Moderating Professional Learning On Social Media-A Balance Between Monitoring, Facilitation And Expert Membership

The role that moderation plays in the effective functioning of online communities is relatively well studied in relation to both general free-time social media groups and discussion groups that are part of formal educational and professional learning initiatives. However, at the intersection of these domains, there are a growing number of large-scale informally-developed professionallearning groups. While this kind of group has been studied more generally, little attention has been paid to the particular moderation concerns at play in these hybrid online spaces. In this study, we examine moderation over a three-year period in a teacher-professional Facebook group with over 13,000 members. Maintaining an interpretivist stance while drawing on an exploratory statistical analysis of trace data to identify critical instances in the activity of the group, we adopt a Goffmanian approach to examine how moderation is performed. Based on this analysis, we find that moderation in the case group involved a particular balance of three different moderation concerns. In addition to the facilitation role that moderators are often described as having in groups associated with formal educational and professional learning initiatives, our findings show that moderation can also involve the monitoring of group norms more commonly associated with general free-time social media groups and the third moderation concern of acting as an expert member.