 Okay, I think I'm supposed to start now. So, if it's working, to help you make sense of the syllogery that follows. Front stage, the rehearsal stage, camera on, you should be able to see me. And backstage, which you'll also hear, there'll be camera off. All right, at last we finally agreed the title of our draft paper, The Online Lonely Lecturer. How apt. Right, time for me to do one more rehearsal of this conference presentation. Hopefully, getting the role of the research scholar now, that is, try and sound like I know what I'm talking about. And I must remember what we're trying to do here is outline our reflections on a year where all teaching sessions were rapidly transferred to an online platform due to the world enduring a pandemic. The more we dwelt, the more we recognise that the substance of our work is actually performance or lack of it. So it all felt rather like being on a static stage that is full of static in both that word's meanings, electronic and stagnant. Do you see that no one's here yet? Gives me another chance to rehearse and learn the lines. Try to work out the new tech and make sure the props work. Now, I'm definitely going to start with this well-known quote. All the world's a stage. All the men and women merely play us. Their exits and their entries and one man in brackets or woman in his in brackets or her time plays many parts. And then I'll start my introductions with something like this. We're drawing on the dramaturgical approach towards social interactions using theories such as Goffman and we're applying this in the context of online teaching. So our paper seeks to contribute to and enhance both our understanding of academic identity and the metaphor of teacher as performer through descriptive positioning of the online academic as a lonely lecturer. Whilst literature has widely established this metaphor of teacher as performer, it has typically been employed in a face-to-face delivery setting. So the need for exploring performative differences for online delivery as well as the implications of technology on such remain underdeveloped. The recent Times Higher Education report about online learning published this year characterizes the informal interactions that take place in physical classrooms as and I quote mundane seemingly insignificant contributing to a narrative that minimizes the value of social co-creation of teaching performance. We disagree. Instead, we concur with scholars such as Richardson and Ulso in 2020 who suggest firstly that the joy of teaching is redefined online. Secondly, that the interpersonal connections are often substituted with a rather mechanistic checking in of student progress. And thirdly, that the building of a rapport is consistently identified as challenging. Okay, hopefully that kind of feels like it sets the scene. Hopefully a reasonable introduction. I suppose what we're really doing is posing this question to be an academic as performer online or not to be. And we're making a case that this is a pertinent question to pose especially in our world of student customer satisfaction, ratings, league tables and the perpetual review of, well, our performance. Anyway, let's hope it's a good audience today or whenever they see it. Good audience? It's not really what I mean or should mean is it? Especially since one of our key points is how they audiences need to play a vital role and active participants in the quest for knowledge, understanding, another perspective, wisdom even there we say. Anyway, let's at least hope the audience can appreciate this is not a talk aimed at damning technology despite what's just happened nor damning our students thrown into this unfamiliar space as they were. Rather, it's a reflective piece based on our experiences of the last 18 months of being well unsure of feeling some absence of sensing important things have been lost in translation. Right, I'll put this quote in at this point I think from Hamlet. It's above all to thine own self be true. And I'll move on to some of the key issues from the literature and that will be right get ready for this that will be something like this. Goffman's approach to understanding social interactions, including informal work settings helps us to understand the academic as primarily a performance role. Both Goffman and Elias their work introduces the idea of cultures becoming ever more highly sensitized to the existence and needs of fellow individuals. Hence the performing of a role is as much for others as it is for ourselves. It's about connecting. And in the contemporary literature and academia we see a growing concern with notions of what it means to be an academic, i.e. identity. Nixon and Scullion discuss the impact of marketization. Welsh investigates audit culture and academic priorities within it. Hall looks at the alienation of what they call service labor in academia. And Clark and Knight ponder the ethical dilemmas of having split loyalties, dual roles that sometimes conflict. Hence it's very pertinent to employ a Goffman-like lens on the academic as a consciously social actor demonstrating their own self-management in order to generate suitable and appropriate workplace demeanours. And in contemporary universities we believe this is manifest in things like treating students as customers, showing that we care, the showing perhaps sometimes being more important than the caring, and being willing to use appropriate front and backstage scripts. Indeed Smith's work in 2012 reveals how academics own account of their work demonstrated how readily the notion of adopting roles was used by them to make sense of their own experiences. This generated two core typologies. One of these aptly labelled Shakespeare's Fools to draw parallels with the character in King Lear, who through purposive acting sought to challenge settled truths, our role. Brooke's seminal notion of the empty space also helps us to develop a more robust theorization of performative pedagogy. Here the idea of empty spaces is used to denote a sphere of possibility, where emptiness refers to how the various actors make it real and it is for all to play their role turning the empty into something. The theatre of teaching is one such space and Chisner illustrates how transformation can occur in such spaces, in the stories told, in the performers and in the audiences. And he argues that change can be either temporary, entertainment or permanent, becoming our new ritual. Other parallels between teaching and acting refer to deploying professional communications to enhance the message, language symbolism, parallel language, pace, tempo, timing of speech. Indeed as