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Online Guests
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.

The administrative side

A Guest is approached and the manager of the event negotiates topics for the discussions. Significant issues include the timeframe for the event, the availability of the guest to participate actively in that timeframe, and the expertise the guest is able to share. The task here includes identifying related web sites and other resources plus ascertaining the willingness and capacity to participate in a live episode via chat or equivalent medium.

The topics or problem and administrative procedures for the guest are refined. This might include placing the guest onto the list where discussions will take place, checking their technical capacity and times in the day they are available for live chats that the community can accommodate, given class schedules and the guest workload and working pattern.

 

The structure of the conversation is negotiated with the guest by articulating the pedagogical model and the resultant structure of a conversation.

 

The event participants (perhaps your class and those of peers) are prepared for the event. They need to know about the event, prepare technically for participation and understand the facilitator's expectations of their participation.

 

The event is announced online and sets of pre-event instructions issued. This enables the host to check that the technical logistics for the class and the guest are overcome.

 

The guest and topic are announced and clear instructions of how the conversations might proceed are provided. A separate biography of the guest might be sent.

Some final technical instructions about participation are provided in separate email. In particular, instructions of where to mail responses, what subject field to use and how to reply to the LIST and not only the sender are important.

The online guest is invited in private email to send their first posting.

It may be useful to also host a web page with details of the event, provide a biography of the guest, supply a picture and repeat all technical and event management information.

Towards the end of the event, the closure is announced to the list. The recording of the event might be gathered and the community pointed to the web page that summarised what happened or recorded it as it happened.

Structure of the event

The topic, problem or issue is announced and the guest introduced.

The guest sends their first posting interpreting the question or issue, sharing some simple experiences. The guest also invites first reactions and ideas from the audience. The purpose here is to gauge the capacity of the audience to participate in the event and to encourage people to contribute before the discussion becomes too complex. It could be considered a warm up.

The members of the list send their responses to the list and are invited to seek clarification of ideas of contributors or to extend discussion.

At a suitable point the guest responds to the discussions and answers questions.

The guest then challenges the group by adding a new phase to the debate and extending the audience to more in-depth and particular discussions. They might pose a question/problem or dilemma/scenario for the audience to react to. Participants might be referred to resources where they can participate from an informed and broader perspective than their own experiences.

 

The audience reacts to the second phase and poses more questions and debates the issues publicly.

The guest reacts to the discussion and answers questions, gives examples and extends discussion if necessary.

The guest makes a final comment or summation. A "critical friend" could also take on this role.

The event is closed and the guest thanked.

The discourse model
In order to encourage deep discussions and open-ended debates, it may be useful to develop stages for discussion. The model for social investigations might be a useful frame for organising discussion that progresses and becomes more complex.

A problem is posed or an issue raised.

The guest and manager of the event might negotiate the starting point for posing the problem participants might discuss or investigate.

Sharing initial reactions, knowledge and opinions

The guest shares opinions and experiences and asks the community to share theirs.

Investigating a new idea

A new hypothesis is posed and the audience is challenged to find out about it, look for examples, reflect on their own work and share back with the community, the results of their thinking.

Synthesis of reactions

The guest draws together the common issues and synthesises from the audience reactions and their own work, a potential solution or range of solutions or summaries new ideas.

Refining ideas drawing to a conclusion

The audience reacts to the guests summation/synthesis and posed alternative solutions, critiques the positive and negative elements of various ideas and opinions drawing on their experiences and new enlightened understanding of the topic.

Final conclusion process

The guest and the audience finalise their personal conclusions and share them with the audience.

Managing the event - more logistics
Online guest events are very difficult to manage if the intended audience does not participate. Causing dialogue to begin and be sustained is quite a challenge especially if you are remote from the participants and the guest. Online events require some work while the event is being hosted. Careful pre-preparation is not enough. There are three kinds of activity that can help events be successful.

Supporting your guest
Send a great deal of personal email to your guest encouraging them, checking out their technical issues, helping them out with difficult conversations, interpreting reactions with them and generally keeping your guest on track.

Call your guest by phone and talk with them about how they are coping with the conversations and the online guest model you have instigated.

Send email to the list reminding them of participation conventions and logistical issues.

Participate in the event yourself, as you might if you were in a classroom or face-to-face event.

Manage your class or group
If you are in a classroom situation, you can work with your class to ensure their contributions will encourage dialogue. You are modelling what other teachers might follow. Discuss your progress with other participating teachers as you work.

Encourage other participating teachers to work with their classes in a similar way and perhaps mail individuals you know are contributing to check on their progress.

Netiquette conventions
To support participation I offer classes the following netiquette conventions.

• Participate. Online guests have given uptime to be part of your community. Please participate in it actively, so they know you are benefiting from the event.
• Learn how to participate technically and conform with participation suggestions, especially about using the subject field.
• Be polite and courteous to all concerned in all email - watch the tone of your email and add in the human salutations and greeting.
• Critique the message, not the messenger" is a good motto in online debates.
• Check spelling and layout etc and adopt normal writing standards.
• Avoid Upper case text. Use blank lines between paragraphs.
• When replying to messages, edit out bits you are not replying to and only include enough that is necessary for the context of your message to be clearly understood.
• Write short digestible messages, rather than long ones where practical.
• Write clearly and support statements where practical, so you can defend your arguments and others can critique your rationales.
• Encourage others to respond to your work.

Recording the event
It may be useful to build a web site which acts as an organising device and a central place where folk with lost instructions can be reminded of procedures and purposes. Here also, list traffic can be archived, providing an instant record of the conversations. Some online guest facilitators illustrated in this article manually construct a record of the messages that pertain to the guest and edit out stray mail. (See the VECO examples). Others build two lists, one for all traffic and one for interesting messages from the guest event (See the QUT example). The web of the event including all organising information is an important record for other potential facilitators to view the operational side of the event and for the community to review the content.

Conclusion
Online guests can enhance your class activity or professional development activity. They are however complex events to manage and careful planning is necessary in order for the event to achieve its goals. Underneath the event has to be a pedagogical model for designing the task, from which a clear structure needs to emerge. It is then that planning how to manage the event becomes definable and the whole project achievable.

In Australia, there are some powerful models emerging and some useful applications being shared. I commend the following examples to readers to pursue. Moreover I encourage readers to use online communities and professional journals to share their ideas, models and applications.

Examples of online guests available for viewing