Rebecca Jestice, Author at Leading Virtually

Returning to Leading Virtually

Rebecca Jestice — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:26:49 +0000

I have been away from writing for Leading Virtually for a little more than a year. I didn’t intend for my absence to be so long, but it was a very eventful and busy year for me. I am happy to be blogging again for Leading Virtually at the start of this new year! Although I was away from Leading Virtually, I was not away from the realms of leadership and computer mediated communication. I’ll tell you briefly what I was doing the past year and few months.

One thing I was doing was getting married! Leading Virtually readers will be able to relate to my story. I met my husband in Second Life in 2007. He is from Europe and I am from the US. So we developed and grew a relationship using online and mobile tools like Skype and Picassa, and virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft in between our opportunities to visit. After four years I consider myself a veteran of online communication! We look forward to the day these tools are unnecessary, but we are so thankful that we live in a world in which they exist and make our communications easier and instantaneous even across the Atlantic.

The other thing I was doing was finishing my dissertation! I successfully defended my dissertation in November. My dissertation focused on using virtual worlds for education and training. I completed two different studies using two different virtual worlds. I’ll give a brief description here of the two studies and will write subsequent posts with details of each. In the first study, I used the Virtual Forbidden City to look at student learning about the Forbidden City in Beijing. The study had students learn about the Forbidden City using an online PowerPoint presentation as used in a lot of distance education courses as well as taking a virtual field trip to the Forbidden City using the virtual world. The second study focused on using online tools for leadership development. In this study, a comparison was made between using Second Life and WebEx for delivering some basic leadership training materials and activities.

Again, I’ll give more details about the studies and what we found in my next posts. Today I wanted to say happy New Year, and I look forward to writing again and continuing our conversations.

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Recent News on Social Media

Rebecca Jestice — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:05:10 +0000

This week I have run across some very interesting articles on social media and how their use is evolving. These two articles struck me as interesting because they discuss requiring people to use Facebook or Second Life in order to perform in classes or on the job. I think these use-cases highlight that we desire to use social tools available to us, and use them in ways that are beneficial to clients, colleagues, and students. But they also highlight that, as with any new system we adopt, there should be measures of their effectiveness, a case made for why they are our top choices, and clear guidelines for requiring people to join and provide personal information to third party applications.

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that Penn State’s online campus is now requiring student advisers to offer meeting hours in Second Life for students. Advisers are required to offer at least 2 hours a week of availability in Second Life for meeting with students in addition to the other regular methods of communication. This will be an interesting case to watch, as it is requiring advisers to join a third party application to do their jobs. It is also curious because it is bringing something personal–student advising–into an open forum where privacy could potentially be an issue. Quotes from the social-networks adviser at Penn State indicate that, once trained in the basics of Second Life, the advisers are enjoying their time there. So far, I have seen no mention of success such as the students finding it beneficial, or finding it beneficial in ways beyond what other communication channels offer them. Perhaps the program is too new for analysis of its success at this stage.

A blog post, also from The Chronicle, discussed a teacher who has his students friend him on Facebook as a requirement for his business course. The Illinois State University professor uses Facebook as his course management system and requires students to friend him on the first day of class. The professor will work with students to adjust privacy settings on Facebook if they have some reservations about the set up. Assignments are submitted through students’ profile pages and questions can be asked by posting to the professor’s wall. At the end of the semester the professor de-friends all of his students and claims that he does not peruse their profiles. Again, currently I don’t see any discussion of whether or not the students find this as or more beneficial than a school supplied course management system, which operates behind a firewall, out of the public space.

In this case, the professor states that part of his point in using Facebook is teaching students that their online presence becomes part of their digital resume and that the World Wide Web doesn’t forget what you’ve posted or put into the public forum online. In this case students are required to belong to a third party application (one that has been criticized for its privacy measures in the past) in order to successfully complete their course.

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How Harmful is Facebook to Reputations and Relationships?

Rebecca Jestice — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:38:00 +0000

I recently deactivated my Facebook account. Although it had been a handy tool for reconnecting with old friends, keeping up with some colleagues, and socializing with family & other loved ones, in the past few months, I began to experience a downside to the social networking site. This eventually led to the deactivation of my account. Although social networking can be a useful tool, I came to the conclusion that, for me, Facebook took things too far, to the point that it became too much work to maintain my account appropriately, I began to worry about my online reputation, and I began to feel that I lived in a self-created, all-too-public bubble with serious negative consequences on some important relationships.

