Ongoing: Lessons from a virtual semester

I am no stranger to virtual instruction. Roughly a third of my teaching experience since leaving grad school 4 years ago has been in virtual versions of my classes. So when my institution switched to fully online classes in the Spring of 2020, I felt prepared. What I have heard from students then and since was that they wanted to know what was expected of them. That certainty and clear guidelines was what they wanted. Some of this was, I am sure, driven by the uncertainty in the world. Covid-19 was confusing and spreading, students on their Spring breaks were suddenly told not to come back, and, to some extent, the ongoing US presidential election increased everyone’s uncertainty about the values of the US (in addition to who would be President).

In the Spring, my face-to-face course went into a sort of Triage mode. I was already teaching 2 courses fully online (an MBA course on Organizational Learning as well as my standard undergrad class on Project Management). Those courses remained largely the same (with some adjusted deadlines due to an extended Spring break) but the students were already prepared to be prepared. The face-to-face course was also in that sweet-spot where a lot of my face-to-face exercises had already happened and (because I had already developed some material for online delivery) I was able to pivot quickly to covering the remaining material. The projects which are always the culmination of my class (it is Project Team Management after all) had to be abandoned as they nearly all involved face-to-face interactions. Instead, I had students submit the planning material that they should have been developing. It wasn’t an overly satisfying conclusion I’m sure for the students but it was something where they could demonstrate knowledge.

Going into the Fall I was planning for online delivery but there was the waffling that we are all familiar with about the extent to which face-to-face course delivery would be allowed. I developed some new material, re-recorded lectures, and shifted my traditional class to the Wikipedia development project the online version of my class has been doing for years. Thus far, the semester has been moving okay. I think that my structure helps students know that they should do, but my leniency also (as is the case in a normal semester as well) leads to more procrastination. The projects are due in 2 weeks so we shall see whether the work that has been ‘theoretically’ been happening in their virtual teams is successfully demonstrated. I know that some of my virtual teams have been struggling (though they sometimes due in a regular semester as well), but I think that student priorities have also affected their ability to be successful. I know of a number of students who have taken on additional work (in addition to more responsibilities within the household) during the pandemic. Time management is not always the forte of undergrads and that has become more evident as the university is expecting more and more students to withdrawal.

20 days to grades are due.

Jim March Conference 2019

Jim March was and remains a giant in the field of Organization studies, at least for those of us that are looking. With all of my academic training being at Carnegie Mellon, I was aware of Herb Simon and (to a lesser extent) Jim March from the atmosphere and the infrastructure. I stumbled upon the Herb Simon outdoor classroom or the intramural field dedicated to Simon, March, and Cyert. Several of my undergraduate courses (Psychology and CS primarily) brought up their ideas even before I made my way into actually studying organizations. The campus has so many artifacts of these massive figures, including a few named buildings and classrooms.

Mark Fichman taught a PhD course that I took in Spring 2011 on the Carnegie School of Organizational Thought. This course served as an introduction to the contributions of Jim March and Herb Simon to Organization Theory. And what are those ideas? Across a number of books, models, and papers, these researchers proposed that people don’t always act with full knowledge or perfectly rationally. That ‘satisficing’ occurs where individuals try and make a ‘good enough’ decision. Much of these contributions are based on mathematical models, eloquent prose, and (occasionally) experiments. These ideas won Herb Simon a Nobel prize, but did not make a huge impact on Economics until Kahnemann (in some ways) “re-discovered” many of these ideas and called it Behavioral Economics. Jim, in some ways, rejected laboratory experiments, which, unfortunately, made his ideas less palatable to the public than Behavioral Econ where the focus is really on the data.

