Follow-up discussion after the workshop or the faculty meeting may be limited or not at all, and a systematic conversation may never happen. Many people consequently do not benefit from the knowledge that they are not alone in their confusion, or that they share similar ideas about the utility of a particular administrative or instructional tool. The consequence can be uneven implementation of strategies intended to be developed through formal professional development programming and incomplete organizational change. Distance learning technologies can provide a suitable infrastructure for the exchange of ideas and deepening of community among groups convening around a focused purpose. Email, threaded conferencing, and the World Wide Web are a suite of tools that can mitigate physical disconnections and strengthen intellectual ones among groups sharing a common interest but lacking a common space or time in which to share ideas around their common interest.
Email supports individual to individual and individual to group interaction.
Threaded conferencing supports individual to group interactions. Participants can add new topics to the discussion agenda, or they can respond to already existing topics. What sets threaded conferencing apart from email is the capacity for threaded conferences to provide an ongoing account of the discussion on the same display. Readers can scroll through a discussion that is tantamount to a transcript. Though threaded conferencing is an older telecommunications technology, it's recent development as a Web resource has made it a readily accessible tool to document and a context in which to facilitate discussion about complex topics because of their emotional or cultural value.