This post is a response to D’Arcy Norman’s Connect Project. The project asks: How do you connect to people online? As a remote employee, managing online course development projects, online communication and connection makes up most of my day. So to answer this question I tracked first who I connected with and then how the connections took place today.

Connecting with Colleagues: Today this includes my supervisor, co-workers, and project team members (an instructional designer, subject matter experts [SME], program chairs), and teaching faculty.

• E-mail sent from a work account mostly answering questions about courses in development.
• Calendar Tool (our organization uses Outlook) Looked at others’ schedules. Sent out and accepted meeting invitations.
• Skype used for both instant messaging and for a conference call. I currently have a Skype Number I use for work. I can call outside numbers and others can call in to my Skype account from their phones, too.
• On Sharepoint I posted updated files for an instructional designer and reorganized a folder with docs that are posted in all of our courses. I also responded to an issue posted by an instructor on another Sharepoint site.
• I uploaded documents to Basecamp and introduced this tool to a new SME to kick-off a project. Basecamp includes our project milestones, to-do lists, existing content files for editing, etc.

Connecting with Students: These are the consumers of the courses I help to prepare and produce. I am not currently teaching, but I think I connect with students nonetheless through updates to individual courses in our Learning Management System. This took place in the form of:

• added Announcements,
• updates to reading lists, and
• review of a course in the final stages of development.

Connecting with Friends: Friends, family, and former colleagues

• E-mail sent from a personal account. A former classmate just received news of a job offer! (Note to self: send e-card.)

Connecting with the Public at-large: posting information and responding to others’ posts.

• Twitter via Tweetdeck is usually running on my computer. Today I sent out a few tweets and followed a little bit of the #ecoo conference. The majority of my tweets are related to work, either passing along some piece of information I think might be helpful or asking others for recommendations. This is the newest way in which I connect with people online.
• Blog posts like this one. Hopefully it will help me connect with a reader or two. I also posted a comment on one other blog today.

While not used today, it is also worth mentioning that I often connect with others online via synchronous web meeting-type spaces. My employer uses Adobe Connect Pro and this has been successful recently for professional development sessions and a virtual conference.

How is your online day different from mine? Any suggestions for new tools to connect?