ABSTRACT
On-line mentoring, or “telementoring” between K-12 students and adult volunteers has proven a valuable way to enable ambitious classroom inquiry. However, past research has shown that simply placing mentoring opportunities at the disposal of all students is not enough to make telementoring effective on an equitable basis. When mentoring relationships are conducted via private media like e-mail, the students who most need to see models of successful mentoring are, in fact, the least likely to encounter them. In the worst case this leads to a “rich get richer” dynamic, in which only students with previous experience of supportive learning partnerships are able to draw benefit from them. In design experiments conducted in Toronto-area high schools, we orchestrated telementoring relationships in a Knowledge Forum™ database — an asynchronous, electronic group workspace. In this new model of telementoring, students could (and did) “peek” into the telementoring dialogues of their peers. This “opportunistic model-seeking”, as we call it, allowed students to develop more sophisticated ideas about the kinds of advice and guidance they wanted from their mentors, defeating the “rich get richer” dynamic. Our findings suggest that mentoring in the open may serve as a powerful component strategy for building equitable and sustainable on-line learning communities for participants of diverse age and expertise.
