I'm Nick Noakes and I've been facilitating online since mid-1995 and took my first online course related to online facilitation in Jan of that year. My full-time job is leading a faculty development unit at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. My unpaid, part-time (?) job is collaborating online in the areas of new media and communities of practice with people all over the globe. Sound familiar?
In Jun last year, my involvement with the New Media Consortium, an edu non-profit, has taken me into the 3D Virtual World of Second Life (gotta one of the worst names chosen for a virtual world ever) and it almost feels like I've come full circle from text-based MOOs .. sort of Tapped In on steroids!
For the next three weeks, we will have a very simple structure to our conversations ... where have we been, where are we now, where are we headed! :-D
Btw, this is a new web-based mindmapping tool (still in beta) and I will try to give us all access to this so we can collaboratively build this map out together over the next three weeks.
Finally, following online facilitation traditional <big grin> - which probably goes back to days of the start of the WELL, and of course face--to-face facilitation before that - please post your hello's here and tell us briefly about yourselves. Try not to share your learning of online facilitation stories in this space! We'd like to keep these for the first part of our three-week exploration together and I'll set up another space for that in a minute.
I hope you're up for this ... to engage us with one of the edges of online facilitation in 2007, I have an offer for you all ....
..... would you be willing to join me for a welcome meeting around a campfire in the virtual world of Second Life this weekend? If yes, please post a note in the thread Virtual World Field Trip :-D
I have an island there called Boracay. If you'd like to find out a little bit more about it, please take a look here.
Look forward to hearing from you here in SCoPE and hopefully meeting you in the virtual world of Second Life too!
Thank you Nick for the warm welcome and let me introduce myself to those you do not know me. I'm Barbara (Bee) Dieu, a secondary school teacher at the Franco-Brazilian school in Sao Paulo, Brazil and I have been online, working on collaborative projects since 1997.
To tell you the truth, I did not know I might be a facilitator until I googled online facilitation and read George Siemens post about it, five minutes ago :-) Still have a lot to learn from all of you and looking forward to it.
One thing I can assure you, Boracay is really worth visiting and I am sure it will inspire lots of facilitation ideas.
I won't be able to make your campfire but I will drop by Boracay to have a look. As I said in my other post, I look forward to this chance to discuss facilitation. I have little online experience but have just completed a course to begin doing such a thing with Harvard Graduate School of Education. I hope to learn and add to what I know.
My perspective on facilitation has moved to include the e-leadership area: the role of helping distributed (not necessarily online) communities grow and function, with this being a little more active than facilitation implies. I aspire to be a good online facilitator. :-)
Hi Nick. Good to meet you online again. Hi Bee. Interesting things as usual going on in your orbit.
I probably will not be in the second life campfire. I have a wedding this weekend to attend. I am interested in the structure you have already supplied to us Nick. There was discussion last month about fragmentation and whether it is inevitable or not in this thing we inhabit here. An experiment in the offing maybe?
And now, this month . . . I'm off to do a tour of our West Coast next week: three workshops in three days, morning and afternoon and evening sessions. I am responsible for 30 minutes a day plus networking at lunch and afternoon tea. (Which is a pretty cool deal) We launch an online leadership event in three weeks to hopefully spawn/launch/birth a community of educators from a three year project.
Then I'm in an e-portfolio conference later on. And business as usual: getting courses with their online side sorted, and helping with any problems, and having fun. - Derek
Great to see you all here! And yes Derek, hopefully a bit of experimentation together over the next three weeks.
I'll send out some invites to MindMeister, the web-based collaborative mindmapping software, at the weekend.
My name's Moira and I'm in France. I work in the higher educational and corporate sectors, teaching on undergraduate and graduate programmes, and coaching adults, both f2f and live online. I am looking forwad to learning and sharing with you. Thanks already for the opportunity to see MindMeister in action :-)
I'm a special needs teacher in UK. I have no idea what online facilitation is. I will be in second life this weekend if I don't get stuck in a wall - still finding moving in SL a problem....but that can wait for the SL seminar later this year.
I am also involved in development team of an online game called IndustryPlayer, doing player support and being their Community and Education Manager.
