Reposting from my Facebook pageI attended a Zoom conference for the first time last weekend, which I enjoyed a ton. (It's not an IS conference.) Overall, it went much better than I expected, and I learned a lot. Here are a few takeaways.
Q&AsThe conference organizers asked audiences to use chat functions to ask questions during talks, without interrupting speakers. So, they were broadcasting their questions by chatting to "Everyone."
It was not a good idea. Zoom constantly sent out chat notifications to everyone, which were very distracting to both presenters and audiences.
At one talk, around the 4th slide, one person asked "What is really new? What are we learning?," which threw the speaker off the rock, and he/she struggled for the rest of the talk. This wouldn't be happening in a face-to-face session, unless the questioner has a very thick skin.
Perhaps a better approach is to have audiences send questions
privately to a session chair, and the chair asks those questions to the speaker at the end of the talk.
SlidesIf you're preparing for a virtual talk,
reduce texts in your slides as much as possible. This is usually a good idea for in-person talks as well, but it is even more so for Zoom talks. It is hard for anyone to concentrate on screens, which makes it difficult to read seven or eight lines of texts.
Social EventsAn integral part of any academic conference is social events, and as you can imagine, Zoom is not ideal for this function. But it was surprisingly okay, and I would say it is still better than not meeting at all.
In this conference, there were two types of events.
Lunch tables, in which each of a few well-known program committee members created private Zoom rooms and we could go around wherever we want. In
evening happy hours, the organizers created random breakout rooms with 4-5 people each, where we could meet any random people and get to talk with each other. Each breakout room lasted for 10 minutes, after which the organizers cleared the rooms and created new random rooms again.
Like I said, this was not an IS conference, and so I was a newcomer who didn't know anyone. So, these Zoom sessions worked out quite well for me. In face-to-face conferences, people tend to gather around and talk with others who know well with each other, which makes it difficult for newcomers or introverts to mingle. In Zoom happy hours with random breakout rooms, everyone had a chance to talk with any random people. It was like a speed dating.
A caveat was that things could go awkward when people don't know what to talk about. Oftentimes there was a silence for a few seconds. So a good idea for organizers would be to create some structure in breakout rooms. It could start with each introducing themselves, and it would be great to have a topic to talk about. It could be about teaching or specific research topics, like "how is your teaching going?," "what's going to happen in fall?," or "how can we do research about COVID-19?." Another possibility is to create mentoring sessions between faculty and students or between senior and junior faculty (like doctoral consortiums but in a speed dating format).
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Min-Seok Pang
Associate Professor of MIS
Fox School of Business, Temple University
Associate Editor, MIS Quarterly and JAIS
minspang@temple.edu------------------------------