As we were getting closer to the event we needed to start choosing roles for everyone to take on in small groups to help bring together the last jobs of the symposium. We had a choice of what we wanted to do and I chose two jobs that I didn’t mind taking on. The first job was design because I did that for the print auction and enjoyed it and the other was to manage and collate digital content which sounded like a similar role I did for the print auction in the end which I enjoyed, there was already a couple of people down for design so I got put on the managing of images team which I was happy with.
A week after the groups had been decided on not a lot had been decided so we all sat down and spoke about what each person could do. I got asked whether I would mind creating a slideshow with one image from everybodies work that we could go off as the order of presenting. I had said to everyone the week before to have their images in their name specific folder by the Tuesday the next week, just after the Bank Holiday so that I could gather all the bios and images to start organising but when I looked a couple of days after the deadlne I had set not everyones work was in their folder so I had to start making the slideshow with the images I had and chase everyone else for their images. The hardest part of making the slideshow and the whole symposium was the contact with the students in India. The leaders had been trying to get in touch with the leader over in India for a couple of weeks and had got no reply so we had to organise the symposium on our side and wait for a response. I had also sent a group email to everyone in my subject area (Travel and Transport) to introduce myself and Shola and ask if they would mind showing us their images so we could see what type of imagery they had created but only one of them responded the night before our run through to say they couldn’t access the folder. I sent them the folder link where they managed to upload their images. I did ask if they would mind telling everyone else that was in our group to add images as soon as possible as the event was in a couple of days.
The day before the event we had a quick run through of the technical equipment to check that the sound, microphone, camera and room worked and was laid out how we wanted it ready for the event the next day. We wanted to be able to check that our Skype account worked with Banaras University but they were very bad at replying so at this point we didn’t even have a contact for them. At this point we were wondering whether we would even have anyone to talk to. We made a plan B just in case we weren’t able to speak to them. If we couldn’t speak to them we were going to record ourselves and send the recording to them. At least we were all ready for the morning. My pictures were up on the wall ready to be shown in the morning.
I was just going to stick a couple of my images up on the wall because we only had limited wall space but I got my images printed a little smaller and not everyone put their work up on the wall so I had a bit more space to put my images up. I laid my images out on the wall in the order they were taken in theh journey to show a full train journey home.
On the morning of the event the main people in charge of contacting the teacher in India received a messgae to say the internet wasn’t working and they wouldn’t be able to cll us so they were going to record themselves and send it to us. None of us were surprised considering we hadn’t had any contact with them before this time so we quickly had to change our plans to bring in extra equipment to record ourselves. Had we have known their internet was down we could have recorded ourselves yesterday and been done with it.
We wanted to start the event at 10am but there was a couple of people running late so we ended uo starting at about 10:15am. We had arrived early to set the camera up and to make sure everything was working properly before the event so as soon as the last person arrived we were ready to go. We started with an introduction into the symposium and then started with the first subject area. Each person in the group spoke for about a minute each about their work and then the main spokesperson for the group would talk a little bit more about the subject area. When it got to my turn I was a little nervous about talking about my work but I don’t know why because I knew what I was talking about. We stopped recording after every group so that we could all get sorted and ready in front of the screen. Once we had all finished we packed the equipment away. I looked at the time and we had taken about 20 minutes to speak through the whole thing when it should have been about 10 minutes for us and 10 minutes for India but I think if we had been speaking to them on Skype we would have got more of a conversation going.
Evaluation of the first symposium:
I think personally that most of the event was organised one sided because we had no contact with the students until a couple of days before the event which was really frustrating as we felt like we weren’t fully organsied as we didn’t know if the Skype call was going to happen or not. The organisation of the event was quite straight forward with us only having to do very small, short tasks in order to organise the event. Being in the smaller groups with set tasks really helped us to get the tasks done in more than enough time before the symposium. Having the run through would have been helpful if we had actually had a contact email address to be able to call the students in India so I persoanlly think it was a waste of time having a run through but we did manage to lay the room out as we wanted and make sure all the tech worked.
Since writing this we got an email to say we needed to do the symposium again because it wasn't up to standard the first time. I was really annoyed because when we finished the symposium the week before nothing was said to us and we were left in the room not knowing how we did because nobody gave us any feedback. At the end of the day we had an email asking us to redo it the week after which we did do but none of us were very happy about it as we had two deadlines the week after and had planned time around the first symposium.
Before the second symposium we had to change the slideshow so that it had pictures of the students from India's work along with bios which we did. It was a bit more casual the second time around.
What went better:
We had a bit more of a conversation
We got an insight into the work from India
It was longer than last time
What didn't go well:
We didn't get there early to get the slideshow up
Not everyone turned up
I didn't participate as well as I could - I could have spoken a lot longer and helped with the discussion more.
Overall, my experience of the symposium was quite a negative one because the symposium was made a lot more stressful and harder than I believed it should have been.
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