The OT Extravaganza

On Saturday, I was a presenter at the USC Occupational Therapy first annual OT Extravaganza. {Honest that is what they called it…} I was talked into this by my roommate who was on the hosting committee. She assured me that all I had to do was show up and talk about my project.
What project, you might ask? Well allow me to jump up on my soapbox and give you the flare of what I presented.
It was for my Occupational Therapy Doctoral (OTD) project. I presented it to my instructors, fellow classmates and friends and family members that attended the event, so they can get the idea of what I am doing. I explained that for my OTD project I would create an online community for occupational therapy and occupational science. This community would serve the needs of the occupational therapy and science profession.
Since I was there anyway, and I really do want input from my intended audience, I took the opportunity to survey members of this community for input regarding the look and feel as well as the content that they would like to have in their community.
They had many questions and I was really quite pleased with myself for knowing many of the answers. Most of the questions I fielded related to explaining how this was different from the large number of list-serves that are available through the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) web site. I addressed this by explaining that there were many differences between the two. I explained to the best of my knowledge and gave some examples of how an online community can offer so much more than a list-serve.
They also wanted to know what an avatar is since I had listed it on my questionnaire. I just wanted to get a sense of where the current OT community was at regarding the look and feel of a setting that would utilize avatars. Repeatedly they asked what an avatar was. I found this surprising since I thought it was fairly common knowledge what an avatar is. Even some of my friends that are often on their computers, were asking me about avatars.
It was an interesting and significant piece of information about the members of the OT community. It is not important if the online community utilizes an avatar, but it is important to keep in mind the readiness and willingness to learn a new way of interacting. When I design my site, it is of the utmost importance that it is not intimidating to my OT cohorts who are not accustomed to using the internet in this capacity.
In the end, though it took all day Saturday and I had to prepare the presentation for most of Friday, it was worth the time because it gave me a significant insight plus several dozen completed surveys that I can utilize in the creation of this online community.