Conferences are in the air right now, heaps of them. Just in the rear view mirror is Creative Commons Summit, EDUCAUSE, Open Ed is coming up, and after that one I am involved in, OE Global.
And that’s likely a small bit of the overall conference pie. Everybody is trying to solve out the riddle of how to organize them when they are online. How can these be effective when participants are not seconded in a hotel away from their home?
Whinging about conferences is a long running rant topic in this blog, dial it back at least to 2004.
I guarantee you I do not have the answers. But what I find a little wearying is that these events center around the programmed presentation sessions- that means keynotes, breakout sessions, workshops. I call it Presentationally Oriented.
Some exceptions I remember to this were the old Northern Voice conferences, the early Open Education ones (when they were small), and for something in this decade, ones organized by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT).
And pretty much pivoted online, conferences stay the course of presentationally driven. I cannot judge them all, because, to be honest, I attend very few (especially compared to how many are going on these days).
My unfounded hunch is that attendance at sessions is much much lower for online conferences than in-person ones.
Dominik Lukes wrote maybe the most insightful (to me) series on this way back in April– Moving events online: Platforms, strategies and challenges. Planners focus much on the platform and the program, but I am tuned into his piece on challenges, especially the way he zones in on “the affordances of space and time.”
Bear with some long quotes. Drink them in.
The whole physical configuration of an event is working to make it seem like a natural environment for interaction. Rooms are configured obviously so that it is clear where one should sit and the idea of a group of people sitting in rows and watching someone speak seems so obvious it is beneath our notice.
https://medium.com/techczech/moving-events-online-part-1-challenges-why-are-not-more-events-taking-place-online-a1b94533649c
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It is not just the rooms in which the talks are taking place. It is also the spaces connecting them and the people in them. We see corridors through which we can walk and even follow other people.
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They automatically present themselves to us for interactions and in that they remove much of the mental burden of deciding what to do.
And then….
Let’s compare it with an online event. Nothing about an online event offers these natural affordances. There are no rooms, corridors, posters on walls, or helpful people in the way. All attendees have a is a link somewhere in their Inbox. This is not a problem for an individual webinar.
But a whole online event is much different. Each participant is forging a lonely path to the component events and meetings. Some carefully put them on their agendas, other just trawl their emails for the links or Google the website hoping to find the right time and place. It is not the lack of sociability that gets in their way, it is the lack of affordances.
Organisers of online events often underestimate this aspect of the event and only focus on the interactions between speakers and audiences, and not how they connect together. An online event then becomes a series of webinars that may or may not feel like they belong together.
But there is even more to it than that. We also need to think of the affordances of time and space from which the virtual attendees are taking part. They are often in their office or at their home which is full of affordances suggesting very different ways of natural interaction. They are most likely sitting at a desk with a headset on. Every cue in their environment is suggesting that they should be doing other things. Going to meetings, washing the dishes, talking with colleagues or family. By moving an event online we have not only removed the social space of the event itself, we have disrupted the social space from which the participant is attending.
This was part of my own planning last Spring. As part of the work I am doing with OE Global, I was asked to help with the planning for their annual conference (one that has always been the in person kind) to an online one– this is happening in few days!
And, as far as I know, the organization has never run an online conference (although they do deftly organize the annual Open Education Week).
I credit my colleagues for making a decision early (back in April?) to Do The Pivot. This of course meant a huge shift of role, opportunity for the conference host, Taipei Medical University. To serve a global audience, we decided to bring on conference co-hosts in different time zones, so adding to sessions in local Taiwan time, we have co-host TUDeflt leading events in Central European time, and eCampus Ontario hosting sessions in North American time. This means something like 20 hours of programming per session day.
Our planning committee felt like it was worth scheduling synchronous sessions (Keynotes and presentations) on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and leaving Tuesday and Thursday for workshops and a variety of asynchronous activities, some social, some connective, and as it stands now, mostly things conference attendees create.