The beginning of my concern over Facebook came when Facebook began making default settings on accounts so that everyone could have access to your postings. I was spending too much time making sure that what I wanted to stay private was in fact private or shared with only certain people, and that I didn’t see all the extraneous junk that I didn’t want to see from my friends. I admit that I enjoyed interaction with some of my friends over games like Mafia Wars, but I didn’t want my business colleagues to know that I was becoming increasingly respected in my online “crime family” — it’s not appropriate — and I didn’t think that anyone else truly cared. The privacy settings were time consuming and not always as easy to use as I thought they should be. Canada has even brought serious concerns to the social networking site—citing that Facebook does not comply with their national privacy laws because of the company’s policy of keeping your account information indefinitely (notice in the beginning I said I ‘deactivated’ and not ‘deleted’ my Facebook account).

The ACLU has also recently brought attention to Facebook and the lack of measures in place to protect users’ privacy. The organization has recently created a Facebook quiz with the sole intention of showing you the access that quiz creators have to your information when you or a friend takes part in one of the numerous, often silly, Facebook quizzes. The quiz emphasizes that Facebook has inadequate safeguards to ensure that any information collected is legitimately for and used only for the operation of the Facebook application. In other words, quiz developers can potentially take whatever information they want and do whatever they want with it. Perhaps most startling is that there is no kind of screening in place to even know or verify who the developers are. You can see the quiz questions and answers.

Setting your security settings to maximum and keeping a bare minimum profile may not be enough to protect your privacy on sites like Facebook. MIT students were recently able to create pretty accurate software that could guess whether or not a man was gay based on basic profile information and friends lists—even if the man did not identify himself as gay on his Facebook page. Another group was able to accurately guess social security numbers based on publicly available data and information such as birth date and birth place—both things which many people have on their Facebook profiles in the form of birthday and hometown. That’s enough to begin identity theft. This raises questions about what else can be gleaned from even basic social networking pages.

Beyond privacy issues, there are real potential relationship consequences from using Facebook—for both professional and personal relationships. A recent article on PC World warned of the digital tattoo that one leaves behind on social networking sites that could potentially be seen by the wrong person. Even if you think your social networking pages are totally private, remnants of this digital tattoo could potentially be found through search engine sites such as Google or Yahoo by potential employers, colleagues, family members or those without good intentions. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how things you may have posted 10 years ago on the Internet or talked about some time ago on a social networking site could come back to haunt you in work or personal relationships now. If you’d like a bit of insight into your digital tattoo, go to Yasni.com and search for your name. It will give a tag cloud of terms and people associated to you as well as a list of links related to you—all just a click away from more information. My tag cloud included my colleagues on Leading Virtually as well as things related to Japan, where I lived 10 years ago, a bookstore I managed more than 5 years ago, a conference I attended earlier this year, and a few acquaintances that I haven’t been in contact with for almost a decade.

Another recent article in the Wall Street Journal accurately described perhaps the biggest potential problem with the extent that Facebook is being used in our lives today—the ruining of friendships and relationships. Some pitfalls contributed to the use of the medium in our important relationships include the feelings of jealousy or resentment when friends or colleagues tell us that they are too busy to write or call, yet they are updating their Facebook status every hour and obviously spending a lot of time on the site taking quizzes or “conversing” with others online. Other issues that can cause rifts in relationships is the posting of boring or inane information that one would never really announce in face-to-face interactions, seeing previously unknown sides of someone’s personality, and the boldness that comes from interacting online that might encourage someone to say something that they might not say face-to-face—all of which is taking place in a completely public forum and can lead to embarrassment, and of course, more of a digital tattoo.

Ultimately, I decided two things: 1) I need to invest time and care into the relationships – personal and professional – that are important to me. I cannot rely on Facebook to be the basis of our communication if the relationship is to be a healthy, growing one. 2) It’s not necessarily wise to mingle personal and professional relationships. Before social networking sites, our circles of friends and colleagues were often very separate. Before I deactivated my account, I had a list of almost 200 “friends” from every facet of my life—my family, students, my advisor, friends from high school, former professors, former employers, my college roommate, and friends from other towns I had lived in. Each group serves a different purpose in my life and they aren’t necessarily meant to mingle. It lead to the feeling that suddenly all aspects of my life were colliding and open to people that maybe the door should be closed to sometimes for my protection and theirs.

