Empathy Without Communication Is Mind Reading

Pam Ressler, RN, BSN, HN-BC, and I discussed how healthcare professionals, family, and friends use empathy vs. sympathy to respond to someone who is ill when I told her about my blog post. Pam had insights based on both professional and personal experiences. She told me about Empathy vs. Emotional Reasoning in Nursing, in Advance for Nurses, which Pam posted a blog entry about. The article defines empathy and emotional reasoning as:

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand another person’s circumstances, point of view, thoughts and feelings. When experiencing empathy, one should be able to understand someone else’s internal experiences.

Emotional reasoning is defined as ‘a cognitive error whereby a person who is nervous or anxious resorts to emotional reactions to determine a course of action.’

The article advises “empathy without communication is mind reading. Listen to patients; provide education, but don’t give advice.”

Pam also mentioned a study about doctors and empathic communication that “sheds light on the types of situations and remarks that physicians should recognize as opportunities to express understanding and support… empathic responses can be brief and do not make consultations longer.”

What Your Patients Are Doing Online and Why You Should Engage Them as Partners in Care

I wrote the cover story of Tufts Medicine, Winter 2009, with Dr. Janey Pratt, a surgeon at Mass. General Hospital. The article looks at patient use of the Internet from the physician perspective. The article concludes:

Online resources can help your patients become better educated about medical topics, more confident and comfortable with you and more compliant with treatment. As Anthony Schlaff, director of the M.P.H. program at [Tufts University School of Medicine], notes, “At its best, the Internet is one more tool in the partnership between a physician and patient.” [Bruce] Auerbach, the Massachusetts Medical Society president, couldn’t agree more. “Given that patients are going online,” he says, “the best thing to do is engage them as partners in care.”

The full article can be read at Dr. Google: Your Patients, the Internet, and You.

Talent, Devotion, and Compensation: Attracting and Retaining Teachers

Sometimes a juxtaposition is more powerful than a mashup. This morning I was at a public high school and later at a private school. While I was at each for different reasons, I was struck by the talent and devotion of the people at both schools. While I don’t know their salaries, compensation to attract and retain teachers and education support professionals is lower in the US than in other countries and lower than comparable professions. Teaching for many, myself included, is a labor of love and a chance to use one’s skills and knowledge to help others. Because of this juxtaposition I find myself wondering what triggers this devotion in people and what causes them to flourish in their profession, albeit in the very different environments I was in today. (The mental mashup here, by the way, was trying to understand the impact of salary after reading a press release about the Economic Policy Institute’s new study.)

Online teachers and adjunct faculty are typically compensated less, and have less prestige, than other teachers. While online teachers may have fewer advising or administrative responsibilities, they work very hard, sometimes harder, than teachers in the classroom because they have to master technologies and be available more hours. I wonder not only what triggers devotion in such teachers but what causes it to whither and even dissipate – and what role compensation plays in this.

Ten Reasons Why Podcasts Are Inferior to Text

Ten reasons podcasts don’t work for education are:

1. It is faster to read than to listen to text.
2. It is difficult to skim a podcast (fast-forward can sometimes be used) while most people skim text and carefully read the parts that interest them.
3. It is easier and quicker to reread text than to replay part of a podcast.
4. Interesting passages of text can be highlighted or, if online, copied into notes.
5. Text can be illustrated.
6. Most people, when driving, working out, etc., do not have the concentration to stay focused on an educational podcast.
7. When a podcast is of high quality and slickly produced, it seems like entertainment, especially when it starts with music.
8. When a podcast is of poor quality, the background noise or pauses and speech fillers are annoying to listen to.
9. It is easier to get into a flow state when reading text because you are less likely to be multitasking.
10. Deeper learning, as Don Norman says, “takes time and thought”, and it is harder to have deep thoughts when listening passively or when multitasking.

