Gilly Salmon’s e-Moderating is a classic must-read for anyone who is involved with facilitated distance learning. It’s also of value to anyone interested in how pedagogy is a KM skill, as I discuss in some detail in my dual review in eLearn of this book and Cohen and Prusak’s In Good Company.
To begin with, Salmon’s core (empirically substantiated) 5-step model of the evolution of group dynamics in an online class is brilliant. Both descriptive (as in, this happens naturally) and prescriptive (as in, here’s what you can do to facilitate this natural and healthy evolution), the theory should be etched into the brain of every online facilitator of any online knowledge-sharing group. Beyond that, the book is chock full of practical tips and tricks for the practitioner.
Apparently, Salmon has a new, updated edition. I have the old one, which seems to hold up to the test of time pretty well (with the minor exception of a few passages about technology), so I suspect that the new edition will be even better.
This is definitely one you want to have in your personal collection.
[…] Good things come to those that wait: Old theories of online communication held that less information is conveyed, therefore making it inherently less intimate. Emperical research has shown this to be false, however (and obviously so to any good online teacher). What is true, however, is that the there is less social information density in communication. Familiarity therefore takes more time. This is why frameworks like Gilly Salmon’s five-step model for e-Moderating are really useful; they give us cues for recognizing stages in the temporal arc of online group dynamics. […]