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Michelle Williams
RITE Group, QUT
Reproduced with permission from the Editors of Quick, the Journal of QSITE.

Introduction
As schools Internet connectivity improves and you want to do more than look up the "CD in the sky", the idea of bringing a guest into your classroom through these technologies might appeal. There are a number of curriculum rationales for bringing people into classrooms. Encouraging children to be inquisitive, providing them with an audience for their questions and ideas, and using the guest as a source of primary data and a complementary source to other 'published' stories of the world, are all sufficient rationales for broadening student's access to the stories that are rarely recorded in other media. For many, adding real context through people, is a powerful rationale which complements the enthusiasm for learning students have, when people and technologies bring a new dimension to the classroom.

Some curriculum projects hosted through oz-TeacherNet and elsewhere orient their activities around the inclusion of an online guest or visitor. The Students and Industry Links project (SAIL) connect students to people they are learning about to build career profiles, find out about workplace practices and investigate industries and people's lives. Recently traditional projects like BookRap, which involve children from a number of schools participating in exchanges about a book, include online authors, illustrators and subject matter experts. Events in Project Atmosphere Australia involve students interacting online with experts. Many projects and simple online events teachers construct, include online guests.

Not only are online guests an important part of learning experiences for children, they also can support professional development of teachers involved in online professional communities. Most of these communities are hosted on email lists where a number of teachers from various parts of the country converse about common issues. Online guests in such teacher communities are becoming common place and some excellent examples exist (See the VECO project and Connected Leaders project). Like many innovations in the new kinds of connected teacher communities, the online guest model described here results from the collaboration and sharing from peers who have willingly helped me think through a model to use online guests in my classes and professional communities. Thanks to Sarah Prestridge and Janine Bowes for their inspiration and advice.

Although rationales for including people in your classrooms and professional spaces are strong, the difficult logistics of managing an online guest may prevent you from trying the idea. This article seeks to describe a checklist of activities that will not only help the event run more smoothly, but help the online guest event reach a deeper educational or professional potential.

What is an online guest about and how does it happen?
Bringing other folk into a community of learners and professionals will stimulate discussion amongst community members and provide some new ideas and information upon which to learn new things. By enabling remote 'expert' professionals to join in, the community has a chance to access ideas from peers, no matter where they are. The online guest usually participates in discussion hosted by an email list. The discussions will inform participants, encourage debate and start new questions. Sometimes the online guest will also participate in a live chat or perhaps send papers and background materials to the community for discussion. The online guest may make use of their web sites to provide background, point people to resources and record debates.

To participate in an online event with a class, a number of classes or professional community, the event manager might build an email list and all participants will need to be members of the list. People then participate in the discussions with the guest by sending and receiving mail in the list. To enhance communications, participants are often given specific instructions. For example, there may be advice about using specific words in the Subject fields of email, so that guest mail can be distinguished from ordinary list traffic. Logistical tricks like this often help the event run smoothly.

A teacher or facilitator usually initiates an online guest event by choosing a topic or problem, asking a guest to come online, perhaps training the guest and other participants, and organising the logics of the event for the guest and members of the online community. Sometimes a web site is built to complement the guest activity and record the guest event for use as a resource by the members of the learning or professional community. It is these records that now help us build improved and varied models for using online guests in classrooms. (See the list of examples at the end of this article.).

The model and an example
In this model the logistical checklists are contextualised through the purpose and structure of the online event. Importantly, the model provides a discourse or pedagogical basis that helps define the rationale for the educational event, and results in a structural model which helps the conversation develop beyond the "I tell you mine, you tell me yours" approach. From there the logistical issues form the jobs list to make the event occur smoothly.

Thus there are three parts to this model for an online guest.

1. A pedagogical model that helps the nature of the conversations and what is discussed, have greater depth.
2. A discourse model that helps shape the conversation and helps the event progress.
3. A logistical model that helps the event occur more easily.

This model is an organising structure for teachers and professional trainers to define and organise their online guest event. It is likely that readers will replace single ideas with alternative strategies or perhaps slip an entirely different approach under any part. The challenge for readers is to try alternative approaches and then share these ideas with colleagues who are also experimenting with approaches to using online people in classes and workshops.

In this example, the online guest event has a problem solving or social investigations process as the pedagogical approach. This provides a clear discourse model as a structure to organise the event and helps describe the logistical jobs list which will help the event occur. Although the model has three distinct structures underneath the process, it is described here as a process in almost a linear way. The chronological description may help readers see the interwoven nature of the parts to make an event that the participants see chronologically.