13936 Occupational Therapy

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Presenting at an on-line conference: a virtual performance Dr Jackie Taylor No matter how much we think we have a wide range of experience and skills, there is always something new waiting just around the corner, to challenge us and make us face a steep learning curve. As a lecturer, researcher and non-practicing occupational therapist, my skills as a communicator, educator and performer have grown in this way, over time. I have found myself responsible for delivering therapy or ideas to individuals, to small groups and large groups, in venues including therapy rooms, people’s homes, offices, classrooms and conference halls. In October 2010, however, I met another new challenge, which required different skills, speaking to a different kind of audience in a different kind of venue; I presented at an on-line conference, in a virtual classroom, to an international audience who were all attending from their own homes or workplaces. The aim of this short article is to recount my experience and in so doing I hope to: • share with you the excitement and anxieties associated with the learning curve • reflect on how the content of my presentation helped me to understand some things about engaging with an audience in a virtual world • convince you (unless you already know) that there is a whole virtual world of opportunity out there to grasp Although I have written the article in the first-person as my personal experience, I anticipate that it will be of interest to anyone who has ever learned something in the past and who intends to do so in the future.

Some background I am not a complete novice at teaching ‘across the airwaves’. I teach undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Salford, where we are becoming increasingly engaged with the use of on-line and ‘Web 2.0’ technologies to help us to teach students in different ways. This is all exciting enough, but two of my colleagues, Angela Hook and Sarah Bodell, who are unafraid of all cyber and techno-things, have developed a Masters degree in Advanced Occupational Therapy which is taught completely on-line. This means that as a lecturer, I have had to learn that teaching can be done via discussion forums, emails, virtual classrooms and Skype (to name but some of the tools). I have to admit that, sometimes, I have been dragged kicking and screaming into what I regard as a 22nd century world. I did so like blackboards and chalk and I have recently been reminiscing about Gestetner duplicator machines (you may not remember those!) Nonetheless, I now teach a module that is completely paper-free and I never meet the students, except via electronic means, unless our paths

cross in some other way. I have digressed slightly, but do so for a reason. Engagement with virtual, on-line worlds is a little daunting, but it is do-able and increasingly necessary and desirable. In the old days you, the reader, could have remained in the dark about what a Gestetner machine is, but now you can Google the answer immediately. If I want to send information to a colleague, I can send a web-link. If I want to raise a discussion amongst an international group of occupational therapists, I can use Facebook.

So, back to the point . . . My colleagues, Angela and Sarah, working with a small group of international occupational therapists (called OT4OT: Online Technology for Occupational Therapy http://ot4ot.weebly.com/index.html) planned an on-line international conference for World Occupational Therapy Day in October 2010. They called it a 24 hour Virtual Exchange. Running over 24 hours, with 24 different presentations, it enabled occupational therapists from countries across the globe to participate as presenters or audience. This meant that, by sitting up in bed with a laptop and a cup of cocoa, or rising with the dawn chorus, one could hear the president of WFOT discussing the future of the profession, or occupational therapists from New Zealand talking about their practice with Maori people. OT4OT achieved what they set out to do. All credit to the hard work and imagination that made it happen, but they presented me with a new challenge when they asked me to be one of the presenters speaking from Britain.

Getting ready to perform I wanted to present some of the findings from my doctoral research, which was about how people construct their identities when they tell narratives about their occupations (Taylor 2008). I did not anticipate that what I was presenting would help me to reflect on the presentation process itself. Isn’t it often the case that the different strands of our lives, our roles and occupations, interweave, influence and inform each other? The presentation that I planned was based on a Powerpoint slide-show, with little interaction with the audience planned (apart from time for questions at the end). This was a traditional format which allowed me to include a lot, although I risked overwhelming the audience with too much theory and too many of my research findings. It was a risk I was prepared to take. Although I had previously presented my doctoral work to occupational therapists nationally, and a mixed health care audience internationally, I was now in the fortunate position of being able to present my ideas to occupational

