 Over to you guys. We're ready for you. Awesome, thanks everyone. Thank you everybody for attending our session. We are all four of us co directors of virtually connecting and we want to talk to you today about intentionally equitable hospitality. So we kind of have two big concepts that we'll be talking to you about. What is virtually connecting and what is intentionally equitable hospitality? First, we will introduce ourselves. So I'm Autumn Keynes and my Twitter handle is at Autumn. And I'll have everybody kind of just say hello. Hi, I'll jump in. Hi, for those who don't know me, I'm located currently located in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, just across the river from autumn and been involved with virtually connecting over the past several years and a pleasure to be here. Yeah, and I'm Mahabeli. It just takes a while to get the video going. I'm Mahabeli and I'm at the American University in Cairo in Egypt. And hello, everyone from Berlin and Germany. My name is Christian. I've been with virtually connecting for a couple of years now and been a co director, I think since October 2018. That's right. Awesome. I will advance to the next slide here. So meh and I took on this slide. We have a provocation for the session. So before we even get started, we want you to sort of think about how you might have experienced or not experienced intentionally equitable hospitality and reflect on how you could or you would practice intentionally equitable hospitality for your particular context. So we will be reflecting on what exactly we mean by that. Maybe I'll let me maybe put it out in a nutshell. I thought that was coming in another slide, but we just sort of break up each of the terms here. So we think about virtually connecting as a space where we invite people to join and to be part of a conference, even though they're not at the conference physically, they can join in remotely. And so we think of this as a space where we need to be hospitable to people coming into it. And the thing is if you just do hospitality as like a welcome without putting equity as the focus and being intentional about the equity, it's not going to happen unless you put in that effort and put in that thought. And I'm remembering the two presentations just before us are also about that. It's like being intentional about what the ethical issues are in the different dimensions and like being intentional of the accessibility needs in different dimensions. We're talking about this, but from the equity perspective. And so we'll talk a little bit about how that is practiced in virtually connecting per se, but we'd like everyone else to think about their own context and where would make sense to follow same mindset. And maybe you already do, but that's not what you call it and that's what we're calling it because we didn't think that there was enough in the, I think e-learning literature to do that. That's awesome. Yes. And I will say that we've avoided putting like a strong like one kind of definition on intentionally equitable hospitality. Really, what's happening is we're a community of learners. We're a community of educators who are working together and we've kind of noticed that we have this approach to hospitality. So we're discovering this as well more so than kind of creating some type of definition and putting it out there. So we invite you to discover it along with us. I'm trying to advance the slide. Oh, there we go. Okay. Just a little bit of a lag. Oh, and then it double clicked because okay. Sorry. I'm having a little bit of trouble with the controls here. All right. So I know a lot of people who are here today. Know what virtually connecting is, but the main idea is connecting folks who can't be a conference as if they're at the conference and instead of letting them just watch presentations. It's more about the informal hallway conversations that you miss out on when you don't go to a conference. And just noticing some of the comments in the chat about the, you know, you think hospitality industry not necessarily in terms of something that is so grassroots and so I think in terms of the hospitality, I show to guests who come to my home, for example, and the roles and responsibilities that that entails hospitality in terms of inviting students into an open online course as another example. So bringing those contexts into hospitality in open spaces and hallway conversations in conferences and how do you gather people in and ensure that everybody has a voice. So this graphic came out of some work that we did part of the Mozilla Open Leaders work with Nate and Wendy, Rebecca and I and we just reached out to the community and asked them what does it mean? What does virtually connecting mean to you? And these are the kinds of terminology, the words that came out. This graphic is done in a little app called AnswerGarden, which I use frequently with the students in my courses. It doesn't collect data. It doesn't require an account students can engage and provide quick feedback on a concept and what they're thinking. So I enjoy using this particular tool. So virtually connecting can be different things to different people. So we are connecting people who are usually on-site, excuse me, at conferences and so the value that we bring to them is that we're bringing a diverse perspectives to them. I don't know if folks have experiences before, but sometimes when I'm at a conference, I just feel like it's become an echo chamber of the people who are there. And so bringing in diverse perspectives of people who are not able to make it to the conference can be very enlightening and it broadens that collective conversation that's happening at the conference. And of course for virtual participants, that's our main focus is giving people access where there was none before allowing them to bring their voices to these spaces. Virtually connecting does this technique of trying to capture the images of events and spaces and places. There is a Flickr account where a lot of people post their images and it just reminds us that it's not about the technology, but the technology is the means and the mechanism to engage in the conversations. And I like Shawn Michael Morris' term I use frequently. It's we're having conversations