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EDITORIAL

This week we distribute an article by Robin Mason, co-editor of the
pioneering work "Mindweave: Communication, Computers and Distance Educa-
tion". Her Internet address is RD_MASON@VAX.ACS.OPEN.AC.UK and she has
agreed to respond to questions and comments about the following article in
DEOS-L.

DEOSNEWS and DEOS-L will focus on computer-mediated communication for some
time. I hope you will enjoy this approach, and take part in the DEOS-L dis-
cussion on computer-mediated communication in distance education.

MODERATING EDUCATIONAL COMPUTER CONFERENCING

Robin Mason
Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University

INTRODUCTION

Since the early educational uses of computer conferencing, there has been a
strong notion that moderating a conference requires special skills,
techniques and even particular characteristics in the online tutor. Most
educational enterprises which use conferencing as a teaching medium,
prepare guidelines for their tutors on effective moderating, and several
research papers have been published on the subject (Kerr, 1986; Brochet,
1985; Feenberg, 1986; McCreary, 1990; Davie, 1989).
The role of moderator in computer conferencing terms involves special
responsibilities and powers, in both the technical and educational sense.
At a technical level, the moderator can delete or alter any message in the
conference and is responsible for removing irrelevant or offensive ma-
terial. At an educational level, the moderator guides the discussion,
stimulates participation and often offers intellectual leadership. The role
of online tutor, therefore, combines elements of teacher, chairman, host,
facilitator and community organiser.
Many claims have been made implying that teaching online is a com-
pletely different skill from face-to-face teaching:

The techniques for moderating an online conference are significantly
different from those appropriate for face-to-face meetings. (Kerr,
1986)

Many of the ordinary conventions and rituals of small group communica-
tion are lost in a computer mediated communication. The reconstruction
of these conventions and rituals involves passing from a 'natural'
pragmatics of communication to an 'artificial', consciously designed
pragmatics. (Feenberg, 1986)

Group leaders [online] need a special set of skills beyond the
effective use of the public message mode. (Davie and Palmer, 1985)

This article attempts to build on the available literature regarding
online tutoring by applying the principles and advice they give, to a
particular example of exceptionally good moderating. Using extracts from a
conference showing these general principles in practice, a model of online
teaching can be derived and conclusions can be drawn about the nature of
moderating skills in an educational context.

GUIDELINES FOR MODERATORS

The advice on tutoring skills for educational computer conferencing falls
generally into three categories: organisational, social, and intellectual.

ORGANISATIONAL ROLE. One of the first duties of an online tutor is to 'set
the agenda' for the conference: the objectives of the discussion, the
timetable, procedural rules and decision-making norms. Managing the inter-
actions with strong leadership and direction is considered a sine qua non
of successful conferencing.

The lack of adequate leadership is one of the factors sometimes
responsible for conference failure; unless a moderator sets an agenda
and keeps the group working toward its goal, nothing much will occur.
(Kerr, 1986)

and also:

Meta-comments are remarks directed at changing the context, norms or
agenda of the conference, or at solving problems such as lack of
clarity, irrelevance, and information overload. Meta-comments play an
important role in maintaining the conditions of successful communica-
tion. (Feenberg, 1986)

Just as in a face-to-face course, the online tutor needs to let students
know what to expect, what are the requirements of the course, the activ-
ities and the schedule.

SOCIAL ROLE. Creating a friendly, social environment for learning is also
seen as an essential moderator skill. Sending welcoming messages at the
beginning and encouraging participation throughout are specific examples,
but providing lots of feedback on students' inputs, and using a friendly,
personal tone are considered equally important:

Provide positive feedback and reinforcement in both messages to
individuals and conference comments to the group, especially for their
early efforts and periodically after that. Be sensitive to the needs
of participants. Create a context conducive to thought, creativity and
self-esteem. Demonstrate that their contributions are valued. Reward
positive contributions. (Kerr, 1986)

These 'nurturing' skills are the essence of the feeling of community, which
is such an important and yet surprising aspect of conferencing.

