General findings

Exchanging views or information on a personal level (e.g. one-to-one or face-to-face) is a frequently expressed objective of conference attendance (see Table 2 in §2.1).

Dolowittz and Marsh (1996) view that in isolation, people often think that their problems are unique, but that in reality, this is often unlikely. The coming together of like-minded communities to discuss topics helps to identify common issues, and can lead to new perspectives and solutions being found. Barnlund (1970) proposed a transactional model of communication to illustrate the simultaneous exchanges that are characteristic of conversational exchanges. Framed as reciprocal dialogue, these exchanges allow parties to progress from a discussion of the ‘facts’ presented, to a broader discussion of the contexts and issues involved (Rowe 2017a, p. 24). As well as allowing the subject matter to be better understood, these one-to-one exchanges allow delegates to gain a better appreciation of each other, and this engenders the networking principle that, according to the conference motivation literature shown in Table 2, is a principle aim of conference participation.

The networking process is often cited as an important way that conference delegates meet, access and share knowledge, and form collaborations to generate new knowledge creation (e.g. Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008; Reinhardt et al., 2009; Ebner et al., 2010; McKendrick, Cumming & Lee, 2012; Borgmann et al., 2015; Cheung et al., 2018). Networking can be seen in various contexts, from the prominent place of social networking in society (especially when supported by social media such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.), to business networking events (also supported by business media platforms such as LinkedIn), and also in professional networking meetings and conferences (supported through platforms like ResearchGate, Mendeley and Academia.edu).

All of these spheres of networking share common goals, and this is best seen through the aims and visions of their prominent social/professional media platforms.

Facebook’s stated mission is to ‘Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’ and the platform has over 1 billion active members (Facebook, 2018). LinkedIn (2018) expresses a vision of ‘creat[ing] economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce’ and a mission of ‘connect[ing] the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful’. ResearchGate (2018) was launched because ‘collaborating with a friend or colleague on the other side of the world was no easy task’ – it now has over 15 million members. Mendeley (2018) ‘facilitates collaboration across the globe and in every field of research’ and has 6 million members.

These services get people together in a common area, allow them to access and share information, encourage communication, and support collaboration. In creating these contacts, people form links and establish common interests, so creating their

own ‘network’ of people who support their interests. The benefits of engaging in these types of activities may be social, business or career oriented. In the ASP context of using them as a forum to access and disseminate research, Academia.edu (2018) offers a good example, citing 64 million academic members, sharing over 21 million papers. The activity on the site gives evidence of engagement and communication between its members, and in terms of tangible reward, a study found that making papers available on the Academia.edu platform raised the citation rates by 16%

after 1 year, 51% after 3 years, and 61% after 5 years (Niyazov et al., 2016). Thus, networking and sharing views and research can be seen to be a beneficial activity for academics.

The popular literature on networking is extensive. Searching the literature corpus, a Google Books Ngram (Figure 2) shows a massive upsurge in networking literature from the 1970s. An Amazon.com search for ‘networking’ textbooks related to communication and presentation yields over 589 returns, with lots of general interest titles such as ‘Networking like a pro’ (Misner & Hallard, 2017), ‘The 20-Minute Networking Meeting - Executive Edition’ (Ballinger & Perez, 2016), and ‘Networking for Nerds’ (Levine & Schmidt, 2015). Much of the literature is oriented towards business growth, sales, and career development, and the titles err towards images of a strong presentation of self or business and achieving success.

As well as popular literature, a number of web sources offer networking advice.

Across a random sample of ‘top tips’ offered for networking, consistent advice advocates preparing well for the event, establishing contacts in advance, being approachable and attentive, using business cards and reminders, following up after the event, and engaging with social media.

Figure 2. Google Books Ngram of networking literature, 1960-2008.

This latter aspect has been of interest in scholarly literature, especially in regard to the use of the Twitter microblogging service as a medium of educational and conference communication. Twitter has been proposed as a wider educational intervention, with applications for the classroom community, course/class blogs, reader response, inter-school collaboration, project management, metacognition analysis and expression, and also in conferences and workshops as a research resource, virtual classroom discussion platform, and creating a personal learning network in the edublogosphere (Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008). In the context of conferences, Kimmons and Veletsianos (2016) report that education scholars engage in Twitter use, and that professors and students have similar levels of usage in conferences, although professors were more inclined to engage with event-based hashtags (which tended to spike in the first week and were more short-lived), whereas students erred towards on-going hashtags.

Twitter has been reported as enhancing medical education in the conference setting (McKendrick, Cumming & Lee, 2012), and social networking innovations for use in conferences have also been patented (Shridhar, Sing & Brahmbhatt, 2010). However, it has been seen that only a few of these microblogs are of interest for non-participants beyond the specific event, and therefore the meaningful use of microblogging may be restricted (Ebner et al. 2010). That said, Aramo-Immonen, Jussila & Huhtamäki (2015) observe that discussions in social media networks can function as virtual collaborative co-learning environments, and that discussions prior to the event can increase the motivation to learn collaboratively.

Of note, there has been virtually no empirical research that examines the interactions of conference delegates with either each other, or with the content of the conference program they are attending. The lack of research into the physical interactions and exchanges that take place during conference events is somewhat surprising, given the major role that interaction and networking play in our conference activities. The technological enhancement of scientific communication during conferences is clearly of inter-disciplinary interest, as demonstrated by the breadth of Twitter-related literature (e.g. Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008; Reinhardt et al., 2009; Ebner et al., 2010; McKendrick, Cumming & Lee, 2012; Aramo-Immonen, Jussila & Huhtamäki, 2015; Borgmann et al., 2015; Cheung et al., 2018), but this strand of interaction is clearly supplementary to our physical interactions.

Face-to-face networking at ASP conferences has been little explored, and given the potentially vast number of events that are hosted every year (see Rowe, 2017a;

Sub-Study II), this is a significant issue that affects a global, trans-disciplinary population. Why we have failed to explore this dissonance between what we profess to believe (i.e. the conceptual importance of conference interaction and networking) and the actualities of our engagement is not clear. The ideas of interaction and networking are integral to conference activities and learning.

Interventions to augment the social space of academic conferences have been

undertaken, with an aim to enhance the participation of conference attendees (McCarthy et al., 2004). Computer mediated communication in the conference setting has been seen to enhance the social presence of attendees and hold positive implications for their interaction and collaborative learning (Gunawardena, 1995).

Kordts-Freudinger, Al-Kabbani and Schaper (2017) have identified learning by interaction as one of the main research topics in educational sciences, yet feel that

‘Although 30 years old, Boucouvalas’ statement – “We must explore the issue of how to learn from conferences” (Boucouvalas, 1985, 55) – is still up-to-date’ (p. 30). As well as confirming the conference motivations of ‘education’ (expressed by 46% of their sample as a primary goal) and ‘networking’ (39%) as being primary expressed goals of conference attendance, they look at conference gatherings as communities of practice, and consider the way that social interactions work towards meeting the goals of conference attendees. Accordingly, they identified ‘self-presentation (10%) as a third expressed goal, and their analysis identified that the goals of education and networking were both enhanced by interaction in the conference setting (p. 34).