through the screen, not to the screen. Yeah, I love that. So next we want to talk a little bit about what we mean by intentionally equitable hospitality. And again, I will I'll just remind you this isn't something that we have a hard definition for it. It's more like something that we have discovered is happening. And I guess I won't claim that it happens every time or that it happens perfectly all the time, but it's something that all of us are striving for and continually growing through. Um, so again, this graphic is one that that I created early in my time with virtually connecting and try to capture a sense of we often talk about this radical hospitality, a cultural radical hospitality and we veered away from the terminology with with radical because of the negative connotations that are are held globally when you talk about things that are radical and really rethinking what what exactly is hospitality. And again, hospitality can sometimes take on paternal holistic or a colonial type of terminology or thinking. So rethinking exactly what it is we're doing actively doing what are the moves and actions of being hospitable. So one of the things about it is this intentionally actual hospitality is the way you invite new members in the way we help them the way they become active once they join ways of recognizing and encouraging the different what modes and levels of participation and considering all the time who's excluded who's included when you make certain decisions and going beyond just claiming to be open to all but actually intentionally recognizing who can be disadvantaged in a certain space and how to center them in that space with they're not marginal in it. Um, so you need to question your own values and we are constantly questioning our own values. If you've ever read any of the papers we've written about virtually connecting, you'll see that while we say, oh, this is the great stuff we hope to do. We always say, and this is how we keep falling short. And this kind of meaning evolves with time as we learn as new people join the group. So if you think about those personas that were being shared in the presentation just before us, there might be personas that we had not seen before that we had not been considering. And as soon as we see them, we modify our practice to make sure that we're we're addressing that by involving that person in deciding how we should do that. And then that shifts the power structures, I believe. And I think one of the ways that we consciously intentionally do this is by inviting voices and individuals who may not feel like they have a voice in a specific place. For example, inviting students consistently into the into the sessions and making space for people who are reluctant voices. They don't want to talk on screen, but still allowing them to participate in ways that they're comfortable. I think that's all absolutely right. There's lots of different ways that people can participate in virtually connecting. We do live stream all of our conversations. So it's true that there could be people out there who are just consuming that content. But it's that active intentional welcoming of asking people to come in and let us know about their their their experience so that we can be more intentional about the hospitality that we're offering that's at the key kind of at the center of all of this. And sometimes that happens even before the sessions begin. It's it's the virtual buddy who brings people into the space and make sure that everybody's comfortable in that that space and and get to feel for what kind of engagement they want to have in that conversation. If they just want to listen, then they won't necessarily be called on. But if they do want to have a chance to talk, making sure that everybody gets gets an equitable share of the time in the conversation. And so part of this for me this quote that's up right now is from a piece that I wrote called the Praxis of Virtually Connecting is also about recognizing where we have privileges that can also be multifaceted. And so realizing that it's not enough for those of us with privilege to just show up that we have to use our privilege to create spaces for those with lesser lesser heard voices. And maybe that means listening and empathizing before speaking. Sometimes it means providing someone else with a means to have their voice heard. And so I guess in my head when that means is like somebody who can't make it to a conference, giving them a means, giving them a space, creating that space and inviting them in and making them feel welcome. Christian, do you want to, I think the connection is not so great. Can you do this life? Okay, I'll give it a shot. So to put this in more, let's say for lack of a better word, practical terms, how does this actually work? So how do we make space? How do we try and practice intentionally equitable hospitality? So and one of the things is that lots of people who are not as familiar as many others with virtually connecting what they often don't see and what they're sometimes even not supposed to see is what we do in terms of pre-conference planning, for example. So we deliberately try and decide to which gone for conferences we go to, who we want to speak to on-site, but also who do we want to invite to join a session virtually? And this relates to the kind of planning that we do in terms of, for example, time zone. So if we want people from a certain time zone to be able to participate, when would a session actually have to take place in order for them to be able to participate for them to be able to make their voices heard? And also, and there's been plenty of that going on in the chat about imposter syndrome and all kinds of personal kind of mixed feelings about speaking up on the internet, being recorded and live streamed. Some people, if we just opened our doors, if we just opened our chats to our conversations to anyone and just opened our doors, I guess many people here would have an experience and a feeling of who would come and join us. So these might not be the people who we would feel that need amplifying, that need make additional made space or that we would need to empathize with. So who do we invite? How do we address that in different time zones? What sometimes