This weekend, Christian Ydesen (Aalborg University) and I hosted a small workshop on the comparative history of school accountability. We had six papers written by eight scholars from three time zones in two hemispheres. I’m excited by the subject of the papers — all told, the papers discussed school accountability in some detail in six countries, with a few mentions of some others on the side, across a few centuries. Given the five hours of discussion and the small numbers, it was a highly rewarding experience, and Christian and I will be following up in terms of looking to publish revised versions of the papers and expanding the set of papers if feasible.
However, what prompts me to write tonight is not just the topic and the nebulous “you will see these papers in improved form!” promise but how we conducted the workshop: Google Hangouts. For both sessions this weekend (one yesterday, one today), I drove to my office (with the better connectivity and a nice webcam I could use) where I connected to colleagues in Chicago, Kingston, Copenhagen, and two cities in Germany. None of us took an airplane, and none of us paid for hotels or airport transportation. The “registration fee” was … oh, yeah, there was none.
Finally, or most importantly, because there were six papers, and participants each wrote (or co-wrote) one, that meant that everyone read everyone else’s papers, and instead of presenting something formally, the author(s) of each paper took a few minutes to explain something about the background the paper, another participant assigned to be the first respondent had a few comments and questions, and we were off discussing that paper for about 45 minutes. With a few minutes for introductions and logistics, plus one break in each session, that meant that we had about 2-1/2 hours each day in a block of time to talk about a few papers, intensely and with the same group of scholars.
Is it the same as getting together in a symposium sponsored or funded by a grant or foundation, where it’s common to have maybe two or three times the participants (and about twice as many papers)? No, not at all. We didn’t have a chance to relax too much together, though several of the participants knew each other outside this weekend. And trying to stretch across a total 7-hour difference limited when we could set up sessions: The sessions began each day at 9 am Chicago/Kingstom time and 4 pm Central European time… we really could not have done much more. But I don’t think we could have gotten a symposium for this subject funded, and in the format we used, I got my fill. Or at least after each day’s session I drove home and promptly took a nap, which is not my usual post-workday activity.
Setting up this weekend’s workshop took time and a little bit of deliberate planning spread out over some months. Christian and I talked about this in the fall, and a number of steps were delayed on my end, not his, because of other work demands. But we started with a few colleagues we knew might be interested, and once we ascertained we’d have at least a few papers, we polled interested parties on possible weekends in the summer, drafted a call for proposals (so we wouldn’t be limited to people we knew personally), set up an online form for people to submit proposals, distributed the call, made decisions about whom to accept, set up the schedule tentatively, wrote our own papers and reminded those whose proposals were accepted to submit theirs, set up a place online to receive papers (USF’s library has a BE Press installation, which made it feasible if not hugely user-friendly), circulated papers as they were submitted, set up one private event each day on Google Plus, set up opportunities for participants to test their Google Hangout installation, adjusted the schedule after it was clear one of the papers was not going to be finished, and then participated in the workshop sessions themselves.
You could vary a lot of this–use Open Conference Systems instead of BE Press for the paper repository (or the whole proposal/acceptance review process), use something other than Googe Hangouts, use Hangouts on Air and record/display for “posterity” (we had each session as a private event), and so forth. While I suppose we could have been more aggressive in seeking participants, we were not sure what would be feasible online, … and in the end six papers and 8-10 participants each session were a good size. Even if the Hangouts tool allows more than 10 at some point, or you can figure out how to rotate people in and out, the size and format we used gave every participant a chance to talk about every paper in some depth, as well as have a few general discussions about the history of accountability in different countries. So if I were to run something like this again with twice the number of participants, I would probably want to divide the group into two tracks, or figure out some way so that with each paper, there’s a discussion with approximately 4-6 people (including the author/authors).
The international nature of the workshop is one of the factors that leads me to believe that smaller is better for this type of online professional activity: we had to slow down on occasion for two reasons — minor connectivity glitches (very few, in fact), and the fact that English was the second, third, or fourth language for several participants. And because of the size of the group, there was no problem with slowing down a bit. And a smaller group meant that we only had to negotiate three time zones. I am not sure what we would have done with participants from Singapore, China, or New Zealand — again, probably divide the sessions so that someone would have some sessions during their regular day.
The long and short of this: it’s possible to arrange online workshops internationally, eliminating the expense of air travel and expanding options for collegial workshops.