Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

Time for a reflection on being the Hybrid Experience chair for SIGCSE TS 2023, a.k.a. round 2! This year was so much more manageable in terms of time commitment. I also helped introduce new processes and aspects to the symposium. In this post, I will start with the new processes and structures and then talk about the time commitment since the latter section references things from the former section. [Also posted on  medium .] New Processes and Structures The most significant difference is rather than being a committee of one, I was part of a committee of four! Dela Yazdansepas was my junior Hybrid Experience Co-Chair. Jacqueline Smith was the Authors’ Corner chair and Jessica Yauney was the Online Experience chair. Spreading both the workload and the mental load was extremely helpful and reduced so much of the stress. In addition, three other things. The first was to create a Trello Workspace for the committee. You all know I love my Trello boards ( class Trello blog post , pers...

 The Authors’ Corner was the brainchild of a SIGCSE TS 2022’s chairs meeting. By the time we articulated the idea, I didn’t know who contributed what to create it. The event aimed to enable authors to answer questions about their work online. The Authors’ Corner was primarily for online attendees and authors. [Also posted on  medium .] However, once we decided to do it, I said it had to be something where no one was left alone in a video call, “sitting in a black void,” waiting for someone to appear. The in-person equivalent event was presenters at posters or tables; if someone was interested in the project, they could talk to the presenter. However, the online versions of this I’ve participated in as a presenter and attendee put presenters in a video call alone, where they sat in a “black hole,” hoping someone would come and talk to them. Such events often make presenters feel insignificant and “unpopular” if no one comes, or maybe that’s just me. I refused to put our present...

  Hybrid Conference: Questions to think through Here is the first in my reflection series on running our first hybrid SIGCSE TS 2022 . In this post, I’ll cover a more organized version of the questions I’ve sent to those who’ve emailed me directly about running a hybrid conference. I did my best to cluster them so it isn’t an overwhelming laundry list of questions. But, to be honest, it is still an overwhelming list. Hopefully, the added context and extra ideas will help. Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. [Also posted on  medium .] This post is broken down into the following sections: Overall Experience (5 questions) Nuts and Bolts (3 questions) Videos? (2 questions) Hiring Help (2 kinds) Platform (1 question) Overall Experience (5 questions) Question 1: What kind of interaction/experience do you imagine for the hybrid piece? One person’s hybrid will not be another person’s since we have all experienced it differently. The organizers must be all on the same page. The only ...

So this past March, I was the inaugural Hybrid Experience Chair for the 2022 SIGCSE Technical Symposium . This conference is the Special Interest Group Computer Science Education’s (SIGCSE) flagship conference with over 1,500 attendees. My career plans included serving on committees like this. However, I hadn’t planned to volunteer for such committees until my kids were older and starting in a much smaller role. [Also posted on medium .] But when I got the call, I couldn’t say no. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic started, I’ve been talking about how we can’t go back to pre-covid times as we glacially return to some new normal. In-person conferences are exclusionary. I experienced that first hand with SIGCSE TS 2020, the conference that didn’t happen due to the pandemic. I was eight months pregnant at the time of that conference and therefore couldn’t travel. So I had to remove my name from a submission because it required attendance. I supported my co-authors but couldn’t actually go a...

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...

I attended ITiCSE this year. One of my former undergraduate students, Anshul Shah, presented his paper on our CS1 reviewer app . Attending was an opportunity to iterate on how I approach online conferences and try out ideas from my last reflection when I attended SIGCSE 2021 . One way to describe my approach to ITiCSE is less like prior online conferences and more like how I approach in-person conferences . [Also posted on  medium .] How I decided what to do Step 1 : Look at the proceedings two-ish weeks before and note all of the things I find interesting.  — I did this based only on the titles. The abstracts hadn’t come out at the time. Step 2 : Go through the list a second time and mark which things I will actually attend.  — Talks were live, and the videos would not be available until after the conference. I often had more papers I was interested in than I had time for, so I needed to prioritize. I purposely separated this step from Step 1 because I didn’t want to get bo...

The SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2021 happened! So that means it’s time for a conference reflection. However, this blog post is going to be a little different. I’m going to try writing a letter to my future self focusing on how the conference went and how I can do online conferences better in the future. [Also posted on  medium .] Dear Future Self, So you are planning to attend another online conference. And I know there are online conferences in your future because you got a paper accepted to ITiCSE . And then ICER and Grace Hopper are both online (Wow, writing that makes me realize that we attend more conferences than I thought.). You’ve done a few online conferences now, so it’s time to remember what happened last time and learn the lessons from them. We don’t want to repeat the “I’m up to my eyeballs in work!” experience. Especially considering we wrote an entire blog post about attending two conferences at once, ICER and Learning@Scale (are we going to Learning@Scale this ye...

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...