The call for proposals and review process followed a traditional process (their use of EasyChair works really well for the proposal process), with options built in for presenters to choose asynchronous format.
This has all been a long pre-amble to get to how the conference is being run, and in what. We looked at a few possibilities for hosted conference platforms. I have a feeling about them like I do about the LMS- they do what you want to do, but you end up with something you do not always filly control and often, it just does not do everything you want. I doubt there is any perfect or near perfect system.
I had a meeting with my former colleagues back at the Maricopa Community Colleges who are planning an online conference and urged them to not focus so much on the platform. Just pick one and find a way to bend it you your whims.
Since we were already starting to shape the use of discourse as a community platform for OE Global, what we called OEG Connect. We were still developing the kinds of activities/discussions we might do there as a community space, with not a whole lot of traction.
My colleague Jure Cuhalev suggested we could make it work as a conference platform, although it is not really designed directly for that. What I have been saying is that every part of the conference venue is conversational. Each keynote, presentations it its own topic, and it means participants can engage with them at any time.
In the back of my mind, this is the influence of many years being involved with Virtually Connecting, which offers conference conversations in the margins or edges of planned conferences. We are trying to put conversation at the center.
Well, enough talk, here it is!
For now the menus are all about the conference, and we also have normal account creation turned off. Conference attendees were sent unique invitation links to create an account, and it is set to add them to the conference group that gives full access to the participation features.
And here is something unique. All of the conference session descriptions and the discussions are going to be open to read. You have to be logged in as a conference participant to access the links to the Zoom rooms for live sessions and to be able to post/reply to the discussions. We had some talk early on about making the conference visible only to participants– but why do we have to do that? Does a conference have more value with a shroud tossed over its activity?
Here is what the conference space looks like (yes, you can look too). Each area is a “Category” in discourse parlance, each with its own topics.
The green areas are all session types. Yellow are conference information, and blue are open discussion areas as well as special activities.
But again, everything inside is a conversation. Have I said that too many times?
It may be bedazzling to people, but one thing the discourse platform does well is create ways to do some of the nudging, affordance of making serendipity happen them Dominik Lukes wrote about. We can see it in the big ramp of activity in the last week since we first invited presenters in, and now that conference participants are in there as well. Leading up to the conference, we have activity. And I anticipate/hope it will continue after.
Participants will have to learn some ways around. Discourse does a good job of onboarding, especially for those that engage with it’s “bot” that teaches you about its features via private messages. I’ve been posting guides and support in the Help Desk area.
It does some things subtly as well, like when it suggested a certain person (moi) was posting too much:
There’s a lot of spaces in this setup. As a orientation here is a quick screencast I made to help to show people around.
What is happening now is presenters are finding their sessions (more on that soon) and then doing their own “reply” to add presentation material (slides, videos, links, images) but also, hopefully, to post some questions or prompts to engage participants in their sessions.
One of the challenges in the discourse platform is that the listings for say, Live Presentations, has a long list and are displayed in the order of the most activity. It’s not the way to really browse the program. This is where my colleague Jure pulled off some wizardy of code.
A first key point of global conferences are the always hassle of dealing with time zone differences. What Jure has crafted is a way that all session times are presented in the local time zone of the person viewing a session description. As an attendee the conference schedule is presented in MY time, not the hosts. But he also created a chronological view of the program.
It can be filtered by day. If you are logged in as a conference participant, here, and on individual session views, you have to option to save it to your own personal schedule. Something like:
This is really something like our own homegrown sched tool. I think it’s amazing.
The conversational spaces are picking up in activity. In our welcomes we suggested people extend hellos in the “Meet and Greet” area, what we are casting as the open public space, maybe the hallways of the conference.
And I am also hopeful for the other open space, what we call Convo and Collab (or Conversation and Collaboration). This has a few asynchronous activities we set up in advance like the Iron Chef OER Mix Off and an Open Recipes exchange. We have some Visual Thinkery Remixes that Bryan Mathers is hatching for us.
Or see how it is set up as a topic in the Convo and Collab area. This is a place we created for mostly asynchronous activities. While we/I have posted a few as starters (a recipe exchange, a call for musicians to collaborate, GIF sharing) the idea is that conference participants will create their own activities or discussions.
We already see ones launched for:
- Chrissy Nerantizi’s Open Picture Book project
- K-12 Open educator meet up
- Groups to meet in non-English language discussions e.g. Educación Abierta en español, Terugblik OEGlobal-conferentie, and OE Global Francophone 2020 Première édition
- Topical interest discussions like Are you interested in curricula, MediaWiki, big data… or their intersection?
- Projects seeking interested persons like OpenSail Education
This is exactly what I was hoping for, and much more of the inter-presentation action that is most interesting at conferences.
There’s a lot of moving parts here. We are working hard to get everyone who is registered to create their accounts on the site. We are urging presenters to reply to their posted session with additional materials, slides, links, but also to consider posing questions or invitations to the discussion.
Here’s a great, evolving example, a workshop by India educator Roma Joseph– Creating and Integrating MOOCS in Blended Learning.
There is also so much to coordinate behind the scenes- we have a large team of volunteer session hosts and tech support staff, distributed around the global and across 5 Zoom rooms.
And oh Zoom, the headaches. It never seems to do what you expect it does.
It all starts Monday 9:00 AM (Sunday 7:00 PM for me) with the first keynote from Taipei.
It’s exciting, and nervous, but definitely the Sherman Alexie kind of nervous.
I go back to the wisdom of my mentor at the Maricopa Community Colleges, Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Alfredo de los Santos. I was put in charge of planning a system wide year end retreat, and had my stomach in knots in worry about the event going well.
Alfredo wisely advised me all that needed to happen was to get a bunch of people in a room with something worthwhile to do. Everything else takes care of itself.
We have some 600 people coming into the room next week. And it’s open to see what happens in our OEG Connect space.
Featured Image:
FWIW This post got a mention from Post Pandemic University “From Exclusive Conferencing To Community Building – Facing The Challenge Of The Climate Crisis”
https://postpandemicuniversity.net/2021/03/07/from-exclusive-conferencing-to-community-building-facing-the-challenge-of-the-climate-crisis/
My use of experiment is more the try “to learn something” in the definition than a well-designed test “done in order to learn something or to discover if something works or is true.”
This is also framed in my ongoing wrestling with the conference experience that is (to quote myself) overly “presentationally oriented.” Compound this by a tendency to organize online conferences as replicating in-person ones without consideration of what Dominik Lukes described as the “affordances” of spaces. This is not simply fixed by online platforms where you move an avatar around a graphic of a conference hall. And usually overlooked is our focus and time- when participating in an online conference we do not devote 3 days to be fully locked in. We. Do. Other. Stuff.
I have no solutions to offer. Anne Gagné asks directly who is complicit in the conference game, and I here to write “not me.” While her focus is on exclusion of participation, my primary goal has been to explore ways to break down the dichotomy of in-person versus online conferencing.
In the end, I might only have a clever name.
Here we go, where I try to explain the “AND Conference” format I welded into the OE Global 2022 Conference.
The 2020 and 2021 OE Global Conferences
I may not have been writing a ton here about my work with OE Global, but I began some part time consulting in March 2020 invited by Executive Director Paul Stacey to bring in some community building new ideas. Other “things” in the world happened that month, so I was also asked to help plan their November 2020 Conference that originally was going to be hosted in Taipei but had to move online.
Well golly gee, I do have a blog post about that effort.
A part of this thinking I hold on to still is Conferences as Conversations.
One key influence was noting the registration for the 2020 conference was something like 4 times the count as an in person conference, and a significant response in the follow-up survey was many people noting that outside of a world-wide pandemic, they still would not have the capability to fund and travel for an in person conference.
Flip the calendar ahead a year to 2021, and the conference that was planned to be in Nantes, France was not viable for pandemical reasons. We at OEGlobal (and me now working full time as of June 2021) organized an online conference at the end of September 2021 that made use of the same discourse platform as the year before. For a while in the 5 months earlier planning, there was some hope they could have the in-person conference piggy back right after the online, but again, ****ing pandemic.
So the in-person conference was bumped out to May 35-25 this year, but it would continue the theme of the online conference around the UNESCO OER Recommendation. There was a desire for some kind of “bridging events” in the time between, but that did not materialize fully outside of efforts to engage the community in an annotation effort of the UNESCO OER Recommendation, ideally to attach examples, discussions, findings from he conferences directly to the wording it was related to.
I thought this would have a lot of resonance, and it’s not an onerous task to add a Hypothes.is note to a web page, but I did not really see a good amount of traction. At least I made a nifty remix, meet Rosa the Annotator.
My remix of Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Image used in a call to annotation action.
By maybe February of 2022, the green light was flashed in the sky for a GO for the in person conference in Nantes.
So free trip to France, right? Who would not grab that?
Me.
Go or Not?
As a credit to Paul Stacey’s leadership style of operating as a “culture of care” he offered to his staff the option to not travel if any of us felt it was unsafe. While I was vaccinated and witnessing precautions fraying like a mask left by the roadside, as a Type 1 diabetic looking at varying variants, I questioned the need to go. Especially as at the time I had not had COVID (I got bit in April and it was a doozy).
But it was more than pandemic worry. I had/have misgivings that the way forward out of this unevenly distributed now being a return to doing what we did before. I was thinking too of all the people who had participated in the online conferences (like over 800 in 2020 and more than 600 in 2021) who again would have no shred of participation in a conference.
In my years at working at Maricopa and at NMC, I was fortunate to have gotten the opportunity to go to a (as a colleague nearby says) “wacksack” of conferences, around the globe.
This shifted much starting in 2012 as being self employed meaning that outside of a few invites, going to a conference was not only a “pay for everything yourself” ordeal, but also compounded by being salaryless “you earn no money while not working”–see Conferences by the Numbers. And Chickens. And I recall hearing of colleagues working at institutions having the opportunity to go to Bali, Cape Town, Milan for OE Global conferences. That was way out of my self funded ability. Oh well…
By opting out I was missing the chance to meet colleagues I have known for two years only through screens. At the same time, I did not feel like the chance to go on a plane to a neat place was enough to justify a risk to my health.
And it put me in the same place as others who could go to this in person conference, for all kinds of reasons. It seems like the person supporting a part of the conference open to participants not there in person should be operating the same way.
Presentation Mindsets
After proposals for the Nantes event were accepted in March, presenters were asked to confirm their plans to be there (and also they need to register).
We started seeing messages from a number of presenters who had planned to travel for the conference, but for an array of reasons- health, family, financial, etc could not. When told we were planning some online components, the first question was, “Can I do my presentation online?”
The idea that I was hatching was that the online components would be everything but presentations, it was not to be an online conference at all e.g. the OER22 Conference did a stellar job at being a “hybrid” conference of both in-person and online. But this is the modality for either state.
I’ve seen examples of pre-recorded presentations that just do not get much traction. I don’t watch to many myself. I aimed to design something counter-presentational. How would that fly?
The AND Conference Idea
I had leanings more towards an un-conference mode where those who wanted to share their work could do so, but not in the scheduled presentation mode, but more of discussions/activities that were asynchronous, again using out Discourse powered OEG Connect platform. The emerging idea was not to try and have this “in-person” vs “online” dichotomy, but more aim for ways of interacting that would bridge both, and offer something for both. I started with some playful naming of things do for hose “In Nantes” and those “Not in Nantes”.
Thus I started framing my concept to my colleagues not as an “Un-Conference” but and “AND conference”:
A bonus attraction for this was the conference hosts Nantes Université offered to produce live video streams for the two larger conference halls, meaning three keynotes, and 50 some sessions would be made available.
Also, we were not soliciting fees or registration for participating online. Free as in $0.
Having supported the previous two OEGlobal conferences as fully online in OEG Connect meant familiarity with setting up this iteration. Since this part was open, no access restrictions needed to be put into play. The structure was 4 fold- an area for the daily schedule, then all the in-person conference sessions (“In Nantes Conference Sessions”, plus the “Not in Nantes Unconference Sessions” (really just topic threads). Then between them was the Interaction Zone, aimed at being the activities that were available to those In Nantes and those Not in Nantes (see, the “and”?).
The OEGlobal22 Conference in OEG Connect
The In Person Conference Parts
The Schedule and the In Nantes Conference Sessions were no different than what we did for the online conference. Each presentation is its own topic, we added a link to a live stream if it as available, and we ask presenters to share resources (perhaps more than slides) and pose questions.
We ask participants to engage with the presenters. In keeping with my old idea, each presentation could/ought to be a conversation.
Out of 101 sessions, 30 have at least one reply “here’s my slides”, some have 2, 3 4 replies, one has 11.
So this did not generate much activity, but then again, this all came together maybe a month before the conference. The information about what we were doing gere went out bby social media and emails to participants.
The Online Unconference Parts
In the Looking at the Glass Partly Full Department, I was happy to see a few topics started in the Unconference area, three of them from presenters who had planned to be in Nantes but fate intervened. There were bursts of the kinds of exchanges I hoped for. The description for this area included:
We are asking that you try to think around the usual idea of this as an online conference built around presenting online.
I had tried to be clever in my Magritte Remix on the concept, that what we were doing was online but it was not making it an online conference.
Remix in the the style of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images 1 made by Alan Levine using Pixabay image by 200 Degrees
I am not sure anyone noticed. But Werner Westermann’s topic on Artificial Intelligence and Open Education: indifference or unable to connect was exactly what I thought we could generate. To be this is more interesting, valuable than watching someone flip slides. Others of note include:
Social Media Choices for Open Educators came from a question posted on CCCOER email list, by Amy Hofer I thought it was good fodder for conversation, though I was never successful in arm twisting Amy to join in. There was a good thread on the federated alternatives to twitter, and it is nudging me to look at setting up an OEGlobal Mastodon instance.Contributing to Our Roadmap was good call for response posted by Alex Enkerli to questions on a national OER planSurvey on where institutional policies interact with open educational practices a call again for responses by Leo Havemann who had presented in Nantes (a good example of doing the AND from the in person side)And a few more (see them all)
As a proof of concept, I feel like these were successful. Again, the late notifying of this (because it was assembled a few weeks before the conference) was a factor. But at least we generated discussion type activities outside the usual online conference presenting mode.
Interacting Together Stuff
Again, I see a very good sign that the topics created in the Interaction Zone had the most activity. The idea here was to offer things to do, discuss, share that would be a bridge between the audiences, that could be done whether one was In Nantes or Not in Nantes, may have overplayed that bit of wording, but at least did not slide into making it a pair of acronyms.
A few examples include:
The View We Never See in Zoom was completely organic, as it came out of a different discussion where Judith Sebesta shared a photo of her desk where she would be participating from online. I struck me as interesting, because in zoom I always see the room behind participants, but never what they see. Remix and Share an OEGlobal 2022 Postcard again getting some fun mileage out of the Visual Thinkery remixable digital card that Bryan Mathers made for us for the first online conference.Shameless plug – please respond to my international OE Policy Survey was shared by in Nantes participant Leo Havemann who was active in asking for response to his survey, but here it generated quite a good thread of discussion on how individuals see institutional policy.How Far To/From Nantes? was a different approach to putting our locations on a map. We asked people to use a distance calculation tool to share either how far they were traveling to get to Nantes or how far away they were participating from. It’s small, but to me it is showing how you can make something viable for all participants to do.Attach Conference Sessions, Notes as Annotations to the OER Recommendation is at the bottom of the list by replies, with a resounding zero. After 7 months of trying everything to garner interest in the UNESCO OER Recommendation theme of both is conference and the September 2021 online conference something people would see value in annotating the source document, without me even noticing, thanks to the fantastic CROWDLAAERS dashboard I saw more than 60 new annotations added during the week of the conference in Nantes.And a few more (see all the interaction zone topics)
Oh wait, maybe the most interesting/successful were the Hallway Conversations we held twice during the conference afternoon coffee breaks. I suggested having some sense of “live” action outside of the streamed presentations, and much inspired by the years of participating in Virtually Connecting experiences I suggested we try to arrange a way of allowing participants Not in Nantes to hear and talk to people on site.
Long ago and not so long ago people active with DS106 radio did things like this, but it requires someone with experience broadcasting on site, and then there is no remote participation without a lot of fancy audio rigging. And we could have done an audio only zoom, but haven’t we had enough zooming?
I cannot recall who suggested it, but we ended up experimenting (successfully) with Twitter Spaces. Yes, it meant participants had to use twitter, and it only provides speaking capability on a mobile device, but it did mean people could listen from anywhere, and potentially speak too. My sum experience was being a listener to one during Open Education Week and an impromptu demo with my OEG colleagues.
And because you can only pre-schedule one Space per account, I set up one via our OEGlobal account and one in my own twitter account. And thankfully Lori-Beth Larsen volunteered to be a roaming “mic” in Nantes, plus a few others joined in, and actually it did end up working fairly well. I set them up to be recorded, so at least the archive lives in the tweets:
and
Getting an audio file of the recording is however is anything but simple. You actually have to request a download of your entire Twitter archive (mine is well over 1.5 Gb). Then rummage around to locate a
.tsfile, a format I never heard of, but is some MPEG-2 relict from DVD days. It was stored inside a spaces_media directory. I recommend as well saving a copy of thespaces_metadata.jsfile which can help you locate the proper archive if you have more than one (it also provides a count of participants).This part of Twitter Spaces makes it feel like the software was some high school kid’s special project. It is rather arcane to get your archives. Each time you want an archive, you have to download the whole boat, would it really be that hard to provide access to the one file you need?
Anyhow, then you are left with some mystery format file — I used an online converter to make into an mp3 and I was then able to have something I could share and also edit into a new podcast episode of OEG Voices:
I had a much longer list of ideas of interaction ideas, but just was not able to organize them all. Still, the response was very positive for the ones we did try (the cup is partly full, the cup is partly full, the cup is partly full…)
Timing as Challenge
I am pleased we were able to pull of these bits and put out there as a slightly different way to think about conferences, maybe to be less a dichotomy approach of online vs in person, and also to break down the idea of conferences as presentation-centric.
The idea was developed late in the planning process, so it became more of an emergent experiment, but now is on the table for the 2023 OEGlobal conference that will take place in Edmonton. As that is a few hours driving distance for me, I will definitely be In Edmonton, but also dedicated to creating opportunities for those who will be Not in Edmonton (I am starting this now!).
And beyond these efforts, we at OEGlobal were successful in person continuing the effort to create sessions where presenters could speak in their own language (see sessions offered in Spanish, French , and Arabic).
On site was a first use of a different approach to multilingual sharing than attempts at live translation, see the Multilingual Interactive Display an AI application created by students of our conference chair, Colin de La Higuera. I captured a few bits of the Word Cloud view generated during the opening keynote:
Expect this to be a design of future OEGlobal conference and events.
Much on this AND Conference “thing” hinged on the support and interest of the on-site staff, participants. Thankfully, my colleagues had faith on my whacky ideas.
I admit greatly over-estimating my own energy! I had grand plans of operating on Nantes Time, and after the first day being up from midnight until 9am, I collapsed. On day 2 I was not present live, even with some weird chills, and the original second Twitter spaces was rescheduled or day 3.
All in all, though, I am appreciative of having this opportunity to change up the usual conference game. And will continue doing so as long as I am breathing.
Can conferences be as much places for open conversations as much as for presentations? You can guess my answer…
Featured Image:
2017/365/7 Joined Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
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