INTELLECTUAL ROLE. The most important role of the online tutor, of course,
is that of educational facilitator. As in any kind of teaching, the moder-
ator should focus discussions on crucial points, ask questions and probe
responses to encourage students to expand and build on comments. Hiltz also
lists:

Integrating or weaving the discussions by synthesizing points which
students raised, building upon and developing themes which emerge, and
linking them to the literature and the topic. (Hiltz, 1988, vol 2)

Weaving together the often disparate concepts, so typical of the medium, is
acknowledged to be one of the most highly prized skills of educational
computer conferencing. Feenberg describes the nature and value of weaving
comments:

These summarise the state of the discussion, identifying its unifying
themes and points of disagreement. These comments reveal an important
benefit of textual mediation for social interaction. Writing a weaving
comment involves a relation to discourse which is characteristically
literary and encourages a command of the written world 'from above'. .
.
Such weaving comments supply a unifying overview, interpreting
the discussion by drawing its various strands together in a momentary
synthesis that can serve as a starting point for the next round of
debate. Weaving comments allow online groups to achieve a sense of
accomplishment and direction. They supply the group with a code for
framing its history and establish a common boundary between past,
present and future. (Feenberg, 1989)

Davie lists a number of more specific aspects of the intellectual role of
the online tutor:

He/she must be able to set and communicate the intellectual climate of
the course or seminar, and model the qualities of a scholar. He/she
must be able to support, mould, and direct the discussion. The
instructor or tutor should be able to design a variety of educational
experiences. Finally, he/she must be able to critique helpfully
student work. (Davie, 1989)

Although these three categories define the roles of the moderator, they are
not necessarily carried out only by the online tutor. Students can and do
take on some of these tasks, often to their educational advantage. In fact,
Feenberg (1986) suggests that the more members of the group who share in
performing some of these functions with the moderator, the more its dis-
cussions will be absorbing and successful. The initiative taken particu-
larly by adult students in performing some of the intellectual functions of
the teacher is also seen as a sign of active, self-directed learning
(Mason, 1990).
Feedback from new online tutors indicates that providing a list of
guidelines such as those above is helpful only up to a point. Specific
models of the practical application of this advice is rarely given and is
often requested by novices. The following extracts drawn from an excep-
tionally fine example of moderating skills demonstrate the rules brought to
life. The aim, in quoting so extensively from a particular conference, is
both to provide data for analyzing the underlying elements of excellence in
moderating, and also to demonstrate excellence in practice.

WESTERN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES INSTITUTE (WBSI)

The Institute was founded in 1958 as an independent, nonprofit center for
research, education and advanced study in human affairs. Based in San
Diego, California, the Institute's programmes have ranged from group
leadership to international relations and strategic management. The Inter-
national Executive Forum is unique in its use of computer conferencing
technology, an approach WBSI pioneered and which is central to its current
research interests.

MANAGEMENT OF THE ABSURD. From April until July, 1989, the Institute ran an
online course entitled Management of the Absurd. It was moderated and
inspired by the co-founder of the Institute, Dr. Richard Farson. The thirty
participants represented a broad range of business, industrial, academic
and government expertise, and their interactions form a remarkable record
of the application of conferencing technology to the field of management
studies. Permission has been granted by the Institute, in agreement with
the participants, to quote extracts from the conference in this paper.
In addition to the conference transcript, an equally valuable form of
data for this analysis of moderating skills, is an interview with Dr.
Farson, conducted at-a-distance via set questions to which he responded on
audio tape. Used in triangulation with the conference messages, these
personal views of the experience over a year later give further insight
into the essence of successful uses of the medium.