Volume 16 Issue 1 March 2011

Mental health occupational therapy

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therapists from across the world. One would usually only get the chance to do this through publication in an international journal, or by speaking at a WFOT conference. I wondered if my ‘virtual’ audience would be made up of those who would not normally be able to go to the WFOT conferences. I was very excited at having the opportunity to speak to an international audience from the safety of my own office. I could have done it from my own living room, but I felt that I needed the reliability of the university’s internet connection, and, perhaps, the comfort of having colleagues up the corridor to worry with. I am a professional worrier. Here is a list of some of my ‘what if’ worries while preparing to present at the 24 hour Virtual Exchange: What if: • my computer breaks down? • someone walks into my office (ignoring the very large ‘do not disturb’ sign) while I am presenting? • I can’t connect to the virtual classroom? • I have got the time wrong, misunderstanding the time zones? • I have forgotten how to press the right buttons in the virtual classroom (which I have used on several occasions before)? • no-one can hear me? • the microphone makes me sound like Mickey Mouse? • no-one turns up to hear me speak!? • someone enters the classroom who knows more than me about my subject? Of course all this is normal. As a lecturer I have to have these worry lists. They are a way of making sure that I have covered all bases in my preparation. I strive to be totally in control of all these factors, so that the audience and I can relax and enjoy the exchange we are about to have. I got to work on time, I entered the virtual classroom early to set up, I was well supported by Angela and a marvellous technical support person and everything worked perfectly.

The context for performance During a ‘normal’ presentation in a ‘real’ setting, a fly on the wall might see a room with a solitary person at one end, pressing some buttons, facing a large number of people who are seated in rows. The same fly on the wall would have seen something different in my virtual conference presentation. S/he would have seen me sitting alone in my office at work, with a headset, comprising of an earpiece and microphone. My computer screen showed various boxes and buttons. Most of the screen in the virtual classroom is taken up by a white-board, where slides can be shown, but there are two other important boxes. In the top left-hand corner I could see the names (usually just fore-names) of anyone who has entered the

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room. Each participant has control over various symbols so that they can put their virtual hand up, applaud, agree, and smile or, more worryingly, disagree or look puzzled. All of this is silent, unless the administrator of the classroom allows people to pick up a microphone and speak. On the left of the whiteboard is what I call a ‘chatbox’. In here people can type messages to me or to each other. So, in the virtual classroom, my attention is divided between several things: my slides and giving a coherent presentation with them, members of the audience, who are listed and tucked up in a box, and any comments that are being written in the chat-box. This takes some getting used to. Just before my presentation was due to begin, people started to appear. Angela, the room’s administrator, welcomed them in. As they arrived, I asked them to type in the chat-box which part of the world they were attending from. Slowly, as more and more people arrived, and as Angela talked them through the ways in which they could engage with the classroom and me, I saw a long list of diverse and unexpected geographical locations being typed. The USA, Malaysia, Lancashire UK, Norway, Netherlands, Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Germany, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, the Seychelles and more were all represented in the audience for my presentation! I was delighted. I also began to see that people were occupational therapy practitioners, academics, students and managers. I recognised some names, and some I didn’t. It would have been interesting had we been able to spend time finding out what time of day it was for each person, and where they were actually sitting with their computer (living rooms, offices, classrooms, libraries, bedrooms, gardens?). I was looking out of my window at the industrial Salford skyline. What was the occupational therapist in the Seychelles looking out at?

