Students offended by distribution of printed listserv postings | Kairosnews

Here's an interesting post regarding a teacher who has been using WebCT discussion boards with groups of students. Students are grouped into 4s and 5s and posts are private to the group. The teacher who is "present" in the groups but does not post, so as not the chnage the dynamics of the groups, then printed out the postings for the group to discusss face to face. No group saw another groups postings but the class reacted badly, one student said he felt violated.

One view given in a comment to this post is that the students should be thankful for the lesson about e-postings being real and can/will come back to you.

My own view is that it's always interesting in education the way unexpected things can happen. What could be happening here is that the students are exeriencing new ways of learning and they feel vulnerable, hence the kick back. Whilst I agree with the comment about the students learning a valuable lessson about writing in cyberspace being available in the future, I think it is also a valuable lesson for faculty to learn that when teaching in "new" ways you need to hand hold students rather more than you might expect and make sure that what you intend to do is transparent right from the start.