Teaching online in Covid-19. This is my story.

This academic year, I have missed the random meetings and everyday conversations with my colleagues at work, as we pass each other walking to or from class, sitting for a cup of tea in the staff room, arranging to meet for lunch or queuing in the corridor to use the photocopier. Remember how we used to be with each other? Remember how we talked back then? Walter Benjamin (1936) writes that the ability to exchange experiences lies at the heart of storytelling. But I am not sure where to begin in telling you this story. Perhaps the present moment is best. It is level 5 lockdown in Ireland. I hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my front door. I am about to put on my microphone and ear set, turn on the computer, adjust trailing wires, block out the light from the window, find my cushion, check the sound, video and internet connection, launch the local virtual learning environment (VLE), navigate my way to a module on biography, The Power of Story and Narrative, click on the link, find the virtual classroom, join the room, load my slides and images and wait for students to show up on the screen as icons. Forced on line by `the emergency of a global pandemic last March, of necessity this is where I and students now reside together. Vocabulary is indicative of the change I am transformed from digital `visitor to `resident. Something is deeply awry. Converting a classroom and campus based third year undergraduate social science research methods course to the digital environment is technically and pedagogically challenging. My instinct was for flight. Feeling overwhelmed, mixed with potent doses of doubt, anxiety and stress, a vein of stubborn resistance appeared. `Never give up I muttered. This meant signing up for numerable online courses over the summer of 2020, painfully picking my way through the basic technological skills and communication platforms required to sit in front of a screen and teach `remotely from my desk in the attic, alone. I needed to understand something that I did not. Stay safe. Stay safe. Stay safe. There is irony at work here too. The emergency over, I make the `pivot to online teaching and learning. I sign up for a semester long course `Learning Technologies as a student. Teaching and learning have never seemed so connected, close and entangled. A strange ambiguity emerges I am student and teacher, both and neither. I am no longer surrounded by the structures, titles, roles and relations of the material university nor bolstered by the physical presence of colleagues and students or the architecture of corridors and classrooms. I reflect on my professional identity as teacher, educator, pedagogue, lecturer. Who am I now and where do I fit? The scholarly community to which I belonged for many decades appears to recede. Will virtual realities supplant memories of strong bonds and displace collegial ties? But such philosophical distractions do not last long. The labour of preparing new courses and examination materials, the rhythm and repetition of teaching live online, recording lectures, listening to and working with students every day, writing individual and group emails, talking by phone, meeting in the virtual classroom is absorbing and preoccupying. There is no time for reflection, no opportunity to share and exchange the profound individual experiences of the transformation of teaching and learning. How do we connect and empathise with each other in this setting? Our interior lives appear to be more available online but I am not sure. I taste each new word that I use to describe the actions for online work; `blog, `pivot, `link, `upload, `launch, `submit, and `embed. Peculiarly empty, these words fill me with foreboding. How are you coping? What is your experience? What have you learned? Please tell me.