Q1 how does the dialogue in connect express differ from other types of communication you are familiar with and why is it different?
I believe my connect express experience is immensely different than the types of communications I am familiar with on a daily basis, to begin with, I prefer physical communication and talking face to face and actually find that communicating digitally has too many obstacles such as not being able to portray the correct meaning of my words, connectivity problems and many others. The dialogue itself also differs seeing that I usually interact with individuals of the same background as I am in terms of religion, ethnicity, culture and nationality, however during the program I got to connect with several people from different backgrounds and actually found out that I have a lot in common with them, this was initially shown through the identity task we had to create by listing 7 things that make up who we are and most of us had 2-3 in common, it was also shown through our interests and hobbies. Another different aspect is that we took turns to speak and weren’t allowed to speak over each other using the grabbing mic tool, this allowed us to listen better and have a better-quality conversation.
Question 2: what type of communicator I am in the digital world?
I learned that I actually am a very good listener, and I am very open to different points of view and that I am never easily triggered and actually very understanding as to trying to comprehend why the person has this specific outlook, I also learned that I really like exploring different aspects of different people that I barely know and I allow them to do so as well even though I am a very closed off person in the real world. I also learned that I’m a rather active communicator as I was always very eager to participate and voice my opinions and knowledge about the topics we discussed.
Question 3: what can you do to foster constructive communication both online and face to face?
This was a topic we mentioned a lot in our dialogues and I think we all had the same principles, to begin with we have to go in with an open mind and understand and foster differences between individuals, secondly, we have to be respectful and even if we have different opinions we have to voice them in a manner that is acceptable. We also have to listen and try to understand the meaning someone is voicing and then respond in regards to that seeing that too often, people are eager to respond rather than understand. We also have to be honest and put ourselves into other people’s shoes and also empathy was a key thing , we all shared personal stuff about ourselves that made us who we are and we have to be empathetic towards one another
My overall experience was very informative and enjoyable, I had lovely individuals in my group that are all different in regards of backgrounds but we all had things in common and actually loved learning about one another, I had some technical issues during the sessions seeing that they are rather lengthy and my country’s internet is not the best and I think that was the only downfall, sometimes it was also difficult to understand the local terms seeing that most of us were of different nationalities but we were all very open about it and asked for further clarification and that actually allowed room for more growth and getting the best out of the experience.
