Asterhan, 2010Asterhan, C. S. C. (2010). Assessing e-moderation behavior from synchronous discussion protocols with a multi-dimensional methodology. Computers in Human Behavior. and
Asterhan & Schwarz, 2010Asterhan, C. S. C., & Schwarz, B. B. (2010). Online moderation of synchronous e-argumentation. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 1--24. looked at facilitation of online synchronous meetings using a tool called
Digalo, which uses geometrical shapes for different kinds of contributions, and value-specific links. They did experiments where a bunch of people were asked to facilitate, but not told what to do - in the first one, they focus on how to analyze this interaction using both “shallow” (automatic) data and “deeper” (text analysis) data to look at different profiles of facilitators, and in the latter, they looked at the impact on learning of different approaches. They found that although the literature proposes that domain-independent prompts are the most useful, in their case, domain-specific prompts with the facilitator getting involved in the discussion where more useful - perhaps because of the non-linear design of the environment.
wrote about a tool called Mediated Chat, and how they had gradually developed it to overcome problems of chat confusion, including design of interface, a number of scripted interaction modes (everyone post once, free talk, etc), indicators of presence/typing, etc.
