Doing Field Projects

20 Digital Ethnography (4) Online Meetings/Classes

This project is another digital participant-observation exercise, this time involving the various apps used in meetings and teaching. Use of online apps for meetings and classes has been available for many years both because they can be time and money savers for businesses, and because they can expand the reach of teachers and other professionals. With the arrival of COVID-19, these applications have become enormously widespread. Here you have the opportunity to examine the advantages and disadvantages of using digital media in comparison with face-to-face meetings.

Learning Goals

1. Examine and critique multiple methods of conducting meetings and classes online.
2. Use participant-observation to document online meetings and/or classes.

The use of digital technology to facilitate meetings has been around in one form or another for quite some time. It is expensive and time-consuming to have executives of multinational corporations fly country to country to meet to discuss business, not to mention the problems associated with jet lag, staying in hotels, and the thousand different ways in which such gatherings are inconvenient for all involved. Similarly, having shortlist candidates for a job fly to a conference center for an hour for a preliminary interview is a waste of time and resources for all involved when an online meeting could do the same job as, or more, efficiently. Even before the internet was routinely available to the ...