A Question from Justin, Vision Night, and Other Stuff.
Posted by Justin Wise Transmission Timesamp: 8:04 AMHey everybody, Justin here.
I've been thinking about ways I can be easily accessible to all you Immersionites in case you ever have a need to connect, be it prayer requests, concerns, or just time to chat. How to do that with 250-300 weekly has been, of course, a challenge. But alas, we live in a time unlike any else where communication is no longer limited by space (or time, for that matter.)
All that to say, recently I came across a site that I've really been digging and have started to use it to communicate to our Team Leaders on weekly basis. The site is TokBox.com and it's really sharp. Amongst other things, it allows for group chat rooms and individual video chats. (Oh yeah, it's a regular instant messaging service as well.) Check out my page here.
Then I started thinking about how my professors in college used to have office hours. You know, they'd put on the syllabus things like, "Office Hours: 2-2:01 pm. Must call ahead for appointment." (Something tells me they never liked having office hours. Maybe it was the fact that those hours consisted of cranky students wanting a better grade? I digress. . . .) Then I started thinking, "What if I had office hours, but if instead of being physically located in an office, I held 'virtual office hours'? What would that look like?"
All that to say, recently I came across a site that I've really been digging and have started to use it to communicate to our Team Leaders on weekly basis. The site is TokBox.com and it's really sharp. Amongst other things, it allows for group chat rooms and individual video chats. (Oh yeah, it's a regular instant messaging service as well.) Check out my page here.
Technical specs aside, my question to you is this: Would you utilize "virtual office hours" if I had them? What if I blocked out a certain set of hours during the week to be "e-vailable" to you on TokBox? Would you "stop by" for a video chat over your lunch hour? Would you share a prayer request over IM? What if we had a "group prayer" session online where you could see 15 other Immersionites via webcam? Would you benefit from something like this?
Basically it boils down to being available for all of you who consider Immersion "home." With all of us being scattered all over different parts of the city (and country and world, according to the webcast!), I have found that being online is one of the easiest ways to connect with people. Let me know in the comments if this would be of value to you. Just a thought.
In closing, I want to leave you with the video webcast from last week's Vision Night. We met on 3.03.09 to discuss what God was doing in Immersion and how we could all play a part in that. How we could continuously be immersed in Christ, immersed in community, and immersed in culture. The quality isn't all that great, but you'll get the gist of what went on.