that just needs a personal direct message or an email instead of an openly visible tweet. So how do we invite people? How do we promote these events for people not only to take part in these conversations but also maybe just to check out the live stream or the recording afterwards? And also during a session, I mean, and we've seen the OER people here from Alts do a great job at that making sure that everybody is from a technical standpoint that everybody can be heard, that everybody has a voice to speak up or working mic or working webcam, that the data connection and the Wi-Fi, the Internet connection actually works out in a way that is sufficient for them to take part and to help troubleshoot to help make, to help them claim space to some extent. Invite people, give them a proper briefing in advance, tell them to download apps if they need to or to install a certain plug-in in the browser of things that everything that makes participation for participants and guests in our virtual crowds and among virtual entities as easy and as seamless as possible. So that's basically what these three phases are. And if we're doing a good job, if our community is doing a great job, some of this, you won't even be able to tell if you're just taking part in a session. So just to sort of demonstrate some of the things, one of the things we realized early on is that when we post on our blog post that, hey, we're going to be at this conference with these particular guests, people who don't know us very well might retweet or like the tweet, but not necessarily say, I want to join. So what we do is if we notice that someone has noticed the tweet altogether, we'll say, hey, I saw it. Well, okay, this time I said you, but sometimes I say hey or hi or whatever. I noticed that you tweeted it. Are you interested in joining us? And then that's the way people get to know us. And then sometimes we start DMing and explaining what this is to people who might not necessarily know what it is and might assume it's sort of like a webinar that you watch rather than something you can be part of. And so going that extra step is one of those steps in hospitality for us. Autumn, do you want to do this one? Yeah, and I'll just piggyback up on what Mejha said there. The way that we had that realization was actually in the very beginning when we were first forming and virtually connecting. We were still trying to figure all of this out. And it was really, I saw that she was doing that and I was trying to mimic it. And so I came up with a new term, what would Mejha do? So that was kind of our first realization of that. On this slide, we wanted to address the part about the planet a little bit. So last year as we are 19, we got a shout out from Kate Wolz. She was talking about the fly less movement and this movement to try to get people to fly less to help with emissions, to keep down the emissions on the planet, to recognize that people fly so much for these conferences and are there other ways of doing conferences? So it's ironic to be in this situation now with COVID-19 and we are seeing that emissions are falling. There's lots of reports out there about emissions falling because people are flying less and we are reimagining conferences and reimagining conference spaces. It's important, I think, to point out that it's likely that that's not going to last. At least that's the reports that I'm seeing from scientists. So there is something to be said, I think, for virtually connecting in terms of thinking about conferences and thinking about ways to bring people in. It can also be a problematic phrase though. We do a problematic frame. We do worry about this stigmatizing. Those who are furthest from conferences who are a lot of times folks who don't live where I live, right? People who live where I live in the United States, going to a conference inside of the United States is a lot easier, a lot cheaper and so there's more access there and so we worry that this could set some unrealistic expectations. But this is a new line of thinking for us and we're still trying to think about how this might fit into our frame and how intentionally equitable hospitality might enable less flying. I don't think we'll have time for this one because I think we're just one minute over time already. We just wanted to give people a chance to think about how you could apply intentionally equitable hospitality beyond virtually connecting and so one of the things that happened to me in my context recently is that when we moved to Pivot Online we told people do more asynchronous text-based stuff to overload students' internet connections and each of the internet is always so great but because of the social isolation the students wanted the synchronous video chats because they wanted to see people. So even though in the more generic good practice of e-learning it was don't do that now the students really want that so we pivoted into do it when you can when your students can because they want that they are socially isolated. So that's one example of a shift there. And with us running over maybe we should just invite folks to think about this in terms of your own context and reach out to us of virtually connecting and let us know if you know we can help you in any way but also we'd love to hear if you've thought about this then maybe apply it in your own context somewhere. Oh thank you. Thanks ever so much. That was such a brilliant session of all three of our sessions today. Our presenters have been awesome. I'm very pleased to say we were brave with the chat and the power of the hug just got us through it. It was really really great. Thanks ever so much. I know Marin's just headed off because she's doing the introduction. So I should just stop the recording and then we can all head over to our last session. So thanks everyone. I don't know if you like me but I'm a little bit tired now but still okay for the next bit and been such a pleasure to be part of this today. So thanks ever so much. Oh I'm well done for getting up in the middle of the night. Well done Victoria. I know Kathy will sympathize with you there. So yeah really really great badges all around for all the people that have got up at Cilio Clock. So take care everyone and see you shortly. Bye now.