Connecting in Today’s World: Terms and concepts
Blogs: Experts or other interested writers keep track of new developments and issues in a field, and write what they think about them. Readers can go online to read their postings and make comments, or get updates delivered directly to them.
Communities of practice: These are small groups of people who work together on a common topic for a limited or open-ended period of time. The key is that everyone comes together with a common purpose and a real desire to share what they know with the community. The focus is on conversation, sharing of ideas and documents, collaboration, support, and continuity.
Moderated email listservs: CLAS-talk is an example of a listserv with a broad theme that allows people to send emails posing questions or issues to a large group of people, and to get answers or engage in a dialogue. It’s also possible to set up targeted listservs with a small invited membership, and focus on resource sharing, problem solving, and moral support related to a specific topic (like managing a cultural and linguistic services department).
Online collaborative workspaces: There are many web sites that host private workspaces for online collaboration and virtual teams where people can upload and collaborate on documents and communicate with each other in the development and editing process. Some involve real-time conferencing and instant messaging.
Online forums: Many websites host forums or community bulletin boards where users can pose questions and get answers from whoever else is reading. The questions and answers stay there permanently for others to view.
Social and professional networking sites: Hip people are on Facebook. Serious people are on LinkedIn. These are some ways for people to profile who they are and what they’re interested in. We’ve created the Attendee Profiles on the conference website as a start-up endeavor to connect people in the field of cross cultural health care. If it’s popular and useful, we may expand the kinds of information that could be featured on it.
Telephone conference calls: People call into a conference number, hear one or more presentations, and have a discussion with featured experts and fellow callers.
Web conferencing: These are live meetings or presentations conducted over the Internet. Each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet. Presentations and interaction can be delivered through slide presentations, live video, audio-over-internet, text chat, polls and surveys, and screen sharing.
Wikis: These are user-created (meaning you, the expert) online ‘encyclopedias’ or databases of information on a particular subject. All users are invited to edit any page or to create topics, entries and updates within the wiki web site, enabling documents to be written collaboratively. A single page in a wiki website is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire collection of pages, which are usually well interconnected by hyperlinks, is "the wiki".
Virtual worlds: For those of you ready for the cutting edge, virtual worlds are created online environments where participants interact through ‘avatars’ -- computer representations of themselves (or someone they’d like to be). While early use has focused on social or game-playing interactions, increasingly serious applications are being developed for virtual meetings and education and training purposes (including a health education program featured at the conference).
Tell us what you think about these tools – make sure you fill out the Your Voice survey. You can find it on paper in the front of the conference binder, or online here.