When the Virtual and Physical Networks Converge

While curating the keyword Networks (with Mia Zamora) for the MLA collection entitled Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models and Experiments, we were reminded not to focus solely on digital networks to the exclusion of physical/analog ones (thanks Andrea Rehn!).

This March, my virtual and physical PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) will converge as I organize and host the Digital Pedagogy Lab Cairo: An AMICAL Institute. I am exhilarated but also anxious for many reasons. Unlike most people in my PLN, who live in the US or Europe, I very rarely get opportunities to physically meet people from my virtual network - I do not travel often, and they don’t often come to Cairo. I am unlikely to bump into people at a conference here unless I invite them as keynote speakers (which I have done to varying degrees of success in the past few years). On the other hand, I have been participating virtually (and Virtually Connecting) in a lot of conferences and other learning experiences in the past few years, so I feel like I have been physically there, and met so many of them. I have co-authored more papers with my virtual PLN than my physical colleagues. I am deeply engaged with my PLN, and learn a lot with and from them, but my context is very different from most of theirs. And yet I often feel that my colleagues at work would benefit from my PLN, if only they would give it a try. So I decided that if I can’t get my in-person colleagues to benefit from my virtual PLN, and if I couldn’t go to meet my virtual PLN, I would bring them to me. It took a lot of hard work, but it looks like this will be happening next month (inshallah).

The event is a 3-day (plus 4th day optional unconference) version of the original Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute held last August in Wisconsin. The audience of faculty, faculty developers, librarians and other educators will be coming from my own institution (The American University in Cairo), other American universities outside the US (from the AMICAL consortium, which is the main sponsor of the event), and a few educators in varying roles in Egypt. Parts of the event are limited to event participants, but we have several public events (including all keynotes, which will also be livestreamed, and the unconference).

I am professionally excited that a lot of what and how I have been learning in the past few years, virtually, can be shared with my colleagues locally without having to spend thousands of dollars to send each of them to conferences in the US. I am personally excited to meet people whom I call friends but have never met, and to meet new people. But I am also anxious about how this will all turn out.

I also share Paul Prinsloo’s feelings about what it means to host an international event in a developing country like Egypt, with all kinds of concerns about hosting the event at such an elite institution in the midst of a poor country, and where the suburbs hide a lot of the ugliness you can find all over Cairo. I live with the stereotypes media make about life and safety in my country, even while I work with American and British faculty every day who feel completely safe and happy living here .

Rethinking Context and Hybridity

This upcoming event made me think of my own hybridity and with whom I share context. On the one hand, we tend to assume that those who see us every day in a face-to-face environment know us well, and that those who know us virtually only get glimpses of us. But if you have a very active online life, those who know you virtually end up knowing your ideas and ideology much more closely, as most of their interactions with you involve explicit discussion of those ideas in textual form. You tend to gravitate towards affinity groups because you can choose whom you interact with outside of any formal hierarchy.

On the other hand, many of our online interactions are decontextualized as we try to meet on common ground to discuss mutual interests. The fact that my virtual PLN know me personally does not mean they will understand my context enough to understand how others in my physical network think or behave.

For example, I have conversations with my PLN about issues I could not comfortably have at my institution. I do, occasionally, and my colleagues from my own department know about my views that are anti-learning outcomes, anti-LMS, pro-social media for learning, etc. They fall along a spectrum in terms of their familiarity with eLearning as teachers or students, their comfort with social media, and their critical pedagogical stance - versus my virtual network who are mostly on the radical end of all of these. Apart from my immediate colleagues, other participants will be a diverse group of people from different institutions and backgrounds. Unlike my virtual PLN, I don’t know them or their contexts. And so I suspect there will be much time spent on getting to know and understand one another. How will they respond to the radical ideologies we come with? And I am saying “we” as in myself and the facilitators of the Digital Pedagogy Lab Cairo, because, ideologically, my thinking is more aligned with facilitators Jesse Stommel, Bonnie Stewart, Sean Michael Morris and Amy Collier, than it is with people from my institution or institutions with a similar context. I do know, however, that our stance will be flexible and responsive to the participants’ needs and interests, even as we challenge them to think differently and more critically. In most US or UK conferences I have been to, the majority of participants have been from the same country as most speakers. In this event, half the participants will be living in Egypt (many of them American faculty), and half from different institutions from different countries. The diversity of contexts will be both enriching and challenging. For everyone, myself included.

I am realizing how much more diverse this physical professional development experience will likely be versus my virtual networking, which is actually more focused ideologically, and how much more intense it will be having my virtual and physical networks converge as opposed to when one travels to a conference “as oneself”, without carrying their entire context with them.

Have your virtual and physical networks converged before? What was the experience like? Tell us in the comments.

flickr photo by dominiqs https://flickr.com/photos/dominiqs/2982062762 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license