I fell asleep and missed part of the online meeting
Is it me or do Online Meetings sometimes seem like a “play date with coma patients”? Ok, that was mean, and a paraphrase from Scott Adams in the Wall Street Journal 8/6/2011, hopefully since I quoted someone else it will keep me out of trouble with management.
But Scott Adams does make a good point, boredom is the driver of creativity, and if I am being creative during a meeting, I might miss something that really is important. After all, only large parts of most online meetings could easily be recorded and then viewed at a higher speed, then we could have discussions, but not all of the meeting can be that way. And the online meeting unique parts may need to be replayed for me because I was being “creative”.
In this case, Microsoft Research is hard at work trying to overcome these kinds of lapses in the attendees attention:
In this paper the authors discuss a new concept of allowing online meetings to have the ability to get people with short lapses of attention to get caught up on the meeting.
Why would you read this paper? This is an opportunity for add-on for collaboration tools. For professors it is a great source for papers on how to make online meetings more useful and interesting. For students this would be a great senior project.