The virtual performance I am a little thankful that, when I have given presentations in ‘real’ life, I cannot replay my performance and subject it to critical scrutiny. In this case, however, I can do just that, because all of the presentations from the 24 hour Virtual Exchange were recorded and can be accessed on-line until April 2011. So I have revisited myself telling some of the things I know about identity and occupation to an invisible international audience. I have listened to my hesitations, inane laughs and occasional tripping up over words. I think it went quite well; I have had some positive feedback from those who heard the presentation, but I am not sure that, in a virtual setting, I am as fluent as I am in a ‘real setting’. I will consider this further below. What was interesting was that the audience used the chatbox to communicate as the presentation went on, though the communications were usually not directly with me. We had asked them to save questions until the end, but as I was talking I could see things happening in the chatbox:


C O N T E M P O R A R Y ‘Hi Jeff!’ ‘How are you, Penny?’ ‘Oh, my audio is breaking up!’ This was a little disconcerting, it was like students arriving a little late in the classroom, then saying hello to everyone. As long as I stopped my eyes drifting to the chat-box, it wasn’t a distraction, and anyway it didn’t last long, and people settled down to listen. Then, as they became interested in what I was saying, people would type little comments, such as ‘YES!’ or ‘Hmm, that makes me think of . . .’ A couple of times, two or three members of the audience took up some of my ideas and started to discuss them in writing. This was an interesting experience for me. Unlike in a ‘real’ lecture, I had a visible commentary from my audience on what I was saying. It was a little like having students having quiet discussions with each other during a lecture. This was acceptable, because the discussions were triggered by what I had said, but I was slightly distracted by them and wanted to get involved. My pre-presentation anxieties, listed previously, could however be put to bed. I turned up at the right time. I did the presentation. People could hear me and the recording shows that I didn’t sound like Mickey Mouse (although I might possibly sound like a character from Coronation Street). Some very knowledgeable people did turn up to listen to me and they asked me some challenging questions, but, of course, this is what academic debate and discussion is about. I am stimulated by it and flattered that people came to listen. Even more rewarding, I had emails and verbal exchanges from people afterwards, taking the academic debate further and expanding my international networks.

Virtual performance and identity My doctoral research gave part of its focus to the idea that people construct their identities when they are interacting with other people. This is based, in part, on the work of Goffman (1959), who regarded such interactions as ‘performances’. He also suggested (1975) that many interactions have set rituals and expectations which help those involved to know how to behave. So, there was I, a lecturer with no real audience to talk to. My audience was not a pool of faces attached to bodies, shuffling in their seats. My audience was a list of names that could only prove to me that it was alive and well and listening by typing into a chat-box, or by showing smiley faces and clapping hand symbols. This is a new set of interactive behaviours to become accustomed to. My successful performance as a lecturer usually relies upon having eyeto-eye contact with my audience, being perceptive to their degree of engagement or confusion, watching them smile to show appreciation when I have tried to be humorous, injecting energy into the performance when the audience’s energy is low and adjusting my voice and my posture in many small ways to make the interaction effective. Many of these things cannot be done in the

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traditional way in a virtual classroom, where members of the audience have neither eyes nor bodies, nor facial expressions or little murmurs of appreciation. We all had to learn to interact differently. When I listen to the recording of the presentation that I gave, I seem to be less comfortable than in front of a ‘real’ audience, but it is early days for all of us in the developing era of on-line teaching and I expect that I will adapt.

Pains lead to gains I have written above about the anxieties and difficulties of on-line lectures, but I have, of course, also pointed to some of the positive aspects of this exciting way forward. From the comfort of our homes and offices, we can sit side by side with occupational therapists from Norway, the Netherlands, Australia, the U.S. and the Seychelles and discuss practice, theory, problems, solutions, differences and similarities. It’s a slightly daunting learning curve to climb, but I would strongly recommend having a go. Put on the headphones, press a web-link or two, grapple with the technology and the social skills and nuances of on-line communication and the globe becomes smaller. We can develop our professional networks outwards to include new friends and colleagues from across the world. Occupational therapy practice, and education, can only be enriched by this. If you want to make a start, you can watch any of the 24 presentations from World Occupational Therapy Day by going to http://ot4ot.weebly.com/index.html Authors details Dr Jackie Taylor, School of Health, Sports and Rehabilitation Sciences,University of Salford, UK References Goffman, E (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday. Goffman, E (1975) Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience, Harmondsworth: Penguin Taylor, J (2008) The construction of identities through narratives of occupations School of Health Care Professions Salford: University of Salford.



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