Gray in 2010 reminds us that the expectations of the students themselves, steeped as they now are within popular culture, leads to pressure on academics to better engage students, thus the rise of a new genre of teaching, widely referred to in the literature as edutainment. And in this context, the literature points out how humour is an ideal vehicle. So humour is an ideal vehicle. So maybe, just maybe, I know Akesh doesn't agree but perhaps I should add a joke in here, well not a joke, more like a humorous anecdote. I guess then again, given that I'm arguing that performance tropes don't translate well to online, it's probably a bad idea. So no humour, it's a shame really because I've got this great story when one of my students was changing their babies nappy in a seminar but anyway, no humour. Anyway, I plan to finish the literature with a brief overview of the following paragraph. Teaching as an oratory accomplishment is also well established. Morgan Fleming notes how communities, including learning communities, enact the rules and norms that constitute acceptable performance. This limits but also enables what can in any given situation be said, gone, shared, understood. And to be successful here requires linguistic community, where the everyday know-how of face-to-face communication feats are mutual and widely shared. Transferring this to the new environments of online is complex and problematic. So scholars such as Simon argue that traditional models of enacting our teaching identity and our professional fulfilment are limited in online settings, causing academic self-doubt. Am I actually teaching in such a setting? Or what? Others note how rules for showing feelings are reconfigured and oversimplified. Smiley face, smiley face. And that encounters online become practically focused and pragmatically selective, in part to compensate for what they cannot achieve. Hence from this literature an understanding of academia drips with analogies of performance. And all of this means an extension of Gotham and the original work is useful to appreciate more fully what online does for both academic identity and for performance. Okay. Cue camera off. I've done that bit. So that seems like he has a good place for this quote from Richard II. Speak only comfortable words. So hopefully that captures the essence of the literature before it gets too bogged down. Very briefly on the methodology now, although time is going to beat me. So methodology. The paper employs duo ethnography as the method. The two authors collaborated in the creation and delivery of modules that were modified from face-to-face to online delivery due to the pandemic. We later interviewed each other about our experiences. Then analyze these reflective dialogues, discussing changes to delivery, challenges faced and our immersion in the whole process. Thus far, early days, it's highlighted both significant experiential and identity differences between us, but also shared values and meanings. And this is appropriate for a rigorous duo ethnography. The student co-op we reflected on might be characterized as those with chronic student engagement issues. In online classes, most would not turn on their cameras. They stayed mute most of the time. And also, they didn't participate very much in the so-called chat facility when asked and encouraged to do so. So I imagine by now the conference delegates that are listening in will probably think that we're blaming other people or simply revealing our own inadequacies of technology here. As for the advocates of tech, well, I'm fairly confident they'll have switched off by now. Anyway, what can we do? It's just a perspective. Right. What do I don't want to do now? I want to plan to go on to some very early findings and that will then be a time to wrap up after that. So here we go, early findings. Using theatrical analogy, we might say that our shiny new online stage, the opportunities for IMPRO were very limited as the lecturers, performer could not easily listen to what most of the other actors were saying. Audience feedback and the ability to respond accordingly was relatively numbed. Being immersed in and influenced by the sense of being a crowd was dulled. Familiar props went missing. Nuance and depth of language as a relational tool was somewhat flattened and blunted. The backstage was suddenly turned into the front stage. Often, the other performers, students, read their scripts at their own different pace and move the order of the pages around. So the lecturer as performer also felt the need to fill the many silences on the stage when others did not engage in the kind of spontaneous dialogue expected. Beyond acting on stage then, the lecturer as performer had to manage the sound effects, the lights, the curtains. They had to regularly imagine the audience and wonder what's their reaction to my performance. They sometimes even wondered if the audience was still in the theatre. Though through positioning the online lecturer as a lonely performer with the descriptive insights outlined above, we suggest that the boundaries between synchronous and asynchronous mediation are problematic, blurred and still confusing in virtual communication settings. While transferring some of the equivalent functions of teaching online may well be straightforward, our argument is that the communicative and relational aspects of successful co-learning is not easily transferred at all. So that's the early finding. I think I'm going to add another quoting from Macbeth here. Confusion now has made his masterpiece. So how should we conclude? Well time is short, so what I would want to do is ask the audience about their own experiences and because time is short, the implications, the early ones that we've had, I'll have to skip. Maybe instead we'll add another Shakespearean quote in here. This one also from Macbeth captures the state of flux. So this has been a tale doled by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing or perhaps ironically given our position, we do want our audience though to offer us their thoughts because let's be honest, we wanted to help us develop a journal paper out of this. Yet despite that I'm still keen to finish with this very adapted Shakespearean quote. This one from The Merchant of Venice. Shining technology lies before us, but all that glitters is not gold. I'm really not sure whether playing with the form we're critiquing here works. I might say to Akash it needs a rewrite or at least a lot more practice. Oh yes, note to self remember to thank Akash, to thank our MBA students and to thank a guy called Wilp. That's it, please say it worked.