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Division Listserve |
Dear Division 42 Member We are pleased to invite you to join the Division 42 email list which has been created to provide a forum for collegial discussion among division members. Participation in the list is a membership benefit, thus there is no cost to you to belong. Benefits of list membership can include opportunities to:
We hope you will join us and look forward to getting to know you! Sincerely, Rona LoPresti Read what others have said about the listserve: This issue (Winter IP - 2004), I devote my column to imploring readers to join our Division 42 email “listserve.” For those of you who participate, you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t, you have no idea what you are missing. The listserve provides the community that independent practitioners need. Once you get hooked, you will wonder how you ever lived without daily or weekly contact from your online Division 42 friends. Isolation is one of the drawbacks of independent practice. You sit in your office, seeing patients, often with no regular communication with colleagues. Some of us are in group practices, so we have a chance to shoot the breeze with a friend, comment on the news, discuss a new scheme to make a buck or decry a new scheme to take our hard earned bucks from us. For those of us who lack easy access to that kind of community, the listserve provides it, electronically, daily, and, with wireless and remote email connections, anywhere on earth. Even if you have plenty of daily contact with colleagues, you will also treasure your listserve contacts. They include some of the best known, brightest and most creative independent practitioners in the U.S. and Canada. For those who have never tried a listserve, here’s what it is: It is basically a piece of software that relays any email sent from a member to the email addresses of all other members of the list. You never see or install the software. You just use a particular email address for the listserve and your mail goes to all other members. For Division 42 list members, that address is div42@lists.apa.org. Send an email to that address, and it instantly goes via email to the several hundred members of Division 42 who subscribe. Once members look at their inboxes, they see that this particular email came from the Division 42 listserve and that you wrote it. The downside of belonging to a listserve is that you might get 50 emails on a given day. That is also the upside, as I’ll explain. People on the list shoot the breeze about whatever they like. You will find not all topics are interesting to you, but you will find some that are. If you were in the mood to read about HIPAA when it was first implemented, you could find more than you ever wanted to learn about HIPAA on the listserve. If you are concerned about evidence based practice, you’ll find that on the list, along with periodic discussions of the best ways to treat borderlines, do custody evaluations, make martinis, shovel snow, collect money from patients, furnish an office, fight with a particular managed care company, or tell a joke. Discussions range from professional to political, with side trips into questions about computer viruses and computers. The wonderfully amazing thing is that someone on the list knows the answer to any question. Topics that involve opinion will generate all possible opinions. If knowledge is, indeed, power, the Division 42 listserve will make you stronger than The Hulk. And, if the subject line of an email is something that you find uninteresting, there is always the delete key. Also for those concerned about too many e-mails, there is a digest version of the list that allows you to receive a summary of all mailings and choose to read only the subject lines you find of interest. Join the list for more details on this feature. People who are new to the list, tend to lurk. They feel like they just walked into a party where everyone knows everyone else. Lurking is the good way to see what is going on, who is who, and what the pattern of interaction is. A lurker receives all the listserve emails, but doesn’t reply or participate. The great thing about being a lurker, if that is what you feel comfortable doing, is no one knows you are there lurking. You can follow the conversation for weeks or months until you feel comfortable jumping in. It’s like being invisible at a cocktail party—no social anxiety because no one is pressuring you to talk. When new people feel ready to jump in, they tend to send an introductory letter to the list, saying who they are and what they do. After that, it’s a matter of seeing what topic is interesting enough to warrant a reply. Or, you can initiate a discussion of a new topic. Trust me, if you lurk for a few days, you’ll quickly pick up the lay of the land and feel comfortable. Soon, you’ll be checking for new emails between each patient and typing your replies quickly, as you rush off to see the next one. The listserve has regulars who drop by almost daily, much like the general store in a small, New England town. Frank Froman offers his humorous and wise ramblings pretty much daily, and Ken Pope serves as the resident scholar, researcher, computer genius and humanitarian. Raise a difficult ethics question, and you might get input from Gerry Koocher. Ask something related to APA politics, and incoming APA President Ron Levant might reply, as well as all members of the Division 42 board. When I travel on business, I still feel at home when I connect my laptop to an airport wireless “hotspot” and check out what my friends are saying. Indeed, I am so hooked that I have posted replies in flight via the dial up service that is available from some airlines. When you have a caring community like the Division 42 list, you want to participate. As our lives become more fragmented during this information age, we can develop new resources to help us recapture the sense of community found in a small town. For Division 42 members, our listserve is the place. To join the listserve, send an email to LISTSERV@LISTS.APA.ORG. In the body of the email, put only: subscribe div42 I look forward to seeing new people on the list. Marty Williams Mary/colleagues, |
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subscribe: email central office:click here; or go to the listserv online form by clicking here. |