Eric Baumgartner a piqué ma curiosité, plus tôt cette semaine, en signalant l’existence d’un logiciel de télémentorat, complémentaire à Knowledge Forum (KF), réalisé par l’équipe de Kevin O’Neill à Simon Fraser University.
«Telementoring Orchestrator is a server-side web application, designed to aid any sort of organization (a corporation, university, school or nonprofit society) in efficiently organizing and monitoring on-line mentoring relationships… »
Développé dans une perspective de knowledge building très proche de celle d’IKIT (largement inspirée par les travaux de Marlene Scardamalia et Carl Berieter ), l’outil semble intéressant même si, en se greffant à KF, il se trouve à servir un environnement de travail relativement fermé, dont l’utilisation risque de se répandre relativement peu. Heureusement, Telementoring Orchestrator est pour sa part développé dans un environnement largement ouvert (open source). En plus, il est disponible gratuitement.
Je retiens particulièrement du site du On-line Learning Relationships Lab, la section qui regroupe les publications de D. K. O’Neill sur le télémentorat. La présentation faite en 2001 à l’AERA (la seule que j’ai eu le temps de lire en entier ce soir), notamment est fort intéressante. Elle s’intitule Building social capital in a knowledge-building community: Telementoring as a catalyst.
J’en retiens quelques extraits…
Sur l’isolement physique des écoles
Since knowledge-building pedagogy developed in classrooms that were technically isolated from external collaborators (aside from the knowledge-building team), teachers and students did not naturally develop ways to cope with outside collaborators who might be of great help on a daily basis. Neither did they develop ways to take account of the needs that knowledgeable adult collaborators bring. […]
Sur les rapports que les enfants entretiennent avec les adultes
Rather than firing off questions to ³ask-an-expert² services and passively receiving answers, as many students and teachers do today, they might grapple together with ambitious problems of understanding, in the company of adults who would serve as role models, guides and advisors. Working together over extended periods of time, students would be able to engage in the sorts of mentoring relationships that are unfortunately rare in face-to-face settings (Kram 1985; Noe 1988), creating a new kind of computer-mediated ³knowledge society² (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1996). […]
Sur Jane Jacobs et la cité éducative
« In a similar way but in a very different context, Jane Jacobs (1961) describes the informal teaching relationships that she observed on the sidewalks of big American cities. These relationships, which serve an important role in socializing children and protecting them from the rigors of growing up, involve participants of all ages ‹ including peers, parents, shop owners and passers-by. This network of relationships relies on a broad-based social awareness that develops partly through sheer proximity, and partly through the mixed use of sidewalks for business and play. This mixture of uses allows learning relationships to be struck up spontaneously, and with very little effort:
« People…who have other jobs and duties, and who lack, too, the training needed, cannot volunteer as teachers or registered nurses or librarians or museum guards or social workers. But at least they can, and on lively diversified sidewalks they do, supervise the incidental play of children and assimilate the children into city society. They do it in the course of carrying on their other pursuits…. It is folly to build cities in a way that wastes this normal, casual manpower for child rearing and either leaves this essential job too much undone…or makes it necessary to hire substitutes.« [le gras est de moi!]
Jeux de mots et d’images 