ORGANISING IN PRACTICE. The aims of the conference workshop are intriguing.
Farson refers to the demeaning of management issues in the current rash of
management literature, quick-fix advice, and 'One Minute' books, and
suggests that managers, as a profession, do not have sufficient respect for
themselves and for the difficulty of the tasks before them. He says in his
opening remarks:

It is my hope that in this conference, we can partially compensate for
this trend to oversimplification by examining the paradoxes in
organisational life, by respecting the complications and absurdities,
and thereby give ourselves that salutary minute in the history of
management that we might call 'Management of the Absurd'.
It is the goal of this workshop to engage a group of you in a
discussion of the paradoxes of organisational life, using your own
experiences, your own management cases, if you will, to illustrate
these paradoxes and absurdities.
In this workshop, however, we are going to try to approach
paradoxes somewhat differently. We are going to resist the immediate
temptation to resolve them in ordinary, rational, linear ways, and
instead just let them wash over us for awhile, see if we can become
more comfortable using a kind of paradoxical logic to understand
management and human affairs, and perhaps even come to enjoy thinking
paradoxically. (Management of the Absurd [MA])

As the participants begin to offer examples and thoughts about the absurd
management situations they have experienced, Farson further refines the
aims and clarifies his expectations for the workshop:

Gloria's multilayered paradoxes, paradoxes heaped on each other,
further illustrate these predicaments and begin to show what leaders
are really up against. . . It's what you ARE that your people learn,
not what you do deliberately. What parents do deliberately probably
makes almost no difference in whether their children grow up to be
happy or unhappy, successful or unsuccessful, good or evil. My guess
is that the same dynamic occurs in management, and leadership. That's
why the technology of management, like the technology of parenting is
such a blind alley, or worse, such a wrong turn, taking us to a place
we shouldn't be going. . . It is my hope that we in this workshop will
come to enjoy looking at situations this way, and that rather than
crippling or paralyzing us, we will be able to embrace the paradoxes
and act anyway. [MA]

At various points during the three month discussion, Farson introduced a
new perspective by means of a paradoxical statement or aphorism for the
group to ponder and exemplify in their comments. For example: "nothing is
as invisible as the obvious"; "the better things are, the worse they will
feel"; "technology creates the opposite of its intended purpose". In this
way, he provided structure and pacing for the workshop, as well as a sense
of leadership. However, the following extract demonstrates the superb
casing in which he surrounds this apparently simple organisational role:

Aristotle gave us the idea that A can't be NOT A. A thing is either
one thing or another, not both, and certainly not its opposite. I
think he called that the Law of the Excluded Middle. It has dominated
western thought for two thousand years. That's why the following
statement is so difficult:

Profound truths are true also in their opposite.

Why does it always sound wise when confronted with a conflict to say,
"Well, yes and no". or "It's both", or some such statement about the
coexistence of opposites? Can we think of examples? Living is dying.
Dying is living. I love you. I hate you. Less is more. Leadership is
membership. No two things are as similar as opposites. What kind of
practical value can we get out of that notion? . . [MA]

We see that he does not pose his conundrum and leave students to get on
with it. He provides it with context, with his own personal opinion, with
'hooks' to stimulate others to respond. Half way through the conference
Farson performs the classic role of 'reviewing objectives', and again he
clothes it in such a whole picture that participants get a meta-view of the
endeavor:

As we reach what I hope is the midpoint of our experience together,
I'd like to review the basic idea of the workshop and remind ourselves
of the objectives.
We are trying to gain a different perspective on the world of
management and human affairs, one that is not constrained by linear,
rational thought, one that can embrace paradox as a fundamental
condition of human experience. Not that we want to dismiss this
traditional logic that has helped us get where we are, but to give
ourselves a moment when we are not captured by it, where we can
transcend it.
To do this we are examining a number of seeming absurdities, not
just to deplore or laugh about the apparent stupidities, but to alert
ourselves to the deeper meanings involved, and more, to gain the
humility and compassion that is required of truly significant human
relationships, which I believe can be acquired only by recognizing the
overwhelming absurdity of life.
The format is for us to generate paradoxical or absurd statements
we believe to be true about management and human affairs, describe
absurd situations we have experienced that might fit those statements,
and offer criticism or attempt to make generalisations about them.
My goal is to mobilise the combined wisdom of our group. . .[MA]

Drawing the conference to a close is also the job of a moderator. Here is
one of the last messages from Farson:

Now that the workshop is drawing to a close, I would like to ask those
of you who have been participating to reread the opening couple of
comments in this conference. I would be interested to know if they
read differently than they did at first, and if so, how.[MA]

So we see how the moderator has used even the organisational aspects of his
role to develop the sense of a learning community.
How did the moderator view these organisational aspects of his role?
One of the questions he expanded upon via interview tape was: Did the
workshop develop differently from your plans as laid out in the early
messages?

