Facilitating Online/Facilitating, moderating, or teaching




 * Many people either don't understand the differences, or too easily confuse the different roles of a facilitator, moderator and teacher. Some teachers believe that teaching is an act of facilitation. Some facilitators see their main role as moderating discussion and keeping order. Over these two weeks we will consider the differences in these three roles and attempt to describe situations where they might be mutually exclusive from one another.

To do

1. Try to determine what the different roles and behaviors are for these three roles: You might like to look for their definitions on something like Wikipedia.
 * Facilitator
 * Moderator
 * Teacher

2. As a post to your blog, answer each of the following questions: Try and identify some of the skills required to carry out the different roles and post these on your blog.
 * When might the role of a teacher undermine the role of a facilitator?
 * When might the role of a moderator undermine the role of a facilitator?
 * When might the role of a facilitator undermine the role of a teacher or moderator?

3. Attend a meeting to discuss these roles and work collaboratively to develop a list of skills and techniques for facilitation.

Extra resources
 * To Facilitate or to Teach - CC By Leigh Blackall with discussion in the comments.
 * Wikibooks: Managing Groups and Teams/How Do You Build High-performing Virtual Teams?
 * GROU.PS is a platform for social groups to get together. Use it for any purpose. Choose your template and pick all the modules that you want (wiki, blogs, photos, links etc). And get your group web site without waiting. No branding, it’s free!
 * Five stage model for e-moderating- Gilly Salmon.
 * Curatorial Teaching CC By George Siemens 2007 with audio recorded presentation and discussion
 * recording of the meeting held in the last course
 * Sugata Mitra: Building a School in the Cloud