Early in his book about The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold (2000) confessed that "[t]he idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me at first," but he quickly acknowledged that he warmed up to the idea. Many people are passionate about their web connections, warming to strangers (as well as kith and kin) while homesteading on the electronic frontier. But many people still find virtual worlds cold and alienating, and those of us cultivating learning communities do well to break the ice for them. Here are a few ideas...
The following icebreaker activities are (mostly) appropriate for online communities. Some have been adapted from face-to-face exercises. (As we move through the pandemic and something like face-to-face instruction appears possible, this list will show more examples of meatspace icebreakers.)
This is based on a "Lost in Space" thought experiment described by Symonds & Symonds (2020), in which people must identify items that they will need as they evacuate a malfunctioning space station. But in light of our common experience with evacuation of workspaces during the current pandemic, this version of the icebreaker invites us to share the choices we made as we shifted our work into our homes. Participants are likely to find many common work-necessities, but there may also be some intriguing differences. Depending upon the number of participants, the exercise could take anywhere between 20-30 minutes.
Imagine that you are at the office (or in the lab) one day when you learn that the governor has issued an emergency stay-at-home order. You have one hour to collect whatever you need from your office/lab so that you can take those resources home with you that day. What are the first five things you would take? (Take a couple of minutes to write these down on some scratch paper or in a text editor, but keep your list to yourself while writing.) Once everyone has made their lists, each person in should share their list with others in the group. (Take turns and share the lists quickly, allowing more time for discussion and comparison after all lists have been shared.) After all lists have been shared, compare lists, reflect on what was forgotten when you *did* shift your work home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and speculate on how you might organize work differently as we transition to a new "normal" in the future.
Maxine Atkinson, inspired by Mary Stearns (1998), uses a "me-bag" to help break the ice with her students (Atkinson & Lowney 2016). This is a bag of items that symbolize who we are. Maxine brings her "me-bag" to the first class and introduces herself by showing the items to the class and telling them what each item represents about her and her life. Among the items in her bag are a coaster with a picture of London (for her love of that city), two male dolls (representing her husband and her son), a tennis ball (for her favorite sport), an artificial flower (representing her garden), and an article she published (for her profession). Then she asks her students to assemble me-bags to show and tell the class about themselves at the next meeting.
For those times when we are meeting online from our homes (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic), we could easily assemble the symbolic ingredients of ourselves in a basket (or even a small pile on a desk) rather than a bag.
This may work best as part of extended introductions over several meetings. If the me-bag concept is introduced and modeled by a teacher/team leader in one meeting, then students/participants have time before the next meeting to reflect on what best represents them. The assembly of the bags/baskets may be more meaningful than if they are just given written instructions to gather some items representing themselves. But this is an empirical question, and some groups might have very successful icebreakers with this activity at the top of an early videoconference.
Gather together, in a bag or basket, several small items that symbolize or represent what is most important about you. Try to find just a few things: more than three, fewer then ten. As you assemble your bag or basket, think about how you want to reveal yourself to others in the class/group. What should your peers/colleagues understand about you so that you can have better working relationships, perhaps finding some common interests. Consider what you have that represents people who are important to you (family, friends), places you love (or that shaped you), accomplishments you are proud of, activities (hobbies, sports) that you enjoy... (You get the idea.) We will take some time at our first/next meeting to share our bags/baskets with one another, and thereby introduce ourselves.
Send them a reminder the day before. When the time comes, plan to give each person two-to-three minutes to share and explain their me-bag to the group (or perhaps to a smaller breakout group).
There are myriad variants on this theme. For a face-to-face activity, one interesting option is to have students/participants scavenge for interesting facts about each other (Nilson 2016). This requires some preparation, as the teacher/leader will need to survey the group first to learn a few things about each member of the group/class (e.g., what pets they have, what languages they speak, what their hobbies are). Once these data are available, members of the class can randomly draw several factual statements (e.g., "has a pet iguana") from a hat (or bag, or basket) and begin the process of finding people for whom that factual statement is true. Along the way, everyone will introduce themselves to each other. This could be adapted to an online environment, with appropriate preparation. Once the list of factual statements has been compiled in a spreadsheet of survey responses, then a randomly ordered list of such statements could be used to give every member of the group a few facts to attach to others in the group (via email). The difficult bit is the introductions and interviews, but in a smaller group it should be possible to do this by using "private" chat posts/replies. This would not scale well, however, and I want to suggest another variant of the scavenger hunt for online use.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended a "release party" for some digital editions of important historical documents, part of a wonderful project called SourceLab. A scavenger hunt was used as an icebreaker at this party. We were all assigned to small groups, and everyone was given a link to a Google Doc that provided us with several questions that could be answered from the documents that were being published/released (as well as links to those documents). Each small group worked as a team (meeting in their own breakout rooms to coordinate their hunts) racing against the other teams to answer all of the questions first. The first team to answer all questions correctly won a prize. Each team had a leader who was responsible for submitting the answers to a judge/referee for the event. I cannot recall whether this was done by using a separate Google Doc for each team's answers, coupled with a post to the chat tool in Zoom when finished, or whether this was done via email. Either could work. Structuring the activity as a race meant that we did not spend much time introducing ourselves during the hunt, but this broke the ice nicely and we had plenty of time to introduce ourselves afterwards.
This sort of scavenger hunt could be adapted for just about any online meeting/gathering, with some preparation: organizers/teachers need to identify some sources (on the web, or available in a shared online space [e.g., Google Drive, or an LMS course-site]) and generate some questions about the information in those sources. Once this is organized into some documents that can be circulated to the meeting participants (via email or a shared online space), all that you need is a conferencing tool that supports some breakout/small group rooms.
[...]
Atkinson, Maxine P. and Kathleen S. Lowney. 2016. In the Trenches: Teaching and Learning Sociology. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN: 9780393918779.
Nilson, Linda B. 2016. Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors. Jossey-Bass: A Wiley Imprint. ISBN: 9781119096320.
Oldenburg, Ray. 1999. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, Third Edition. Marlowe & Co. ISBN: 9781569246818.
Rheingold, Howard. 2000 [1993]. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Revised Edition. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262261104. https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/ (last visited 2020.07.08).
SourceLab. ND. https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/sourcelab/index (last visited 2020.07.17).
Stearns, Mary F. 1998. "What Works for Me: First Day Class Activities." Pp. 161-165 in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 98, May. edited by J.A. Pearce.
Symonds, Paul and Valeria Lo Iacono Symonds. 2020. "21 Free Fun IceBreakers for Online Teaching, Students & Virtual and Remote Teams." Symo Training: Certified Course Training Materials. https://symondsresearch.com/icebreakers-for-online-teaching/ (revised 2020.06.14; last visited 2020.07.08).
There are plenty of other icebreaker ideas out there, whether for online interactions or face-to-face gatherings, so take a few minutes to surf those icy waters. If you find something promising, please share it with me (djs@illinois.edu.) Thanks!
Revised: 2020.10.30