Skip to main content

Virtual Attention

I am scheduled to participate in a Zoom conference today of indeterminate length that has kept me from scheduling anything else at work.  It is important for others that I give my full attention to the proceedings.

Zoom has facilitated my having more meetings than I would otherwise have done because of COVID certainly but also because of travel cost, etc. The pandemic got us used to virtual meetings (mostly on Zoom for me) and our thought of what a meeting is has evolved.

It is worth noting how much information is cut off by not having meetings in a given room where posture and body language provide many clues as to what is going on that is unspoken. I have trouble identifying at the time who is not speaking (and hypothesizing why). 

I am not very facile with the chat feature and find it hard to have side-conversations going on; I've been this way in live meetings and have never been able to process having a note handed to me.

On the plus side I believe that I do speak much more effectively when I can see my face on a monitor. I make better "eye contact" with the camera and thus the group and I am comfortable modulating how reactive my face is for emphasis in a way that I am not in person.

I take voluminous notes during all meetings, not out of a love of detail but because I know from past experience that my mind will wander otherwise, and so I think most screenshots of me during meetings are of me looking down at my pad. Afterward I can use my notes to see who did not speak but it would be better if I noticed at the time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Car Accident

I was in a car accident a few days ago. There was a stopped car in the interstate and I didn't see it in advance; the car in front of me swerved into another lane and then there it was in front of me. I also swerved but damaged my commuter car, which is old and had many miles on it. The insurance company declared it a total loss.  The damage was where I scraped along the passenger side of my car (and the driver side of the stopped car). I had no deployment of airbags and no damage from my seat belt; no glass on either car broke, so it was a glancing blow if that makes sense. The front passenger wheel was damaged and I could not drive the car very far.  I pulled over to the shoulder and dialed 911. A state trooper made sure I was alright and proceeded to take care of the situation. I was moving slowly, aware that I had had a shock to my system and trying not to do anything to worsen the situation (stepping into traffic when I exited my vehicle, etc.) The trooper took my informa...
2 comments
Read more