Yes, indeed it did. . . I found first of all that people completely
misunderstood absurdity and could not distinguish it from stupidity. I
also did not get the kind of rich case material I would have liked. I
think that is the lesson to be learned from computer conferencing - it
has its own direction; it is very difficult to control. It is some-
thing like Alice's effort to play croquet with live flamingoes - they
kept being alive! That's what happened in the conference - it was
alive and therefore, not controllable. On the other hand, it developed
much more enthusiastically and satisfyingly than I ever ex-
pected.1[Interview]

Despite providing strong leadership and a definite structure and agenda for
the conference, the moderator had to be responsive to the unexpected,
changing reactions of the participants. This organisational dynamic has
been usefully described as follows:

The moderator is like the lead player in a jazz ensemble. Participants
do not know in advance what roles they will play in relation to the
others: they begin the ensemble in pursuit of a theme; but how that
pursuit will progress, the contributions to be made by each member,
and how it is to be resolved to a satisfactory conclusion remain to be
discovered. It is the moderator who organizes and leads each partici-
pant to create an ensemble. (McCreary, 1990)

CREATING A SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT FOR LEARNING. The guidelines to moderators
about being friendly and welcoming, personal and responsive to partici-
pants, seem relatively easy to put into practice. In the hands of an
expert, however, they become a very powerful educational tool. For example,
Farson takes the 'rule' about responding to each student contribution and
makes it a vehicle for refining the aim of the workshop by pinpointing the
relevant and positive in each participant's message:

Student: If I remember correctly, a paradox is a self-contradictory
assertion based on a valid deduction from acceptable premises. . .My
favorite paradox is the famous liars paradox. . Epimenides said: "The
Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is
true". Epimenides was a Cretan. . .

Farson: Thanks to Beryl for his helpful definition. . Variations on
the liar's paradox are very good examples of precisely what this
workshop should be about, because they illustrate the paralyzing
nature of the dilemmas that people face in dealing with organizational
affairs. They show how the situations we confront are often predica-
ments, not problems. . .[MA]

Similarly, he transforms the 'rule' about welcoming new participants, into
a building block of the course material:

A big welcoming hug to Kathy, and thanks for the fascinating comments.
I'm so glad you are with us. Your story of the answer to the question,
"What are you doing coming through my window at night?" is a good
example of the double bind situation - - a classic absurd condition in
which you are damned if you do and damned if you don't; you can't
answer and you can't not answer. . .Yours is a funny and trivial
example, but there are many which are not, such as the mother who asks
for a kiss from her child and averts her face as he or she approaches.
[MA]

He is also quick to acknowledge the insights of others in the group:

We are indebted to John again, for making the case for this conference
better than I can make it, and for keeping us on the track. And I
found your admonition not to rush to agreement too fast very apt. .
.So I am once again chastened, John, and I thank you. [MA]

The most outstanding characteristic of all his messages, however, is his
involvement, enthusiasm and commitment to the workshop and the ideas it
aims to convey. This is clearly the most powerful element in the group
process. In fact it is one of the key elements in the creation of a learn-
ing environment, as Farson acknowledges in his interview:

What we have learned is that when a leader enters with enthusiasm and
passion and commitment and a real interest in conveying what he knows
about this material, that more than accounts for the success of the
conference. That kind of moderator can violate all sorts of other
'rules', and still have a successful conference. People can tell, in
other words, when the leader is present as a person, and when he
isn't. Participants will forgive a long- winded discussion, comments
that run for two or three pages from a leader that is passionately
interested in the conference, in what he is doing and in trying to
convey ideas to the group and being responsive to their ideas. That
carries the day. So I would say, much more important than skill is
commitment, passion, involvement, absorption in the conference.
[Interview]

He elaborated on the function of this aspect of moderating in response to
the question, 'Why was the conference obviously so successful even though
there were really very few messages which addressed the central issue -
experiences of the absurd in which things could not have been otherwise
even with more planning or any other kind of human interaction'?

