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By Dr. Harry Tennant

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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Online Mentoring

What does one do with all these buckets of wisdom (???) collected over a working lifetime? Mentoring can put it to use, and the way to do it today is primarily online.

I have mentored professionals in the past and continue to do so today. Decades ago, face to face meetings were the way to go. Either meet on an as-needed basis or on a more formal scheduled basis. Sometimes meetings were done in the office if convenient or perhaps at lunch meetings.

Today, you can be far more efficient and effective using online technology for mentoring. Email, video chat, phone calls and webinar-style connections allow mentors and mentees to connect when questions arise and address them immediately. In fact, I prefer online webinar-style meetings to face-to-face meetings when the topic of discussion is specific such as software development questions. Better than two people trying to crowd around the same keyboard, mouse and monitor, you can both be looking at a shared screen image, control of the mouse and keyboard can go from one to the other easily, and the discussion is concrete, not a bunch of abstractions and likely misunderstandings.

For more general discussions I like video chat links such as using Skype or ooVoo (my preference). The communication isn't quite as good as face to face meetings, but I find it better than a phone call yet just as spontaneous as a phone call. And if there's a need to quickly get more specific, you can switch over to a webinar connection.

K12 Mentoring

My experience with mentoring has been almost entirely limited to within a business environment. Why? Because that's where it could be done without considerable overhead of getting a mentee and myself at the same place to have a mentoring session. But online mentoring has changed all that. One of the things that the new technology enables is the ability for life-experienced and work-experienced people to work with students.

When the whole tribe sat around the campfire at night there was easy communication between the young and the old. Experience and novel challenges were easily passed in both directions. But today, kids rarely know exactly what their parents or other adults do at work all day or how they do it. And adults have only a vague understanding of what school life is really like. But that can change with online mentoring. The dinner table is probably still the best place to talk about life's challenges and solutions with your own kids, but to work with other kids, online mentoring is easy and convenient.

Posted at 12:00 AM Keywords: mentoring 1 Comments

 
Seth Stephens said...
I think it is interesting to look at the progression (if that is what you call it?) of personal communication changing within families and communities from the old night time campfire discussion to the family dinner table, to the current situation we find ourselves in. That form of communication seems to be missing today, at least in our culture. People feel nostalgia and ache for those close family interactions of yesteryear, but one thing is for sure, everything changes. The answer is rarely to cling to the way things used to be with white knuckles. Instead we must find a way to integrate what we have with what we want, and I am impressed to see that you are using and suggesting ways of doing just that. Now if we can just find ways to encourage more families to do the same. Your positive attitude is half the battle

Saturday, March 5, 2011 6:10 PM

   

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