I developed this list after talking to some of Jared Spool’s students, who sent me an e-learning scenario centered on the use of podcasting. While writing this, I listened to a podcast that Jared made, just to make sure that my list was accurate. Part way through, my son called and I dropped off his cleats and then stopped at the track and ran because it is a sunny day and I had been sitting too long. When I got back, the podcast was still playing. Voice can convey nuances that text does not, and Jared is an entertaining speaker, but I prefer text and am unlikely to ever make podcasts for my students.

Persuade Me I Need a Degree: How Unaccredited Online Degree Programs Advertise

The funniest emails caught in my spam filter are the ones that offer me degrees in various enticing ways. Since I am on a “top 10″ kick this week, my favorites in my last perusal are the following charmingly ungrammatical ones (#2 reminds me of Porgy and Bess: “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”) or the ones that cause doubt (such as #1: can a degree ever expire?):

1. Expired academic qualification
2. Is your skills about to expired?
3. Without books and education process call now
4. MBA the hottest most sought after degree
5. Receive PhD that you deserve from an Established Prestigious Institution
6. Receive MBA very fast
7. Nominated for a Ph.d
8. Celebrate your life-long achievements
9. Start earning the salary you deserve by obtaining the approopriate University Degree
10. Your Degree shipped by Fed-Ex

In Degrees by Mail: Look What You Can Buy for only $499, I wrote about reading these online degree offers “more carefully than other unsolicited emails to find out how much the degree costs, how long it takes to ‘earn’ it, and what the plausible-sounding name of the institution is”. Now I just read the subject lines. But I still worry that these ads make it harder for the high quality online programs to move away from the déclassé correspondence schools that used to be so common. The biggest issues to me are how students find the high quality programs while avoiding the ones advertised above, and how employers know which online degrees are legitimate and from reputable institutions.

Ten Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes To Be a More Successful e-learning Professional

You need a break and, instead of heading to the coffee pot, what can you do in 10 minutes that will refresh and energize you and increase your job satisfaction and career success?

1. Find an e-learning conference to go to and send an email to your manager giving 10 reasons why this will help you perform better. If travel is a problem, find a local seminar to go to.
2. Find an e-learning conference to submit to. It is much better to go to a conference as a speaker and the process of figuring out what you want to talk about and writing an abstract will be a valuable reflection process.
3. Write a short description of what you learned at the last conference or seminar you went to or the last article or book you read and circulate it to your colleagues. They will appreciate it and it will reinforce what you learned. It might also help your chances of getting funding for your next conference (see 1).
4. Do a search on “e-learning”, “instructional design”, “online degrees”, or another topic related to your job and see what people find. Refine your search and try again. Maybe you’ll find something you want to look at, maybe not. If not, use the rest of your ten minutes and search on something totally different, like “swing dancing”, and see if you like the results better.
5. Write a note your manager with 10 reasons why you deserve a 10% salary increase. Don’t send it unless you came up with the reasons quickly. If you struggled with the list, rewrite it as the 10 things you need to do to deserve a 10% salary increase. Then act upon it.
6. Take an online course – or at least part of one- and think about how it is designed rather than the content. What are 10 things you would do to improve it? (What would colleagues say if it was your class they were going through?)
7. Read 10 current e-learning job descriptions and see how many you are qualified for. Write down 10 ideas for your own professional development just in case you ever want to go job hunting.
8. Email the e-learning expert you most admire and ask him or her to schedule a 10 minute phone call with you to discuss your three most important questions about e-learning. Write up what you learn (when you have the call) and circulate it to your colleagues (see 3). Also, make sure you introduce yourself to that person at your next conference (see 1).
9. Do a search on “learning technology trends” or “Web 2.0″ and identify at least one new technology you know little about that has the potential to improve what you do. Read one or two articles about it.
10. Ask a colleague the most exciting e-learning idea he or she has had or read about recently and discuss it why it is exciting. You can do this by phone or email, but over coffee is best. See, you get to go to the coffee pot after all!

Finally, think of your own idea for a 10 minute activity that can renew and improve your e-learning practice and post it as a comment to this article so others can benefit.

Thanks to Mark Notess for suggestions 7-9 and to CIO Magazine for inspiring the idea.