Facilitating Teams in a Collaborative Online Environment

March 18, 2010 | 7 Comments

This week I’m co-facilitating a seminar in my MA program. The topic is “Facilitating Teams in a Collaborative Online Environment”. So, ya, we’re facilitating how to facilitate online, in an online course. Recursion and irony follow me. Its recursions turn apparently.

Our instructors suggested that we think outside the box and advised us to “get creative” thus opening Pandora’s Box. Ok, maybe not quite so dramatic as Pandora’s Box. We did decide to colour outside the lines and rather that doing an Appreciative Inquiry process or a Community as Curriculum we decided to use the week as an opportunity to nudge some of our cohort outside of our safe,comfortable and cloistered team environment and into the world of blogs and networked learning.

Clint LaLonde and Pam Joyce, my partners in this endeavor, found three blog posts that related to the reading that had been assigned for this seminar. The first post “Lurking and Loafing” by Steve Wheeler of the University of Plymouth relates to an article by Lam, Chua, Williams and Lee titled “Virtual Teams: Surviving or Thriving?”. In the article Lam (et al) uses the terms “free-riders” “easy-riders” and “social loafers” to describe team member phenomenon similar to Wheeler’s discourse on lurkers and loafers.

Ben Grey’s blog was chosen due to his ideas about the differences between collaboration and cooperation. I have to admit I had not thought quite so deeply about the difference until I read his post.

Lastly Tony Karrer posted to his blog after seeing Patrick Lencioni present on Dysfunctional Teams. I am a huge Lencioni fan and appreciated the post although I’m not sure it was enough information for anyone unfamiliar with Lencioni’s Field Guide to Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of Teams. Perhaps that’s best though as it might wet ones appetite for more.

So, our cohort, or at least the western division of our cohort will hopefully post comments to one or more of these blogs between now and Friday. Already a few have and feedback has been mostly around comment moderation. Hopefully the blog authors will have their “ears” on and approve the comments quickly so that we can “facilitate” a team learning experience in a wider network. (We need the marks guys, so please, be home, be listening and be nice).

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7 Comments so far

michael thorne on March 18, 2010 10:00 am
Hi Clint et al,

you may want to check out “The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century”.

http://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Corporation-William-H-Davidow/dp/0887306578/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268930986&sr=8-5

I read it back in when it first came out in 1993 and it’s been interesting to see how we’ve slowly been slowly moving in the directions it talks about.

M.

THINK
think different
Think Open Source
Robb Stevenson on March 18, 2010 10:18 am
Just doing a bit of friendly spying I have to say, I’m very impressed and curious about this approach. Until now, we’ve been exposed to facilitated discussions on our “own” site – that is within the Moodle environment, or on our own blog sites.

I’m curious on how facilitating a discussion on three separate “non-own” site is going to work – it sounds very interesting. A few questions:

Did you contact the blog owners prior to beginning this facilitation, and if so – what role are you expecting them to play in it if any?

Do you think team members might be more “cautious” with their postings knowing that they are now visible to the entire web, and essentially removed from the protective barrier of the Moodle environment?

Have you run across any strategies for dealing with outsiders, those not in the program that come across the blog and choose to participate in the discussion?

Sounds really neat – looking forward to a follow up blog on how this turns out

Robb
Clint Lalonde on March 18, 2010 11:11 am
Hey Robb,

Crazy how you are not part of the Western Team eh?

To answer some of your questions, our contact with the blog owners is by way of the blog posts jamie and I did on our own blogs. The nature of blogs is that when someone links from one to another, the blog owner getting linked to gets a pingback notification that someone is linking to their blog. Usually, that blog owner will follow the link back and read the originating post.

I’ll be interested to hear from our cohort in the debrief whether they tempered their conversation based on the fact that it was public and open.

As for the outsiders, I really hope we get some outsider action as part of the conversation. That is part of the intent is to move beyond the group and out into the network to connect with other educators who are experiencing and questioning the same things we are.

For me, it is a bit scary from a facilitation point of view because you have to be willing to give up control of the environment. For example, one gotcha we ran into early on was that 2 of the blogs have moderation, so comments were not appearing right away. But it looks like at least on of the blog authors is quick on the draw with moderating, so that has been a big relief.
Jamie Billingham on March 20, 2010 1:02 pm
Thanks for the book link. Looks like a good read.
Jamie Billingham on March 25, 2010 2:42 pm
Posted on this weeks topic, humour in education, Working on the follow up to last weeks blog now lol.