Teaching, Emotion, & Technology 3
E-motional Interaction Between Teaching Assistants and Students:
Expressing emotions via WebCT
Many changes are taking place in today’s society, in large part because of the increase in
new information and communication technologies. Almost every aspect of one’s life has been
touched by these now common inventions, such as: on an industrial level, they have opened the
door to the globalization of the workplace and improved efficiency of doing business; on a more
personal level, these technologies have increased our ability to stay in touch with friends and
family, no matter the time or the place; likewise, these technologies have opened many doors in the
educational realm. The advent of electronic mail, video-conferencing, the Internet, personal and
laptop computers, and high-speed Internet access, just to name a few, has radically altered the ways
to conduct the classroom.
These new technologies that some universities are now utilizing to facilitate learning both
inside and outside of the classroom have the potential to dramatically change the social dynamics
between teachers and their students. The traditional classroom is limited to face-to-face interaction
between the participants, whereas electronic communication limits this integral type of
communication between teacher and student and also expands the classroom to cyberspace. This
study is an attempt to understand some challenges posed by instituting computer-mediated
instructional tools and, more specifically, how those tools affect the emotional aspects of teaching
as experienced by graduate student teaching assistants.
This study is the first of its kind to examine how emotions of teaching assistants and
students as expressed via electronic communication, particularly via WebCT e-mails are used as a
part of outside-of-class communication between a teacher and a student. Because there is little prior
research to guide this project, this study can be considered exploratory. The importance of the study
is obvious: electronic communication between teaching assistants and students is an important part
Convention