HIFLO 21: Creating Online Community
On June 23, 2021 I attended HIFLO 21, a follow-up to last year’s session on “Creating Honors Online Community.” We are actually building quite the online community ourselves through these sessions, especially as it followed the World of Talent conference so closely. In addition to the presenters, I was delighted to see a few of my fellow HIFI-ers from 2019, and Maria Tarasova. Sadly, I wasn’t able to send her a quick message about her World of Talent presentation, but I made a note to follow up later. I also “met” another music person, and Scott O’Leary, who is at NC State (just down the road).
Although the session was too short for what we were attempting, it was a great opportunity to share ideas about building community, and while the specific focus was for online teaching, there were many interesting ideas that would work well either way. By far, the one that impressed me the most was the Utrecht University Travel Guide. This was, first of all, a Place-as-Text program, which I love, but one of the students involved commented that it was a great way to build a sense of teamwork and belonging within the teams that made the tours. As I look ahead to expanding my eight-week summer version of MUS 1600 to a fifteen-week, in-person iteration, this might be a more efficient way to get my Place-as-Text work done. Groups of students, say, could find and arrange transportation to a local music venue, etc.
Some of the other participants had use off-the-shelf products like Living Room Conversation and Flipgrid, which look interesting. I generally push back against “more tech,” but these have promise. A low-tech equivalent was simply assigning students to “make a meaningful connection” with someone, and then reflect on the experience. I would have found this excruciating, I think, had I been assigned it, but the concept is strong. In my situation, it would probably work better to begin with a discussion from Rushkoff’s Team Human, and then work to build meaningful connections within the class… which I suppose would probably happen anyway under the Class Culture model, but not as intentionally (maybe for Class Culture 2.0?). The easiest way to create connection is through shared experience, after all. For that matter, the more traumatic the experience the better, to a degree (I’m thinking of camping in the rain with the other Cub Scout dads). I can see this working in combination with the “Live Music Venue-as-Text” thing.
Some final thoughts I took away were being vulnerable and making sure not to overwhelm students, especially in online contexts. The latter is a struggle for me: some of my students like to see the whole week spread out at once so that they can plan their schedules, but for others this is too much. I wonder whether there’s a way I could create different views like a calendar program? As far as the former, I expect I bring too much of my private life into the class as it is. Particularly when I was having anxiety attacks in Fall of 19: I had a sense that I was talking too much and it even showed up in my course evaluations.
Even though the session was too short, it was great to see everyone again. Beata reminded everyone of the Slack channel for the group, and it would be useful if we could leverage that to make an international community of practice. I’ll try to do my part, anyway.