Hello from UK
I am called E.A. (initials) and at the moment I am on holiday in Providenciales, so will be unable to attend the camp fire. Back in UK on 9th March so will be dipping in and out as I also have another conference to attend at the end of the month.
I work with disabled students mainly in HE, but have a new project about to start looking at how students are interacting with their e-learning and using their assistive technologies. We hope to make use of interactive Web 2.0 social communication type technologies as much as possible during the course of the project.
Till anon when I am back in a rather grey UK - best wishes.
I'm very glad to be here with you. I'm Carla Arena, a Brazilian EFL teacher temporarily living in Key West. I'm just a curious teacher that tries to get the best of tech-tools to enhance learning. I've just had my first real online facilitation in an EVO session, Blogging for Beginners, together with 3 other friends (in fact, two of them, I've never met f2f!). It was a very enriching experience and I do hope to keep learning with you as I feel e-learning and e-facilitation have a powerful potential in the school I work for in Brazil.
Beijos (kisses),
Carla
Good to see you here :-)
We will have lots to tell each other when we meet at Tesol.
Hi Carla and all,
I'm Silvana Carnicero. I am also an EFL teacher but from Argentina. I started as an online facilitator four years ago and my first online course in the role of the learner was in the year 2000. It gives me a great pleasure to find here so many names and faces I get more familiar with everyday. I had the possibility of co-moderating Blogging for Beginners with Carla and it was a very enriching experience.
Hope we can go on learning about this new art together.
Regards,
Silvana
I'm Kaj Rietberg. I'm from the Netherlands. I work as a special needs teacher and very interested in using computer technology in my class. I still have a lot to learn about that. So I hope to learn here something more.
Hello everyone, I'm Carol. I'm located in the US (Michigan) and work in a large high school where I split my day between working with staff and students in the library, support the website for 3 high schools and provide after-school workshops (current focus is Moodle). Our new state graduation requirements will require 20 hours of an online learning experience for the for the class of 2011. I'd like to learn more about online facilitation so I can help interested teachers migrate parts (or all) of their courses online. Maybe teachers should be required to take part in online Professional Development too.
I hope to be able to attend the campfire this weekend. (If I can do the math and figure out what time it starts.) I joined SecondLife yesterday and learned to fly!! Great fun when I wasn't walking into walls!
You don't need any math to know your local time! Just choose the GMT and then it will tell you what time it is in Michigan.
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedform.html
Hope it helps!
Carla Arena
My name's Cristina and I'm an EFL teacher involved in higher education. I've never been an online facilitator but I'm interested in learning all about it. I've been to SL a couple of times and I see it has a great potential for learning. I would love to meet other teachers who are using it for their courses. I will try to join you in SL on Friday.
Looking forward to meeting you all!
Beijos,
Carla
Thanks Nick for arranging a SL session at an hour I can participate . Will be with you for the first one - on Friday, before driving to the countryside. (hope you are not too sleepy and tired)
Hi Nick, Everyone,
My name is Stephen Thorpe, I'm a facilitator in Auckland, New Zealand with Zenergy.
I’ve been interested in the emerging field of online group facilitation since early 2000 through researching, studying and teaching at Auckland University of Technology. As part of my undergraduate degree I came to work at Zenergy to find out more about facilitation. I also ran a workshop on online facilitation that year in Brisbane at the Australasian Facilitators network conference and I was hooked. I became quite involved in the IAF Ethics and Values Think Tank and travelled with Dale Hunter to the IAF Conference in Texas in May 2002. I met many facilitators there and learnt a lot about the different styles and approaches to facilitation from all around the world. Currently I am finishing my PhD on the use of storytelling in online groups.
Looking forward to this programme,
Stephen Thorpe
Hi Nick,
That's great that you have some of the Zenergy books. The Art of Facilitation has been revised and updated and is due for release in about 2 weeks time. Dale Hunter and I were talking over coffee today about the possibility that we could do an online launch of the book as well, perhaps in Second Life!
I do hope I can find space in the next few weeks to share some of the learnings from some of the online storytelling that was done during my PhD. I'm sure others would be interested in what we did and how we went about things. I don't think I have come across Janice McDury and Maxine Alterio. Though it's possible I've met them at one of the Glistening Waters Storytelling Festivals. I'm getting a copy of their book from my Uni library, looking forward to it.