The conference worked in some transcendent way I suppose - I think it
really did convey something of what was intended even though it didn't
look as if it was getting through. But I'm not sure any of the
participants really understood what I was trying to do, and very few
messages did address the central issue. I don't know what I can add. I
suppose I could say that people tend to feel good about a conference,
not when they have simply absorbed something, but when they have
contributed something. People learn when they are talking not when
they are listening. They learn when they are teaching not when they
are being students. So people felt good, not only about my participa-
tion, but they felt good about their own. I think they learned more
from themselves and from each other than they did from me. I think
what they liked about it from my point of view is that I was obviously
really involved in it. I was there 100%; they could count on that. And
even though they didn't like a lot of what I was saying, and didn't
agree, they certainly appreciated what I was giving to the conference
and what it meant to me. [Interview]

These are key insights into the nature of conferencing, into the evaluation
of 'successful' conferences and particularly in this context, into the
examination of expert educational moderating. The implications of these
notions are that online tutoring is not a set of techniques or a mysterious
art, but clearly in the same arena as face-to-face teaching, subject to the
same general conditions defined by the nature of learning itself. A good
teacher, with enthusiasm, dedication and intellectual curiosity, is the
essence, though by no means the totality, of an exceptional learning
environment.

MODERATING AS TEACHING. As is well understood, the primary educational
advantage of computer conferencing is that it is interactive. How does this
impinge upon the moderator as teacher? Farson highlighted the impact by
comparing moderating with writing an article:

Leading a conference confronts one with good ideas from others
developing during the process. That means that the critical appraisal
of one's ideas is going on during the process of writing. That makes
it very different, even though it shares the similarity with print
that one's reflections are disciplined by having to commit them to
writing. . . When one is dealing only with one's own words in print,
one assumes the message is getting through, when it may not be. In
computer conferencing it is made abundantly clear when that is not
happening. [Interview]

As we have seen, many of the participants in the Management of the Absurd
conference did not always understand the moderator's intentions. It is
instructive to look at how Farson handled misunderstandings:

We are indebted to Murray for trying to get us to focus our efforts in
this conference. But I think that in one sense there is no way to
"deal with the absurd" in the way one might learn to handle problems.
The examples that you listed, Murray, seem to me to be ways to manage
what I would call stupidity, that is, behavior that you know to be
mistaken, incompetent or blind to the facts, and which you would know
better what to do. I would distinguish that kind of behavior from the
absurd, which is jarring, outrageous, paradoxical. In the instance of
stupidity it is easy to see how to do it right, so the situation calls
for correction. But absurdity arises from the essential humanness of
the situation that simply throws us a curve, that doesn't work the way
we would expect it to if people were only rational machines. In that
instance we can't know what action to take because the situation
doesn't call for correction. It calls, instead, for patience, toler-
ance, acceptance, humility, humor. It's one of those, "Don't just do
something, stand there!" kinds of situations. [MA]

The intellectual perceptiveness of this comment may not be obvious without
the previous, very extended message to which this is a comment, but the
wit, tact and focusing on the real issue surely are. Another example of how
he enriches the inputs of students and turns them into teaching vehicles is
the following:

Several awfully good comments more or less converge on the idea
Hallock picks up, that absurdity is in perspective, perception,
feelings, and disappears when viewed from a different vantage point.
I'm sure that is correct in the main effect, but equally sure that
there is more to it. . .
We seem to want more than anything else to eliminate absurdity. .
.Some absurdities are not resolvable, cannot be eliminated through
understanding. Take the idea that there is nothing as invisible as the
obvious. One might conclude that to make things visible one should
examine the obvious. But the obvious is always going to elude us --
because it is too obvious! The paradox, the absurdity will continue to
be true, no matter what. It doesn't make any difference where one
stands, or how one feels, or indeed whether or not one understands
this paradox. [MA]

Basically he uses every student comment - plumbs it for any richness, draws
out any faltering insights, enhancing and mirroring back to the student the
essence of what they were trying to say.

