TABLE VII
Facilitators:
Ellen Cahill, Principal, Cahill Associates
Michael Goodman, Professor; Director, MA in Corporate Communication; Director, Corporate Communication Institute (CCI), Baruch College, CUNY
Questions:
3) Are correctness and adherence to formal conventions always required for communication to be successful? Do incorrect grammar, punctuation, non-standard pronunciation (as in accents of various sorts), or deviation from formal conventions necessarily lead to miscommunication?
5) How have electronic gadgets (mobile phones, Blackberries, iPhones, clickers, etc.) and the various means of communication they enable (text and instant messaging, voice mail, email, etc.) affected how we communicate (and miscommunicate) in both business and academia?
Listening is perhaps the most difficult skill to teach:
Listening, to determine the vantage point of your listener
Is this skill learnable? Are some individuals better disposed to be good listeners? Can we develop curricula to teach better listening?
Counseling is all about listening. Yet sometimes counselors give the answer without listening to where the person is. It comes naturally for some, more of an effort for others.
Psychology counseling background—this must have involved training in listening Non-judgmental, paraphrasing, “so what I hear you saying is . . .” part of counselor training; practicum with supervision. This sounds useful for people in management.
Is there any curriculum that offers a pure listening course?
The connotation of business is antithetical to listening even though it is key. Listening is at least 50% of what a student is doing or needs to, no?
Face-to-face communication:
Value of face-to-face establishes relationship, after which you can use various technologies once the context has been established.
Distance resources can be invaluable for time and for keeping uptodate across divisions or social groups.
But how can you do this without being able to pick up in-person cues? It can work, even though it isn’t ideal.
If you are against formality and not against texting then you can really have a communication through non face-to-face media. Yet there are reasons for conventions and formality that give cultural context cues that can’t come across in formats such as e-mail. Conventions may develop around those formats.
We need to teach students how to enter a room, be present, listen with your eyes, it should be incorporated into academia, and people need to get that.
What is the convention for corporate communication re: facebook/myspace? What are the consequences, the drawbacks? What are the positives? What if we think of it as a protocol?
Democratization of the learning process:
The Socratic method is effective in helping students and or employees do all of the preceding. Instead of the power being in the professor /manager, it is now spread out to the students. How do we develop students’ ability to do this in the classroom? Collaboration is very difficult for students [and profs, too, no?]
Students can’t process too much information at once. How does this interact with a multi-media classroom?
The difference between freshman group and a senior seminar: For freshman, repetition is the best teacher. For a senior, the professor is the moderator, listener, not the speaker/lecturer. Technology can bombard students, it moves away from groupwork. Groupwork means students can listen to each other.
Once again it comes back to different types of listening. Managers and or students do passive listening unless the professor stops lecturing and starts moderating. By senior year, they can become good listeners.
Students develop communication skills as in to listen, talk, and repeat other students to see that they’ve heard it, that they can process it.
The lecture format is dulling to students. You can tell from body language, you lose them to their own technology. Yes, interaction is the antidote to some of the technology—students crave the interaction.
Sadly these large classrooms are the trend, economically efficient.
What are formal conventions?
In the business world, communication is what’s important—business leaders assume your knowledge base, rather than rewarding students for it. Knowing social context clues is vitally important. Audience is really important—can you give the same info to 3 different groups? How do you repackage it? How can the other person receive it? Trial/error but that can be difficult. What do you say to the CEO in the elevator?
That is a bit of the paradox in what the keynote speaker said, a loss of narrative, but a real need for technology. Are you saying that one might have to suspend your personality?
There is a sort of I’m training you for business, so be formal with me attitude that is important to recognize.
Yes, students need to learn the conventions to get a job and I have doubts that convention is always the answer in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, response.
Learning to listen means you can learn what context you’re entering into.
Yes, listen to those cues especially because they might be mixed or harder to navigate.
Final Thoughts:
How do you bridge a communication gap? Can you teach listening? How do we teach students to develop meaningful relationships?
What algorithm is there to determine what remains important across generations’ conventions?