Best regards and great work by the way, Stephen
I'm from Sardinia, Italy, and I am a big believer in non formal and informal education. Put this together with a strong interest in e-learning and social networking and you get a bit of an idea.
Still, I will not go through my specific experience. I rather tell about my non-educational side!
I live in Cagliari, a harbour in the southern tip of the island of Sardinia where the sun shines and the sea is warm...
I love both: the sun and the sea and I also love to stay home with my wife, my cat and my (expected) son!
I am very social but very busy too and sometimes I get lost in time and space (I will get lost in SL, I know).
To travel is my hobby and I gave up TV in 1997 (10 years without!).
:D
OMG! ... I just did a quick keyword search on Flickr for Cagliari ... it's stunning .... turning green here! :-P
Hi all,
I'm form Barcelona, Spain, and very interested always in being up to date in all facilitacion and building community issues.
At this moment I'm collaborating with an Oxfam counterpart in Spain to create a virtual space for the program for young people of the NGO.
We are in the definition process, what and how the program will be shown in our web and then how to make this a dynamic space!
Hope to leran a lot here!
Hello all,
My name is Diego and I'm from Colombia (South America). I've been a lurker in SCoPE for a while , so this time I'm gonna try and stop watching and start talking. We'll see how does that work.
I have been online since 1994, and I had my first contact with online moderation in 2000. I 've been teacher in HE, online moderator/facilitator, and currently I'm involved in two things: R&D on virtual learning environments for HE (f2f and online), and management of a national project on ICT use (focused on HE). This project leads the national policy on content access, teacher development and infrastructure access.
So, I'll be happy to be around, learning with you about the moderation landscape.
See you soon,
Diego
Hi Diego,
I'm Brigitte-Louise and quite new around, just like you. And just like you, I was reading most of the time without writing. You inspired me so I'm gonna follow you being active.
I'm a music teacher and I study Educative Technology in Québec, Canada. Yes, you guested it, I'm french. I'm new on virtual learning, which I study, and looking forward to learn more about them.
See ya!
Brigitte-Louise
Well, I'm glad that I inspired you, even though I don't think I can cause that kind of reactions...
Now, seriously, I'm glad to meet you. Now I have a partner to help me when I get back to old habits (lurking, that is...)
See you around!
Diego
Hello everyone ~
Sorry for being a tad late. Been out sick with a cold/flu I seem to have brought in from the Northern Voice conference that I attended (and met Sylvia Currie in person too) last week.
I'm Robin and just recently completed my doctorate courseware in organisational management and leadership with a focus on outsourced training. I opened my own training consulting firm last year with a focus on integrating Web 2.0 tools to organisational certification.
Looking forward to great discussions in our session here.
Best wishes,
Robin (Toronto, ON, Canada)
Hi All!!
My name is Maggie and I am from Johannesburg, South Africa. I am facilitating an online group for secondary school mathematical literacy teachers. Maths Lit is a brand new subject that was introduced last year as a compulsary subject and I am pulling my hair out trying to get the teachers to become involved online, so I have been lurking and learning....
Maggie
A good friend, Cyprien Lomas, is one of the co-organizers of Northern Voice. I have still not made it to Vancouver :-( and would love to be there for an NC (un)conference.
Well, I really am late in joining this fascinating band of experts. I am grateful for the opportunity to join in and learn from you all. Not sure what I can contribute since my experience is predominantly face-to-face.
I have been facilitating / acting as an academic supervisor, face to face, with senior executives for the past 7 years. This was initially in my day job with a UK university, and I am now continuing these activities as an independent consultant. The process is to design an individual curriculum for each exec, and award academic credit for learning arising from workplace activities.
Most of my experience has been one-to-one. More recently, I am facilitating action learning groups of senior execs. The recent work is international and has continued to be face-to-face. That means a lot of travelling (large carbon footprint) and expense to the programme. It is surely only a matter of time before the facilitation is taken on-line. So my interest is online group facilitation of senior execs from different coutries and learning cultures.
Thanks for reading this far!