When I think about teaching, I don’t necessarily think about classrooms or modules or learning outcomes. I think about nursing in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The NICU is fast-paced, high-stress, and high-stakes. It is a place where sometimes, everything feels like it is on fire. Yet somehow we still try to carve out tiny pockets of calm for parents who are overwhelmed, terrified, and trying to understand how to care for a baby that arrived differently from what was hoped for. Teaching there is intimate and hands-on. You read faces, body language, and breath patterns. You adjust your approach moment by moment because fragility and resilience sit side by side in every incubator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later, when I moved into Prehabilitation (pre-surgical preparation), the rhythm changed completely. Nobody is dying in front of you. The stakes are different, but the teaching is still hard. You are trying to help people understand risk factors they don’t want to hear about, like smoking, diabetes, weight, mobility, and you are doing that through a phone or a screen 98% of the time. You can’t see their eyes. You can’t properly gauge their literacy. You can’t tell if they are nodding because they understand or because they are overwhelmed. It is hands-off, information-dense, and time-pressured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two environments. Two rhythms. Two completely different ways of learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reading Teaching Crowds helped me put language to something I have lived for years: different structures support different kinds of learning. The authors describe social forms as: groups, networks, and collectives. Each with its own strengths and limitations. The NICU feels like a group: structured, relational, embodied, full of social presence. Prehab feels more like a network: distributed, mediated, harder to read, shaped by technology and distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet in both places, one truth holds steady: learning is social, even when it feels individual. Even when it is just me on the phone with a prehab patient. Even when it is a parent standing beside an incubator, trying to absorb information through fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is why I have been thinking so much about out current debate on whether digital learning environments are “equal”. From where I stand, in hospital rooms, on phone calls, in webinars, shared structures do not erase human differences. You can give everyone the same tools, the same instructions, the same checklist, but people don’t start from the same place. They don’t learn in the same rhythm. They don’t carry the same fears, histories, or capacities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And you cannot standardize your way out of human complexity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But here is the hopeful part: we can design better when we stop pretending one structure fits all. We can build learning environments, digital or otherwise, that honor the messy, relational, deeply human ways people actually learn. And that excites me. Because the future of learning isn’t identical or equal in the way we sometimes imagine. it’s diverse, adaptive, and full of possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just like the people we teach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Inspired by<\/em> Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media (Dron & Anderson, 2014)<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I think about teaching, I don’t necessarily think about classrooms or modules or learning outcomes. I think about nursing in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). The NICU is fast-paced, high-stress, and high-stakes. It is a place where sometimes,… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":331,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt521"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/331"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru315\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}