As an article in the Guardian today points out, travelling among different cultures can be a minefield of misunderstandings and possibilities to cause offence http://www.guardian.co.uk/../culturaltrips “Flowers may seem like the perfect gift to delight your gracious hostess with, but beware, in many countries particular varieties, colours and even numbers have
I was preparing a “checklist” for e-moderators of online communities and thought I’d post some of the more important and skilled tasks that e-moderators need to do and to evaluate themselves on. So often we hear managers who believe that anyone can run a community – they think: “how difficult
Useful resources, especially for beginners Otis Online Tutoring e-Book NCSL’s e-learning facilitation toolkit and 70,000 heads are better than one
Keller’s ARCS model of motivation AttentionRelevanceConfidenceSatisfaction How can I offer all these elements in an online course? Attention: make sure the activities are engaging and interesting, perhaps even a bit controversial Relevance: meanwhile, being completely relevant to the subject of study and the context in which they are studying –
In conversations I’ve had recently about public online communities and social networking sites, the point has been made that if a community is moderated (particularly pre-moderated, that is before publication) then it is closer to a “publishing model” and the owners of the community can be seen as responsible for
In my e-moderating courses recently we have been discussing whether or not ground rules are necessary to manage student expectations. I’m a great believer in groundrules: I think people like to know where they stand, and if expectations are made clear at the beginning, then it is easier to manage
Community is not the same as commonality People at a bus stop are not a community. people who go online are not a community. “A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them