Periodic Fable

We’ve been setting up some online spaces to support action learning sets for groups of businesspeople. These groups have some face to face meetings and the online space is to support these. In such cases we don’t need strictly defined e-tivities. Action learning is defined by the participants themselves. The online activity is clearly simply to continue discussion. For an e-moderator the job is to facilitate this continuing discussion in a hands-off kind of way. There is no need to set a topic, although it might be useful to summarise and reframe any topics that have come out in the face to face action learning sets just as a reminder to participants about what they may decide to continue the discussions about here.

Action Learning Sets are very similar to Communities of Practice in that the topics come from the participants and the e-moderator’s job is to facilitate (not lead) discussion – the ideal e-moderator in this context is virtually invisible, enabling from the sidelines, dealing with technical problems and access, providing information about the system, sending out emails reminding people to take part. People will also need to be assured of confidentiality.

The subject matter expert (live workshop facilitator) may or may not be part of the online discussion – but they will be better able to facilitate future workshops if they have at least popped in to read the discussions or had some kind of report back to them. (If a report of the online discussions is required to feedback to the next live workshop, for example, then the e-moderator’s job will be to facilitate the choice of someone from the group do that if necessary, advise on time-scales etc.)