Here I am participating in a Google Hangout On Air with Virtually Connecting. We were engaging with teacher-scholars from Egypt, Turkey, England, and the US! Speakers and instructors at the Digital Pedagogy Lab in VA guided our conversation.

I spent an hour of my day yesterday alone in a conference room. But I wasn’t really alone: I was on Google Hangouts with a bunch of people from around the world. As the ten of us fumbled with our web cameras and headphones, our audio and video tests (“Can you hear me?” “Can you see me?”), we all had one goal: to get to know each other and talk about our work in digital pedagogy.

Unstructured social interactions like these used to make me feel very anxious. What were we going to talk about? How would I start a conversation? How would I keep it moving? In college, I took several classes with journalist and master interviewer Larry Grobel, and, in one class, he told us about his technique for managing social interactions, and it has always stayed with me.

It’s simple, really: ask a stranger as many questions as you can think of.

Larry insisted that every person has an interesting story to tell. But we need to break through our fears of engaging with someone new to uncover those stories and be unafraid to ask someone about who they are and what they enjoy. Sometimes, you have to think creatively about what to ask sometimes, but the more that you learn about someone, the easier it can be to formulate those questions. Plus, the more that you show interest in someone, engage with them curiously and openly, the more connections you are likely to form.

This casual interviewing strategy has stuck with me for a long time because I find that, for the most part, it has served me well. As long as I can keep creatively thinking of questions to ask someone, I can keep a conversation moving.

So, yesterday, as I sat in my empty conference room and became a floating head in the virtual room with all of these new friendly professional faces, I wracked my brain for questions to ask. I realized that the situation here was different insofar as I couldn’t really engage one-on-one with anyone in particular, but I could think about what kinds of questions or ideas might bring us all together, to cultivate a shared sense of connection and professional bond. We were in this unique space, after all, just to see what someone else had to say that day. It’s not often that we get opportunities to carve out time simply for idea-sharing and, yet, here we were.

The experience reminded me of a parallel and rather personal life moment I am in too: on the precipice of turning 30, I’ve seen several acquaintances circulate Kate Shellnut’s article on Vox about Why 30 is the decade friends disappear. Shellnut’s article describes how, when people transition into their 30s from their 20s, they report their frustrations with forming lasting friendships. Some of this difficulty has to do with the common life transitions that can happen for people in their 30s, from marriage to children, but Shellnut walks through the various reasons, psychological and otherwise, that people in their 30s can struggle with making new friends. It’s a sobering read, and a good reminder to remain open-minded and interested in meeting new people in-person.

But what that piece also reminded me of was how challenging it becomes to make new professional connections as you get increasingly entrenched in your career. It is easy for us to keep our professional circles small since, after all, we have to cultivate relationships with people on our own campuses, on our own committees, in our own programs. Why go outside of those spaces?

Since I still feel relatively new to the field of learning design, I’ve felt energized by and interested in forming connections outside of my campus community, but it’s not always easy. One thing I’ve noticed about the culture of higher education is that it tends to be focused pretty closely on individual efforts, labors, and merits. Regardless of what position we wind up in, we tend to attribute particular projects to particular individuals and allow them to do the work from that point onwards. Collaborations are, of course, critical, but my experience is that they often go unrecognized or unrewarded. Then, if we think about work at the level of cross-campus, or cross-institution collaboration, the material rewards for those of us in higher education are even more distant, even rarer.

Hearteningly, I’ve been impressed with the number of cross-campus collaboratives and networking organizations that have been forming in higher education. EdSurge LOOP, Penn State and Educause’s ID2ID program, and Virtually Connecting are all good examples of programs attempting to close the social gap and to bring new people from different campuses together to form relationships. I’ve enjoyed my interactions in all of these groups because they offer all of the good things that collaborations can: affirmations, new ideas, questions, and resources to explore. Indeed, they have encouraged me to ask questions, to step outside of my professional routines, and to be critically engaged with new people.

But I think all of these programs are still perhaps one step away from what we perhaps continue to crave: professional friendship. The ability not only to share an idea here and there, but to have sustained partnership or interaction around a particular cause or idea. This factor is probably missing because it just takes a long time to cultivate, and let’s be honest, developing an authentic, working relationship is so subject to the particular qualities of the individuals allowed. To form true and lasting professional relationships, you have to feel a mutual compulsion to keep spending time together, to keep thinking and dreaming together as you both move forward in the world.

This is all to say that I think something we can really take for granted in our professional lives is simply the value of new connection, of finding people who are “like us” in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, and trying to forge a relationship that goes beyond a “like” here and there. The project of forging relationships, of building new networks, is one that will probably be a life-long venture.

But for the moment, I am happy that there are lots of people building the infrastructures, spaces, and opportunities to bring lots of floating heads into a virtual room together just to hang out.