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Rethinking the goal of "Instructor Presence" in Distance Learning and Structured Remote courses
One annoying aspect about Zoom meetings under dwm is the popup notification that takes over half my workspace just to tell me who the new host is. If the main room of the Zoom meeting is just a reception area anyway (with the real work happening in breakout rooms), I'd much prefer to accomplish some other business in a separate workspace while letting the Zoom audio keep me apprised of any walk-in appointments. If at any time I cared to know who the host was, I could just return to the Zoom workspace and scan the participants list. A popup alert stealing focus from my text editor (demoting it from full-screen to the narrow stacking area) is an unwanted interruption.
What does this UI annoyance mean when interpreted in light of Rabbi Hillel's maxim, "what is hateful to you, do not do unto others"? Was I right to refrain from weekly email reminders to my math students last semester, on the theory that they might find it hateful to see their inboxes cluttered by the same alerts they could have generated themselves by reading the syllabus on day one and making the appropriate cronjob? At least one respondent to the course evaluations didn't think so. Such respondents apparently believe that a reminder from me might have saved them from missing the quiz that tanked their average.
From the virtual educator summit last summer, a tip that continues to echo in my mind is to be "professor of the obvious." It's not safe to assume that our students have the same mental bandwidth that we do. Abundance of free time might be the new reality for professors (thanks to the elimination of a lengthy commute), but the students' workdays are filled with many more responsibilities besides school (e.g., searching for jobs that no longer exist). Incessant emails from professors are not likely to be interpreted as nagging, but rather as the only means of cutting through the noise and refocusing their attention on the obligations they signed up for.
The apparent conflict between Rabbi Hillel's maxim and the advice to be "professor of the obvious" can be resolved by carefully unpacking the pronoun in "hateful to you". The "you" in this maxim need not be your present self, but might be regarded more usefully as your remembered self (from a time when your habits of self-regulation were still at a novice level).
Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham points out the qualitative differences between the thinking patterns of experts and the thinking patterns of novices. Experts quickly identify the deep structure of a problem in their domains of expertise, while novices pay more attention to the surface features. This change in thinking emerges only after sufficient "time on task": at least 10,000 hours of practice, to cite a popular figure. Unpromising branches of the decision tree are quickly lopped off by the expert's trained mind, while the novice entertains all possible routes to a solution and is paralyzed by the plethora of choices. This strain on the novice's mental bandwidth makes it more likely that outreach from a concerned professor will be welcomed with gratitude (as a relief from indecision, not an intrusion on a smoothly-running workflow).
In later years the former novice might forget how much mental bandwidth used to be consumed by such plodding navigation of the decision tree. The intrusion into a smoothly-running workflow by an undesired popup alert would then merit the description "hateful", whereas the present-day inbox intrusion by a professor's reminder email would merit the opposite description.
In Norton Juster's classic children's book The Phantom Tollbooth, the character Alec Bings comes from a race of people whose vantage point remains unchanged throughout life. Their legs and torso grow down to eventually touch the ground, while their eyes stay always at the same height. Alec Bings viewed humans (represented by Milo in the story) as encumbered with a significant handicap, in having to adjust the cues from their visual field according to the size of their bodies. A counterpart to this fantasy might replace the visual field with moral and aesthetic judgments, and for a race with constant vantage point in these dimensions, the phrase "hateful to you" would not require such convoluted parsing.