Jim March died in September of 2018. This last weekend (October 4-5, 2019) a conference in honor of Jim March was held at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Jim spent the majority of his academic career at Stanford, but his papers will be archived alongside Simon’s at CMU so many see this as a sign that he thought fondly of his time there from 1953-1964. The conference was unique and familiar all at the same time. There were 6 panels where 3-4 presenters talked about the relevance / importance of some of March’s ideas on themselves or shared stories about their time with March. Some were free-wheeling, some emotional rages against the status quo in sociology/economics, some repetitive, but all were interesting. One point of view that was raised at the dinner the first night was that Jim’s ideas about organizations were like poetry: broad, subject to interpretation, not easily accepted by some, but full of important and inspired wisdom. Some in the community of scholars that align with the Carnegie Tradition therefore see their job as to translate that poetry into prose (i.e. experiments / simulations / or analyses). There was a flavor from some that all Jim’s ideas are sacrosanct and we are his disciples, but I think that view was only held by a minority of people there. Jim and Herb gave us lenses to look at the world, but, not to diminish their contributions, they certainly weren’t right about everything.

I found this conference very motivating and useful. I think its impossible for me not to have been influenced by the Carnegie Tradition. At the conference, there was less rage than I thought there might be. There were less emotionally difficult moments than I feared (besides a touching and important presentation by one of Jim’s daughters). I was deeply moved by the goodness of Jim as a person, an academic, a colleague, and a mentor; and I feel deeply grateful to have been invited to attend.

INGRoup Conference 2019

I recently returned from the INGRoup conference which was, this year, held in Lisbon, Portugal. Academic conferences vary heavily in their format and the general ambitions of the conference attendees. The quality of the work varies like anywhere, but the advantage of INGRoup is that for groups researchers like myself, every session will have something interesting. For a variety of structural reasons, this conference has a bit more of a community atmosphere than some I have been to. At this year’s conference, I was privy to a conversation where some of the organizers of the earlier conferences described some of the reasons they have (for example) historically randomly assigned seating to the opening dinner. These small institutional changes have the goal of creating a connections, the goal that is embedded in the conference’s name: Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup). Those aspects of this conference are generally more successful than not.

I think that this conference has been particularly special to me so I wanted to describe some of my thoughts on the conference in general and on the Lisbon conference specifically. One of the motivations is, certainly, that I gave the Collective Intelligence (CI) conference a post a few weeks ago. The first time I went to INGRoup, I was on the market and participating in the Doctoral Consortium. This is a program that is intended to help students that are looking for jobs to see where their research fits, get some feedback on their job market paper, and get some advice on how to be a productive junior faculty member. I applied because I was on the market and because the conference was going to be in Pittsburgh, making it pretty easy to attend.

My experience was very positive at this conference in part because I had a chance to meet a lot of important people I had never met before but also because I got to connect with several other PhD students or junior faculty in the same boat as me. I have returned every year since 2015 and have continued to have positive experiences. Though some aspects of the conference vary in quality (the food and organization of the Helsinki conference in 2016 is hard to top), there are always interesting talks and a continued sense of community. I have yet to really leverage the relationships I have developed into research relationships, but I feel that that is really just a matter of time and needed proactivity on my part.

INGRoup Lisbon 2019 is the second time the conference has been held outside the United States. Compared to Helsinki, a number of things were notably different for me. In Helsinki there were only a handful of people I knew from CMU present whereas this year, a substantial cohort of students and some faculty were present. On both trips, I spent time with those individuals when exploring around the city when not at the conference itself. There was, however, more of a desire to spend time with the people I knew then meet new people. It’s a tricky balance of course. Compared to some previous conferences, I felt that Lisbon had a bit more slack time in the schedule. I think this was probably due in large because when you stay at the hotel the conference is a part of, you can quickly get away to work / change / chill. In Lisbon, the short periods of slack were still in the schedule but since the conference was on a college campus, no one’s hotels were all that nearby so people either left for long periods or felt that they couldn’t leave. I suspect that the Wine Cave dinner will be one of the more notable memories for many in attendance. Long story short, the event ran a bit long due primarily to traffic to the venue so that though the event was scheduled to conclude about 11, the majority of attendees I spoke to returned about 1AM. I enjoyed the event but there were some negative externalities on the second day of the conference due to that event.

I really like INGRoup and think that it generally works well. There were a few sour notes at this conference for a bunch of reasons, most of which are personal to me, but I look forward to hopefully being more involved in the future.