Monday, August 31, 2009

Discussion groups







I am currently a member of 6 different discussion groups- all have education and/or politics as their focus.

Those connected with an identified course tend to be rather more both facilitated and moderated than the others. Summaries etc appear that help you keep track of things and pose development questions.

Those that are interest groups have a very loose and flexible structure. I think with them the idea that you have the interest at heart i.e. "passion"- is taken to mean that you will make sense of all of that for yourself.

My son belongs to 3 discussion groups that are open and unfacilitated and he says that often he finds it very frustrating that threads seem to be left hanging.(I did ask him why he didn't do something about it, but that was not well received!!!!)

Moderation is an essential aspect of all these groups. the moderator checks posts and comments for libelous/vulgar etc contributions And in one group, requests for membership are put out to all members.

5 comments:

Sarah Stewart said...

I am wondering if facilitation services would be welcome in those gorups that your son are involved with...how would you go about offering facilitation serrvuces & how would they differ from a moderator?

willie campbell said...

It sounds to me as if those free groups would benefit from some kind of dskilled facilitatyion- I guess you would have to monitor their activity for a while and then send them a proposal for how professional facilitation would benefit their members.Paying for the service is likely to be the crunch point.

Sarah Stewart said...

Good point about payment of facilitation - the vast majority of online groups will be voluntary & I'm sure they wouldn't pay for a facilitator...so question begs...who would pay for online facilitation services?

Hope to see you tonight to find out how you got on exploring discussion groups.

Kylee said...

You are a very busy lady Willie, I didn't belong to any discussion groups until last week and I am not having much luck getting a response. I went into the TKI site and maybe teachers are just to busy to reply!

willie campbell said...

kylee
I think teachers see TKi as a resource rather than a community.
I find it a wonderfjul resojurce and infromation site, but have never really got a sense of community from it.