ÒMentoringÓ is a term much in use both in professions and in education. Classically, it refers to a relationship between a more senior and a less senior person in the same field of work, in which the less senior person is able to profit from the informal, tacit knowledge that develops through long experience. Thus it is intended to supplement and enrich rather than take the place of knowledge gained through instruction. ÒTelementoringÓ refers to mentoring carried out on-line. Typically it is carried out via e-mail exchanges. Telementoring has obvious advantages in terms of making possible mentoring relationships that would be difficult to establish or maintain because of physical distance, time constraints, and so on.
Telementoring has become popular in schools,
particularly in connection with inquiry-based learning. Students working on a
project dealing with climate, for instance, may be linked with a volunteer
meteorologist or climatologist. Many business and professional people have
volunteered their time as telementors, some corporations even promoting it
among their employees as a form of public service. Despite generally favorable
reports, however, a number of difficulties have been reported. Perhaps the most
common is that the students call on the telementor to answer questions for them
that they could have found answers to themselves. thus treating the telementor
as a labor-saving device. Telementors themselves may err in being too
controlling, too laissez-faire, too remote or too chummy, or they may simply
not hit it off with the students to whom they have been assigned. Students, for
their part, may not know how to make optimal use of their telementors and may
not see value in the relationship. A common reaction to these difficulties is
to call for the training of telementors, but for obvious reasons this idea has
not gotten very far in practice.
An alternative to the conventional e-mail approach
to telementoring has been under development by the CSILE/Knowledge Forum team
at the University of Toronto, working in collaboration with Kevin OÕNeill who
joined the team for his post-doctoral work. Taking advantage of the
collaborative knowledge building capabilities of Knowledge Forum (see Chapter
3), this approach involves telementors as participants in the work going on in
a Knowledge Forum database. The possibilities for mentoring relationships can
expand considerably under such conditions. For example, instead of having
designated Òmentees,Ó the telementors enter into the work as collaborative
knowledge builders. They Òbuild-onÓ
studentsÕ notes, enter notes of their own in views, construct new views,
reference different notes, or create synthesizing Òrise-aboveÓ notes. This
approach has been tested in a variety of settings, including high school
science (OÕNeill & Scardamalia, 2000), health care (Russell & Perris, 2002) and
preservice teacher-education settings (Hewitt, et al., 2002). Work directed by OÕNeill provides an
example of this different approach to telementoring. In one of his studies students' worked with their
telementors as part of a 10-week "Independent Study Unit" Ñ a
mandated part of the curriculum for these courses in which students
traditionally write library research essays on their own time. The students
divided into groups to undertake joint research. Each group had its own
Knowledge Forum ÒviewÓ and one mentor was assigned to each view. All views were
open to all students and mentors, however, so that all could observe what was
going on in the various inquiries.
Survey data collected on the 112 students
indicated that 74% of the 112 students judged Knowledge Forum to be moderately
to very helpful to them in their work. Not only did the students monitor each
othersÕ work, but the telementors also monitored what other telementors were
doing, so that there was learning on their part as well. One mentor reported:
...I started, I guess, peeking in on some of the other discussions to see what level of assistance was going on, and how harsh you should be about certain things. Because you want to be encouraging, but you also want to say, you know, youÕre really out of line there, way off in left field. And maybe you should think about this (laughs). Where are you going?
It could be argued that this represents a more
effectiveÑand far less costlyÑapproach to developing mentorsÕ skills than would
training workshops. Problems that appear with e-mail telementoring are also
more easily avoided: Telementors are not put into a question-answering role;
students can benefit from the contributions of more than one telementor; and
mentors are able to get a much clearer picture of the work in progress and thus
find relevant ways to be of assistance. Perhaps most importantly, however, this
Òparticipatory telementoringÓ is more consistent with the principles of
knowledge building. It moves telementors out of the role of experts
transmitting knowledge and into the kind of collaborative role that
characterizes the working relationships of more senior and less senior
researchers, designers, and professionals in the real world.
Marlene
Scardamalia
References:
Hewitt, J., Reeve, R., Abeygunawardena, H., & Vaillancourt, B. (2002). Pre-service teachers as telementors: Exploring the links between theory and practice. Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 11(1), 7-22.
OÕNeill, K., & Scardamalia, M. (2000). Mentoring in the open: A strategy for supporting human development in the knowledge society. In B. Fishman & S. OÕConnor-Divelbiss (Eds.), Proceeding of the Fourth International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp. 326-333). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Russell,
A., & Perris, K. (in press). Telementoring in community nursing: A shift
from dyadic to communal models of learning and professional development. Journal
of Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning.