@rjhogue writes in her blog “I did not leave the conference feeling that I was part of the community”

6 thoughts on “@rjhogue writes in her blog “I did not leave the conference feeling that I was part of the community””

1. huh. i’m curious whether you’ve taken on the same phenomenon Rebecca was referring to here, or something of your own, Fabian. (maybe it is and i misunderstood Rebecca’s original point. i trust her to set me straight if needed). 😉

   i remember the conversation you & i had on FB a long while back about some of the MOOC folks not replying on Twitter. i think some maybe important critique of the challenges of getting into the cMOOC conversation gets lost here because of two issues that look (to me) like misunderstandings of your subject.

   one, the network you’re referring to (and i think it IS a network rather than a community, though Rebecca’s quite right; it seems to play a community at conferences, b/c people get excited to see each other) isn’t actually Twitter-based. it’s blogging-based. the majority of the strong ties visible at the conference predate Twitter and are rooted in long-term deep engagement with each others’ ideas. so the attributes you ascribe to Twitter aren’t actually what’s driving most of the connections that left Rebecca feeling like an outsider.

   two, your assessment of Twitter itself seems especially…odd…to me. you’re right, it takes time and it doesn’t make sense to outsiders, but…what social spaces do? this is what my research is actually taking up these days, so i’m thinking seriously through your points on the platform and comparing them against early data. and i can see, at a surface level, the points you make about reinforcing self-glorification and the fact that followers *count* for more…but i’m seeing far more subtle understandings in actual practice. and real academic conversations and value, i swear.

   but still, it’s not easy to get *in* to longstanding conversational corners, and power relations are part of any networked interaction. i thought Rebecca’s post was a quite honest and reasonable exploration of what it’s like to come into contact with a network that you’ve largely been on the periphery of. i’ve had it happen f2f AND online, and it can be awkward and eye-opening and a little insecurity-triggering. (at least for me. others’ mileage may vary). but it can also make the shape/structure of those networks far clearer and help me understand how (or with whom) to build stronger ties IN that network if i want in.

   i’m thinking there’s an important message here for what you’re calling the MOOC movement, even if i think they’re a small part of what MOOCs have become. you make some great critiques of the conference structure…i do believe making those kind of distinctions (like how the Wed sessions operated, which i think was about granters & reviewers) transparent matters, in terms of minimizing and mitigating the kind of outsider feelings that are part of trying to open up and merge a variety of separate networks. I think there’s openness to that, at least from parts of the MOOC world. but you need to have reasonable expectations and contextual understanding of what people in that world are doing if you want to influence the conversation.

2. The part of your post where you say it takes a lot of time and patience to generate connections on Twitter (and by extension, blogs) is true. I look at the people I hung out with the conference, and though many of them I met in person for the first time, I connected with them online over a period of the past seven years. The oldest connections were probably Stephen Downes and Jim Groom from late 2006/early 2007. I started reading (and responding to) Martin Weller the following year, and became aware of Dave Cormier when he became involved in the early MOOCs. I met Stian Haklev the following year. I didn’t know about Martin Hawksey until 2010, started following Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill in earnest in 2011, and probably engaged with Bonnie regularly (as opposed to peripherally) in 2012.

   So it did take a long time, but the thing I have a hard time understanding is why that’s a problem. Aren’t strong, engaged, multi-year conversations what we want? I also think the “twitter elite” critique is 180 degrees wrong — it’s not like Martin Weller or Bonnie were walking around with a bunch of fans following them. Rather, they were continuing these conversations with the people they had been talking to, as peers, for years. Connections like this, formed over long periods of time through honest two-way conversation do create a power structure, but are actually the antithesis of unidirectional self-glorification. In fact, the idea that people should value new connections more than cultivated relationships seems far more uni-directional to me.

   That said, I get that in our excitement to finally meet each other we may have been clique-ish at times, and I sincerely regret if that was the case. I think whenever one is at home in a place (which I certainly felt at MRI) one has an obligation to take on some of the responsibilities of a host. So if you were in a session I was in, at a table of mine during lunch, or in the hotel bar later and I did not reach out to you, that’s on me. I’m honestly pretty introverted, and I tend to gravitate to people I know. That’s an explanation, though not an excuse. So I am more than willing to take on more of a host role if there is a future MRI.

   As far as the cost, conferences cost money to run. I’ve run conferences before, and even after paring everything down to the most basic items, it’s still quite a bit of money (I’ve run unconferences before too — and it’s still a bunch of money, even after the donated time and labor). When it’s a smaller conference, the costs per person are even greater. That can be absorbed by the hosting institution, donors, the institutions of people who go, or the people who go themselves, but someone has to pay. I think George mentioned that 180 people was the break-even point for the conference (even with the sponsorship); the conference exceeded that, but not by much.

   There are ways of course to engage without the price of a flight, hotel, and conference fee. But I think they often look like twitter, blogging, video-conferencing and other sorts of online social communication and sharing. But then we’re back to square one, because that’s seen as aggrandizement as well. So help me understand what I’m missing.

3. Hi Fabian

   Like you I’m interested in the impact of these kinds of long-term online friendships that Mike is talking about, becoming realised within professional settings like #MRI. This is clearly a huge factor for the rest of the world when those friendships are professionalised within a smallish part of California, for example. So the fact that there’s a counter-narrative of Canadians and, apparently, Scottish people is really just the next wave — there are also lots of us in other places figuring out where we are, and with whom, and what languages we want to use.

   But a factor is that when professional friends meet at a conference, their enthusiasm is then amplified by Twitter interactions, so that people who aren’t in that loop are left watching the replays etc.

   This is just human stuff, but I think it’s particularly prevalent when any new field forms, because often the first group in — the first group of people who openly valued each others’ ideas and lent support to build something against institutional resistance — experience some battle fatigue and a concomitant sense of joy on running into each other in person. I don’t think it’s an inherent flaw in Twitter, or in any other medium. It’s how any of us would behave.

   On Twitter celebrity: last year I was at an Australian conference where an earnest presenter showed us the bar chart of Australian Vice Chancellors on Twitter — how many followers, and so on. We ooh-ed and aah-ed at the well known A-lister in the group with 3000 followers. A little later in the day my teenage daughter showed up and I said, maybe a little pridefully, “You know, there are academics with thousands of followers.” She looked at me as though I’d just claimed to invent the lead pencil and said “Mum, Harry Styles has seven million followers.” (And of course now he has 18 million followers.)

   So any academics who mistake themselves for celebrities really need to take a walk outside the tent.

   My feeling is that the kinds of networks being built by new modes of participating in higher education will need new practices of engagement and participation from everyone involved. And that includes engaging by giving some feedback on how and why to include people who aren’t working primarily in English, or in Northern hemisphere timezones or whatever. Whenever I’ve raised these questions (sometimes quite crankily on the timezone issue) the response has typically “Oh, gosh, yes, sorry, let’s try to remember this next time”, and although I’m sometimes amazed at the way northern Americans seem to forget the reality of where the rest of us are, that’s honestly all we can ask for as this new way of doing things takes shape.

   This will all be better if work together within it.

4. I think a lot could be examined about the conference culture template that MRI followed. Even when I found out about it I asked if I could present a session with a regular co-presenter of mine because we tend to like to have fun, thought-provoking, open discussion style sessions. But I was told it was only for people that received grants. And research is good – I research various issues myself. But presenting research does tend to be a one-way engagement that doesn’t encourage inclusion. And some people tend to find research a bit… tedious. So MRI for sure could have used so more theoretical or practical or inspirational breakout sessions, or even planned discussion/interaction times. I know conferences like NUTN do a good job of getting people interacting with each other during the day and after the last session. But they tend to spend a lot of time planning those more informal aspects.

   But you know, even of you try to interact with people, its no guarantee it will happen. Jim Groom and I had been tweeting a few times about getting some TexMex and discussing syndication while skateboarding around downtown Arlington and then that never happened thanks to the ice. I would have loved to have gotten to meet Stephen Downes and pick his brain a bit. Even often saw him sitting by himself. But I was the one talking to a co-worker or someone I knew at the time. So it actually ended up being my fault as the non-famous person that I didn’t get to meet the famous person. There were also several bloggers that I follow that I wanted to meet but couldn’t because they just don’t put their picture on their blog so I have no idea what they look like. All that to say that it is really hard to transition from virtual to face-to-face interaction sometimes.

   And Twitter…. Twitter is just really different for different people. I have friends that never respond or re-tweet a thing I write but will come up to me in real life and tell me they love what I am saying. So do the big names in MOOC land ignore my tweets because they think I am an idiot, or that I am annoying, or simply because they just don’t want to annoy their own followers with too many tweets/re-tweets a day and I just don’t make the cut? Who knows. I shouldn’t even assume they had time to read it. Have you seen George Siemens tweets about how many emails he gets a day? I’m surprised he has time to even sleep at night.

   I also remember the one time I was invited to be in a panel session at a conference I spent a lot of time the rest of the conference sitting by myself with little interaction. But then I heard some people wanted to interact more with those of us on the panel afterwards. Why didn’t they sit at my mostly empty lunch table? Well, maybe they had a fire to put out at work using the always spotty conference wifi. Who knows? We can always look at what can be improved. But sometimes we just have to chalk it up to life being complex.

5. I did not attend #MRI13, but as a student in learning technologies who continues to navigate the journey from novice to expert, I wanted to share my experiences with Twitter in this field, as they differ from those expressed by Fabian.

   While I began using Twitter in 2010, it was not until Fall 2012 that I truly engaged the platform. At the time I had begun initial research toward my dissertation, and many of the contemporary scholars were active on Twitter. I followed them. I also began blogging (a lot). For the most part, those I followed did not follow me. I did not take this as a sleight, but more as the expected outcome of joining a new network…the idea of legitimate peripheral participation, zone of proximal development in a social setting, and my place as a novice in their expert space. As I gained comfort with the field, I began responding to select tweets of these scholars. These responses were almost always met with responses from the scholar, and from there a follow and further interactions. My interactions in the field (both in what I was blogging and what I was discussing via Twitter and other blog discussion boards) had gone from peripheral to more noticeable. As with any zone of proximal development, I failed to notice my movement forward until I was looking back at where I had been. Today I know people from Twitter when I attend a conference, and we can discuss my work and their work, a node that I may not be an expert yet, but I am on an expert journey and the members of the community see that.

   That does not mean it is not awkward to see the communities I am a member of versus those where I am still just networked at the community is further down the road. At #opened13, I was initially intimidated by the DS106 gang, a bunch of people I know by reputation but have little correspondence with. Was it their fault I did not know them, or their responsibility to accommodate me? The people I had engaged in correspondence (@holden, @audreywatters, @jimgroom, and @gsiemens) I did meet and converse with (with the exception of George, which was less about a lack of want and more because we met three times but always crossing paths at inopportune places). Those I had not engaged in conversation (@dkernohan, @clhendricksbc, @brlamb, @mgershovich) had no reason to know me other than an email notice explaining I had followed them. I was intimidated to sit at their table…I mean, they are power players, and there’s Rory McGreal too, and who am I? These are not celebrities, but because of my knowledge of their histories in the field and a touch of backstory on Twitter, they are celebrities to me and I start out with the same relationship to them as a celebrity does to a fan. I don’t blame them…I had ample opportunities to engage David at the conference but was nervous and did not do so…until I had provided some context for us to converse. With some it was further Twitter conversation, with others it was inviting them to my presentation and discussing it afterwards. I cannot blame the experts in the field for lacking an awareness of my awesomeness if I have not provided them access to the awesomeness. By the end of the conference, I had engaged each person in some manner, enough that the next time we meet hopefully I won’t be so nervous to say hi again (this has proven true with others in the field such as @veletsianos).

   I am in the analysis phase of my dissertation, a Delphi study looking at the MOOC as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than just a learning model. I needed experts for the panel. I asked a lot of people. A lot of people said nothing, and I would be a liar if I didn’t say it stung (intellectually I know it should not sting, but it still does). Some people responded to decline, but I established relationships with through the process. Some I had grown relationships with on Twitter said yes. Others I had no relationship with prior to a cold email (or Tweet) said yes. It was not easy to put out nearly 80 invites for my project, but in the end I had a robust group of 20 experts in the field involved, with another 10 declining but expressing interest in the project. None of them would have known to care had I not approached.

   There was a celebrity at the restaurant I grabbed take-out from last night; you’d know him if you saw him. He was affable and engaging with anyone who wanted to say hi. It takes a lot to do that, but he gets paid well for the privilege and understands it is the price of fame. EdTech scholars on Twitter are not the same as celebrities. I would imagine many are introverted and just as nervous about engaging a stranger as the stranger is about engaging them.

   I do not wish to critique Fabian’s message here, just to note my experience and how it does not relate to the message above. I am always surprised at the number of people the scholars in the field follow on Twitter. I follow a smaller percentage of my followers than they do and am amazed at how they navigate so much content from so many scholars and practitioners (I follow a third as many people as follow me; many of the pre-eminent scholars in the field are at half, two-thirds, three-quarters, one-to-one, or in some cases they follow more than follow them). I also do not understand how Twitter is either neoliberal or postmodern; maybe there is a Lacanian argument to make a la Zizek and the ever-present object of desire, but there is nothing neoliberal about Twitter and the argument made in the blog sets Twitter as a modernist technology rather than postmodern.

   We cannot expect colleagues and friends to stop using Twitter to discuss where they are meeting up, what they are doing and sharing inside jokes and old war stories. This is normal. What Twitter changed is that I, a peripheral member of the network, know that story, and thus am aware of my lack of bond to the group. This is not the fault of the group, but a consequence of public Twitter conversations. Perhaps future conferences should realize this will happen and make the inevitable meet-up an official part of the conference so it does not feel like Members Only, but I do not see when this happens as a result of self-glorification and superfluous communication. It’s an unintended consequence and one that can be considered in future iterations.

   There is a responsibility for those at the head of a conference to work on buttressing cohort and network in an effort to help community grow. To expect a conference to get it right in Year 1 is overdoing it, but there is room for improvement at #MRI13. Recently I attended the Museum Computer Network conference (#MCN13), a conference in a field where I was a total noob. My first session was a “speed networking” session where people sat at tables of 10 and each had a minute to share why they were at the conference, what they were interested in and what they had enjoyed, everyone in the room switching tables at 10 minutes. It was brilliant, and did so well that many of us stayed after the hour and continued it for another hour. The director of the conference was sitting with grad students, business practitioners, curators, publishers, etc. I met people from around the world, and while I did not get to know all of them, I did make connections based on interest, gained insight into the field, and knew people so that when I walked into a room later in the day not knowing a soul, there was someone I felt comfortable at least sitting next to and seeing if we could further our one-minute of knowing each other. And it almost always worked. It was not easy, and I often felt out of place, but that session made the conference a much more manageable experience, to the point that I can come back next year and feel comfortable saying hi to people and engaging conversations. But at the same time, some of the responsibility was on me to engage these people. And not only is my scholarship and career much better for those moments where I step outside the comfort zone and reach out to these scholars and practitioners who to me seem as Twitter luminaries, but it helps me continue my journey to being a part not just of a network but a community.

6. Thank you everyone for the comments; I appreciate all of them.
   Some ideas that come to my mind:
   “(These) are rooted in long-term deep engagement with each others’ ideas” this makes the group quite difficult to penetrate (and the emphasis is on the closeness) for some people especially if you are not from this group. I know this is typical of any organism, like groups. But organisms are not open.

   “but still, it’s not easy to get *in* to longstanding conversational corners, and power relations are part of any networked interaction” I know this very well. The issue emphasizes the problem of inclusion in any project or movement. Evidently this “MOOC group” (I know you do not want labels, but I have to call it something) is not excluded from this dilemma. Perhaps the question is how we can ease this problem.

   “[…]I don’t think it’s an inherent flaw in Twitter, or in any other medium. It’s how any of us would behave” I agree but I humbly think, especially Twitter, amplifies this issues.

   “So the fact that there’s a counter-narrative of Canadians and, apparently, Scottish people is really just the next wave — there are also lots of us in other places figuring out where we are, and with whom, and what languages we want to use.” I like this Kate. Thank you for your comments.

   “But you know, even of you try to interact with people, its no guarantee it will happen.” I agree Matt, thanks for your comments.

   “I was intimidated to sit at their table…I mean, they are power players, and there’s Rory McGreal too, and who am I?” In real academia and research, your voice is as important as anyone else’s. Fame in reality means nothing (to me) when you have your tenure.

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