This is my response to Jenny’s interesting post on Group Think
Hi Jenny and Carmen, I love to join your conversation. @Jenny, as posted here https://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/cck09-emotional-intelligence-in-online-and-community-learning/ I have been studying, researching EQ for more than a decade and am still intrigued by its application and implication. I always referred back to Gardner’s multiple intelligence to start with, followed by Daniel Goleman when thinking and applying EQ in education. What I found was that many educational leaders have deep interests in this “niche” area and thus got training in it. However, the implications are: They are going back to their workplace and “mentor” their “subordinate” or peer educators. The educators have since been so accustomed to the “closed door” policy and “autonomy” regime in teaching. Since a coaching or mentoring approach starts from the coachee or mentee’s needs and wants to improve and develop, if the educator doesn’t see the need to be involved in the “team improvement process or COPs” or “mentoring process either individually or in a group”, what happens? Nothing? So, the result is: “Silence” is golden on both ends”. Training and development completed on a “one stop” workshop with theory only will be hung on the wall as certificates of competency, or even hall of the fame, but not much might have happened in the workplace. What happened next? Community of Practice approach (Ning, SL, wikis, twitters, face-to-face COPs across schools or universities, on the other hand, have appealed to a lot of educators, as there would be less conflicts, when working with educators in other schools, other sides of the communities. The issues are the security, trust, autonomy, and “intrusion” of privacy as perceived by educators when surfing on net.
Besides, the self awareness, self control aspects of EQ are really personal, and not too many educators/learners would like to share their results online. Also, empathy is far from easy to fully understand, especially when people are “packed” with emotions or overly critical in heated debates, conversations or interactions online. So EQ is still a ‘myth” to many educators, and cannot be “easily introduced” IMHO.
More research is needed to unfold the realities. I have once suggested Assumption Theory (see my post on this in https://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com ) as we have often made lots of assumptions in social networking and online learning, which would later found to be doubtful or false. I couldn’t find any significant research on this “Theory” except the one by Stephen Brookfield: The Getting of Wisdom: What Critically Reflective Teaching is and Why It’s Important I would surely look into Carmen’s reference.
@Carmen: I agree with your conclusions. It is too easy to assume in an education/teaching/learning situation. I would like to explore with you two about the implications of EQ in online learning. I would compose some more posts that relate to my experience about team working, individuals, EQ and learning. My previous experience with EQ, team working revealed that EQ could have a great impact on learning. However, it seems that the more EQ one has, the more “power” and “control” it could exercise on others – “silence” is the most powerful influence on others….
There has been a few researches done that correlate EQ with online learning. The findings were that those with high EQ would be more successful in online learning. This sounds like common sense, but is interesting. Is high EQ required in MOOC or MOON? How could we evaluate it? What are the measures of EQ in MOOC or MOON?
Thanks Jenny for your insights. And Carmen for your interesting comments.
John
Learner Weblog 