Communication

Communication F21

NYU Abu Dhabi has announced that courses will be in person, on campus. During the ongoing pandemic, we have learned a lot about course delivery, the value of multi-channel communication and the importance of staying up to date and in touch. Given the realities of the ongoing pandemic, it is difficult to know what "business as usual" will look like.

It is very important that we stay in communication outside of class hours about class activities, as well as personal and mental well being. Here are some important things you should know about how we will communicate in F21.

COURSE DELIVERY: This course will not use Brightspace for course delivery. Course materials will be linked to this Google site. Some materials will be disseminated in Drive. We will have a few other platforms to use, and all will be linked to this site.

INSTRUCTOR AVAILABILITY: For a number of reasons, I will be holding asynchronous "office hours" (individual and group) in the F21 semester via Zoom in the early evening. In my experience, in person office hours address a number of concerns, from small questions to more informal means of communication. You are welcome to ask questions before or after class, or by dropping a Google chat message. I will answer that message as soon as I can, but usually not late at night.

COMMUNICATION: We will use Google Chat in order to communicate with each other about information related to the class. Some instructors in the world also use Slack, Teams or Mattermost for this purpose. Since NYU is already a Google workplace institution, Chat is also integrated with other Google apps that we will use.

Furthermore, the collaborative potential of group messaging systems such as Chat or Slack is of benefit in the professional world for project management and team coordination. I hope that one of the potential benefits of using this in our course is that it will provide you with the experience of working both alone and in teams that you can use in your professional lives. You might appreciate reading this study about team messaging tools and how they promote "egalitarian communication and easy sharing of content in familiar digital interfaces" (Ross). Think about this the way you would in terms of an equitable, balanced conversation in the classroom. Use a positive, constructive tone to engage with your colleagues with respect.

Alternative modes of communication

Communicating in Chat

You can access Google Chat at chat.google.com when you are authenticated or by using the app for mobile devices. You will be added into different rooms at chat for the course (discussions, general, experts chat and random). If you drop the course, I will remove you from the rooms. At the end of the course you will be removed from the rooms.

Chat allows us to consolidate our conversations and communication into "rooms" (Slack and Mattermost call them "channels") in which we can organize different kinds of communication. Inside rooms there are "threads" that we will use to organize different sub-topics.

All of these rooms will be visible to everyone who is subscribed to the room (all classroom members). It is possible to "direct message" someone in the course without everyone seeing. It is possible to tag specific members of the rooms (the members of the class) openly to include them specifically in the conversation.

It is also possible to have direct messages and linked Google Meet calls (that are like zoom, skype, etc). Since it is part of Google Workplace, you can share materials from Drive. The rooms and threads are searchable and can be used for your reference throughout the semester.

What can we not do in Chat?

I encourage you to think about chat as an unencrypted messaging system, one that is private to the members of the class. Just as with other forms of remote delivery, Zoom or Teams, NYUAD policy states that we will not be allowed to share screenshots or excerpts of the interactions in class with others outside the course, and for no reason should they appear in social media of any kind, including Whatsapp, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. Anyone who is found sharing such data outside of the class will be reported.

Your instructor will not be able to give feedback or grades, discuss grades, share personal information, or discuss sensitive issues including health ones in Google Chat. These need to be addressed by email or a zoom session.

A Zotero library that I curated on using team messaging in the classroom / team-based work can be found here (including the various authors mentioned above).