Student: I think John is right when he says we are probably committing
present absurdities even as we recognize past ones. That's why
learning from your mistakes is so impractical.

Farson: I think that's an important insight, Ed. Of course we don't
learn from our mistakes. Whatever makes us think we do? We all seem to
have the idea that we learn from our own failures and others suc-
cesses. "I'll never do that again!" and "Tell me how you became so
rich and famous". It's probably just the other way around: We learn
from our own successes and other people's failures. [MA]

In the following example he has taken a small offering from a student,
consisting of a quotation from the Four Quartets, and brought out its
relevance to the workshop theme:

Thanks, Billy, for the T.S. Eliot. "Ridiculous the waste sad time,
stretching before and after". Yes, how quickly the laughter is shut
out, and how long the stretches in between. But we must remember that
it is the stretches of silence that give the laughter its power, not
the laughter itself. Stretches of laughter would make silence blessed.
The absurdity is that everything derives its power from its opposite.
[MA]

The most powerful teaching 'technique' which Farson uses, perhaps uncon-
sciously, is that of modelling. He doesn't tell students how to think about
the absurd; he doesn't ask questions about it and leave students to figure
out what the answer is; he demonstrates; he models the concepts in prac-
tice.

A good example of this is my feelings about parenthood...and manage-
ment, for that matter. I used to want to know how to handle my
children. Actually, I probably wanted to know how to handle everyone,
employees, students, friends. Now it is a great relief to me to
realize that I cannot do that. Nor can anyone else. I especially
cannot handle the people I love most. I have come 180 degrees from my
earlier position. The prospect of such an achievement now appalls me,
and instead I think it a blessing that I, and we, will never learn.
Of course, I also believe the opposite of what I just said. [MA]

And again in response to another student:

Hang in there with me, Ken. This is where the going gets tough. I know
that the idea that an organization should have full and accurate
communication doesn't square with the idea that an organization needs
mystique, distortion, and deception to be healthy. But I have come to
believe that it is that very inconsistency that is the heart of the
matter. It cannot be resolved by coming down on one side or the other
because in fact both are necessary. Nor can it be resolved by suggest-
ing that sometimes you need mystique and sometimes openness. No. We
need both at once. That is where our ability to appreciate the
coexistence of opposites comes in. And that is where an appreciation
of our fundamental inability to sort it out, our inability to resolve
it with some linear logic, is so important. And that is why management
is more art than science.
Opposites can coexist, and can even enhance each other. Take
pleasure and pain, for example. Scratching an itch is both, so is
urination, defecation, sexual intercourse, massage etc. Not pleasure,
then pain, or pain then pleasure. But both at once. Granted, scratch-
ing an itch too long can become very painful, and not pleasurable, but
there is a moment when they coexist, when they are one. Like truth and
falsity, good and evil. [MA]

Finally, as an excellent example of developing a student's idea, synthesis-
ing the course concepts and demonstrating them in action:

Ken, with regard to your last comment, you haven't missed my point at
all. . .The issue you raise, that there might be a functional need for
'deception' (which I prefer to call mystique) but all too often
deception is used in ways that do not reinforce the culture, but
simply exploit situations for the benefit of some individual or sub
unit, is one with which I agree totally. I certainly don't want to
condone deception in all its forms. But when you ask how we tell the
difference, you are then moving into an area that I would call
dilemma, not problem, and of course, there are no clear solutions to
dilemmas. That's what makes all this so difficult and interesting!
There still exists in your writing a feeling that you may be able
to get on top of all this. All I am saying is that we never can, and
after we have been humbled by that knowledge, we must try anyway. [MA]

One participant in the conference clearly recognised the presence and power
of Farson as model in his comment:

Dick, you are really wonderful! You are defining Zen management, and
you are exemplifying it at the same time! [MA]

There is an interesting corroboration of this teaching technique applied to
computer conferencing in a research article on electronic networks. After
analyzing the message flows and distribution of 'Initiation, Reply and
Evaluation' patterns in educational electronic networking, Levin et al.
turn to the concept of apprenticeship to describe the kind of interaction
they see as typical of the medium. The educational paradigm of apprentice-
ship is one of learning by doing in the presence of good models of the end
goal.

