Comments on: Mentoring: Effectiveness for Mentors

By: Janine Lim

Janine Lim — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:24:55 +0000

p.s. Are we “mentoring” just by having this conversation publicly instead of via Skype or VC?

By: Janine Lim

Janine Lim — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:24:21 +0000

Roxanne – thanks for the comment – and the story. What do you think (any of you reading) makes the difference in our understanding of “teach it to me” vs. “learn this with me”? Is it a belief about the nature of learning and knowledge? I’m not sure. I’ll be thinking about this more.

I fixed that sentence above – thanks for the question. The authors were talking about the importance of perceived similarity in the context of whether the mentor felt they received a benefit from the relationship – also learned from the relationship.

A “mentoring community” – it’s like situated learning, isn’t it? I noticed a tweet from NECC go by (can’t find it now) of someone saying that we need to be focusing on teaching the newbies the tools instead of just presenting new tools each year. I thought that was interesting. How does the Web 2.0 community “mentor” so that instruction changes? Are there other communities out there like “Jazz” where teachers go away enabled to change the instruction in their classroom?

By: Roxanne Glaser

Roxanne Glaser — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:53:26 +0000

I think your word choice for the invitation to comment is interesting, “how are you learning with others?” I encountered an individual in a learning environment a couple of weeks back who kept saying, “No one will train me.” “How can I get training” or other variations on the theme of someone TEACHING her. I did not hear a mention of LEARNING. I thought that was significant.

Anyway, back to mentoring. Does this statement “However, in a mentor relationship of a longer duration, the perceived similarity is not as important.” mean that the longer the relationship, the more likely that the protege will develop more significantly different characteristics/style from the mentor?

I think your mention of Skype/Twitter leads into the mentoring community of Jazz. Is there such a thing as a “mentoring community”?