# ENRICH (Educators and Trainers In Computing and Research ) CoP Icebreakerz

## Agenda
1. Welcome and debrief 10 mins
1. Share different icebreaker strategies in the collaborative doc 5 mins
1. Split into breakout rooms to try these out 10 mins
1. Return to whole group for discussion 10 mins
1. Wrapping up and next steps 5 mins
1. Bonus time if zoom doesn't flake out 20 mins

## Pre-meeting questions
* What different purposes can icebreaker questions serve? And hence what are some good icebreakers for each of them?
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## Participants
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* Darya Vanichkina
* Rebecca Lange
* Brian Ballsun-Stanton
* Sara King
* Liz Stokes

### Welcome and debrief
Purpose of this meeting is to try out some icebreaker strategies and discuss the relative merits of different techniques.

Our host today is Liz Stokes
Our note taker today is Brian

* Agenda
* Debrief for n-weeks work from home singularity
* We have lost our minds. Seconded by BBS.
* Desire for personal interactions in future. Prepping for online training.
* [Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream#/media/File:Edvard_Munch,_1893,_The_Scream,_oil,_tempera_and_pastel_on_cardboard,_91_x_73_cm,_National_Gallery_of_Norway.jpg)
* Training online last week
* Plus normal WFH. Not finding any productivity.
* Intense focus achieved. Endless meetings.
* Bad habits of not noticing what day it is.
* Found moments for a shared, IRL, lunch within isolation.
* Constant hum of anxiety.
* Standups via zoom.
* Short, strict 15m meetings. Prevents zoom fatigue.
* Testing hackmd as shared pad.

### Share different icebreaker strategies (list is not definative, please add to this)
1. Answer a low barrier benign question on a collaborative document, eg
* What's your favourite ice-cream flavour and why?
* Tell us something interesting that happened on the way in.
2. Round robin f2f debrief question about what you learned #WFH last week
3. Split into 3 person break-out rooms and answer xyz icebreaker question
4. [Jargonbusting](https://librarycarpentry.org/lc-overview/03-jargon-busting/index.html) - was good doing it with SQL - moving to an introduction rather than getting to know people. Some think pair share activities from instructor training could be useful.
6. BBS: Currently plans a monty python 3 questions, "What is your name, quest, ..."
7. R OzUnconf - split in the room (physically) by Cat <-> Dog preference, and then get people in the edge cases to explain why they're edge cases. Did the same later on based on tidyverse <-> base R.
* Physical-sorting-in-space games
* "Sorting by height" (apparently what they did at carpentries exec council)
* Tidyverse versus Base-R
* Conversation starters, forces small-group breakup. Force rapid questioning of peers
8. Finding points of commonality
* Pair up, find something in common. Join pairs. Series of staged breakout rooms.
9. Tom's "Circle what domains you work in" in his online digital practice thingo using zoom whiteboards/annotations.
10. Playing "Human Bingo"

#### When do we choose to do an icebreaker?

* Managed interactions by people.
* Focus on position relative to group
* Increasing participant comfort online.
* Making online learning more human
* Testing technology stack
* Giving late people time to join
* Find initial questions/preconcieved questions

### Jargonbusting

* BBS https://librarycarpentry.org/lc-overview/03-jargon-busting/index.html
* SK Get a bunch of terms on an etherpad
* "Your job is to have a look at these, and define for someone who doesn't know what it is"
* A quick win, to get people feeling happy
* Consistently gets high feedback
* Space for silly/stupid answers

### Split into breakout rooms to try these out 10 mins
1. Jargonbusting on virtual teaching
* 2 minutes to put down jargon, feature/bug in learning experience. Cuckoo timer
* Work together to brainstorm answers/demonstrate competence
* 5 minutes in breakout rooms?
3. Ordered List (ctrl-shift up-down sorts in etherpad)
4. [Carpentries Icebreakers](https://carpentries.github.io/instructor-training/icebreakers/)

## Jargon for teaching online (below?):
### - Breakout room 1
- Etherpad
- HackMD
- slack
- WFH
- hand
- virtual background
- asynchronous teaching
- working from home colleagues
- saving chat history
- breakout rooms
- collaborative platform
- Cuckoo
- collaborative editing
- whiteboard
- hand
- chat (everyone vs personal)
- Zoom

### - Breakout room 2
- RStudio cloud
- Mybinder
- Partipants tab vs reactions vs chat vs /hand
- formative assessments
- Virtual polls
- padlet
- google docs
- Zoombombing
- etherpad
- co-worker (as in pet/child)
- chat
- teams
- VM
- SWAN
- how to share files
- other chat, no that one
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### Post-list brainstorming

- Worries that this allows active users to dominate.
- Maybe split by breakout rooms first?
- Maybe ask subjective-feel things first?
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### Return to whole group for discussion 10 mins

Maybe we can table these out comparatively?

| Strategy | When is it good to use? | Things to be mindful of |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| (example) Contribute to a collaborative document | When over 10 people in the room; When you want people to disclose their organisation and role; When you want to source podcast recs from trusted peers | Sign in and access to collaborative platforms; Is the question really benign? |

### Wrapping up and next steps 5 mins

What would you like to commit to or try out in the next week?

#### Feedback: what was good about today's session?
* Good to have a community of practice - always cool to learn about what other people are doing (ex - I hadn't known about LC jargon busting)
* It was great to try out an ice breaker to see if and how it would work
* I loved that I was late and it was OK :)
* Thanks for checking in on how we are feeling - that space is helpful
* +1! (Maybe that should be the icebreaker?)
* HackMD is new for me - also first time with cuckoo and gist. I learn SO much from all of you.
* \+ We were among friends. That's really valueable
* \- I was taking notes at too high granularity
* I could watch HackMD like it was tv. That's good but probably also not good :D
* We need to figure out rules to cursor tag :)

#### Feedback: what would you like to be done differently next time?
* I love plans. I'd love a roadmap-style plan of stuff we're planning on discussing... But that's me :smile_cat:
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### Bonus time if zoom doesn't flake out 20 mins