Patterns that we've observed in instructional electronic network
interactions resemble those described in face-to-face apprenticeships.
Thus we may see emerging a new pattern, 'teleapprenticeships,' with
some of the properties of face-to-face apprenticeships. (Levin et al,
1990)

They comment that the apprenticeship model is an example of the new ways of
thinking about teaching which will be required in order to use the new
interactive media effectively. This is the real art of Farson - that he
continually models the behaviour, the thinking and the activity of the
subject he is expounding. This is the source of his magnetism as a teacher
and as a moderator.

CONFERENCES AS COMMUNITIES

It is Farson's view that conferencing is about community - creating new
social forms - and this, in an era of communities eroding everywhere, is
not insignificant.

For the first time, more than any other milestone in telecommuni-
cations, we have the opportunity to create new social forms. I think
even though people don't know what they are doing when they do it,
that is what it is all about. Furthermore, that is why it is so
intriguing, why it is so surprising -

- that you can have deep, intimate, warm, personal relationships,
electronically in this way

- that you can have a seminar that is more cooperative, more like a
barn-raising in our American vernacular, than most face-to-face
situations are.

We have yet to scratch the surface of this for education. [Interview]

The role of the moderator is, therefore, to foster the creation of commun-
ity, through the medium of computer conferencing. This view is echoed by
another researcher into models of conferencing when she suggests that our
species is migrating from local, embodied communities of interest to
nonspatial, computer-mediated communities of interaction:

Disruptions are an important and natural stage of true group forma-
tion. The real challenge lies at the level of learning how to work and
even how to 'be' together, rather than simply to focus on getting the
job done. (McCreary, 1990)

The expressions of gratitude from a number of the participants in Manage-
ment of the Absurd give strong testament to the powerful impact of the
workshop. The following student comment at the end of the conference
encapsulates the very art of moderating which has been analyzed in this
paper:

Student: I have known you, Dick, for 25 years, and I have admired your
work in many roles during that time. But I did not appreciate the
depth of your skill as a moderator, nor the extent of your wisdom as a
Zen master. It is generous of you to let us all see what a powerful
mind and collection of skills you have. These attributes have always
been working in the background, I realize; how wonderful that you have
removed your cloak of invisible leadership and put yourself online!
I have looked forward with excitement to reading this conference
every time I logged on; and I have never been disappointed.
You seem to insist that this conference be drawn to a close. As I
have said before, that's absurd. This conference should go on forever.
[MA]

The art of moderating may involve certain 'tricks of the trade', certain
group facilitation skills, even a certain flair, which some have naturally
and others practice laboriously. Face-to-face teaching has a similar set of
requirements appropriate to that medium. From the extensive extracts given
in this paper, it seems apparent that excellence in online moderating is
fundamentally no different from excellence in other forms of teaching:
enthusiasm and involvement; intellectual perception and insight; ability to
model an understanding of the subject matter.

REFERENCES

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Davie, L. (1989). Facilitation Techniques for the On-Line Tutor. In:
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Davie, L. and P. Palmer (1985). Computer-Teleconferencing for Advanced
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Feenberg, A. (1986). Network Design: An Operating Manual for Computer
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Feenberg, A. (1989). The Written World. In: Mindweave: Communication,
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Hiltz, S. R. (1988). Teaching in a Virtual Classroom. Volume 2 of A Virtual
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Kerr, E. (1986). Electronic Leadership: A Guide to Moderating Online
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Levin, J., K. Haesun and M. Riel. (1990). Analyzing Instructional Interac-
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a New Environment (ed. L. Harasim). Praeger, New York.

McCreary, E. (1990). Three Behavioral Models for Computer-Mediated
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Mason, R. (1990). Computer Conferencing: An Example of Good Practice. CITE
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1The author would like to acknowledge the whole-hearted cooperation,
honesty and insight of Dr. Richard Farson in supporting the intentions of
this paper.

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