Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

ICER 2021 has come and gone, and it was my best online conference experience yet! Both in terms of how I handled it AND in how the organizers run it. I won’t give a detailed explanation of how ICER was run. Matthias Hauswirth, the site co-chair, made an excellent introduction video to the platform Clowdr . Not everything was perfect. But I think a lot of that was because I was new to Clowdr. After fiddling with my processes as the conference continued, I found things that worked. I’ve broken this blog post into socializing, useful processes/practices, my wishlist of changes, and highlights. [Also posted on  medium .] Socializing This online conference was the most social I’ve been to yet, and I loved it! I think part of it had to do with the benefit of lowering the number of tools/apps/sites that people are using and baking in the ability to socialize. SIGCSE didn’t have an easy way to socialize outside of the actual activities. ITiCSE had ohyay, but it was not in the platform the...

Over one week, I went to two overlapping virtual conferences, ICER and Learning@Scale (L@S). Both usually are in person but were virtual due to Covid-19. Here is my reflection on the experience for the sake of those planning a virtual conference, those attending a virtual conference, and myself. First off, the biggest pro to the virtual conferences is I got to attend! If Covid-19 had not forced the conferences to go online, I would not have attended either. ICER's locations go back and forth between in and not in North America. This year was a non-North America year and would have been in New Zealand. After I had my first child and an overseas trip away from him, I decided that while my kids were small, I wouldn't travel outside North America without them unless I had a solid reason. We also recently added another child to the family. So traveling that far with a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old was daunting and unaffordable. L@S was originally going to be in Atlanta, Georgia, in...