I am not suggesting that the answer to protecting yourself and your relationships is to deactivate your Facebook or all your social networking accounts. That’s not really reasonable. However, as leaders, professionals, and friends, I advocate spending some time thinking about how we use social networking tools and to what end, as well as what the future consequences of our actions in the online social world could be. I’m sure I’ll return to Facebook eventually but with a strict set of personal guidelines for how I use the account.

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Using a Virtual World for Multiple Audiences: Benefits & Challenges

Rebecca Jestice — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:44:31 +0000

At the Academy of Management meeting earlier this month, I had the pleasure of assisting Dr. Ulrike Schultze in a session that she coordinated. The panelists at the session were respected journal editors. What was different about this session from other sessions at the annual meeting was that it was held simultaneously in Second Life and the hotel in Chicago. It was an experiment of sorts to see how virtual world technology could bring conference events to those who were unable to travel to the actual event.

The session consisted of presentations by 4 panelists. Three of the panelists were at the Academy of Management meeting and presented to a live audience there. They also had avatars in Second Life in the meeting room there. The other panelist joined the meeting via Second Life with his avatar. Power point slides that the panelists used were shown through Second Life, so attendees in SL could see the slides in the meeting room there. The slides, and the SL meeting room/avatars, were broadcast to the live audience through a projector. Audio from SL was broadcast through speakers to the meeting room in Chicago, and audio into SL was broadcast through a microphone. The session lasted about one and a half hours. I was fortunate to be able to assist Dr. Schultze with the technological side of the session; it was a good learning experience in some of the potential benefits and challenges of using virtual world technology to hold meetings, events, or collaborate in “mixed” settings, where some people are in a virtual world and others are not.

Potential Benefits

One major benefit I saw to using a virtual world such as Second Life in this way was that people who were unable to attend the meeting in Chicago would be able to attend a session from wherever they happened to be. Second Life attendees could get the same information that those at the meeting received. This could be done through live streaming of the session or by recording it and posting videos later, as well. However, the added benefit of the virtual world in this case, is that the presentation becomes interactive even for those who can’t attend in person. By gathering in the virtual world during the actual session, presenters know who else is attending the session and virtual world attendees have a chance to participate instead of just listen and/or watch. For example, using my virtual world account I could type a chat message to a moderator to ask questions or I could make comments about a particular topic through audio capabilities. Additionally, being in the virtual world space allows attendees to “run into” other people attending the session through the virtual world. Much of the value of conferences and meetings is the informal communication and networking that occurs before and after working sessions. Using a virtual world would give those same communication opportunities to others that can’t attend in person. In fact, the use of Second Life allowed one panelist to join the session and present from another country.

Another potential benefit I saw to using virtual worlds in this way was permanence and the potential to aid collaboration. After a session such as this, an interactive billboard with presentation notes could be left in the virtual world where later visitors could still browse through the materials that were discussed. A virtual notebook could even be left where visitors could add their ideas or comments to discussion materials. Having such materials available longer term could help sessions or meetings extend asynchronously over a longer period of time, giving people time to develop new ideas. It would give events a life outside of the few hours and four walls in which it happened.

Challenges

Despite the potential benefits, there were also some challenges to conducting a session in this way. Most of the challenges that I saw could be put under the umbrella term “technology.”

One challenge was the use of power point slides within Second Life. Although Dr. Schultze did a fantastic job of having everyone’s presentation available and visible at the right moments, it was a lot of work for her. Getting all of the panelists logged on, into the right location, and with proper audio features was also a challenge; most of them had never used Second Life before. With two of us to handle some of the technological components it was still challenging to get everything ready and functioning properly on time. Some of these issues, such as the difficulty with running a power point presentation, are specific to the Second Life platform. However, the general lesson was that the learning curve for effectively using a virtual world is very steep. Presenters and attendees may have negative reactions to having to learn the technology on their own in order to present or attend one event or meeting.

The other challenge I saw was that the interactivity provided by the use of Second Life was not complete. In other words, people at the meeting could see the attendees in Second Life, but not vice-versa. So, while the virtual world provided some opportunities for interaction, it did not fully integrate the two audiences.

Despite the technological challenges faced, I think there were glimpses of real benefits to conducting future events or meetings simultaneously. When the technological challenges can be overcome and virtual worlds become more user friendly these benefits will become more pronounced. Sun Microsystems is already working on a solution to the challenge of bridging the gap between co-located and virtual audiences with their porta-person system.

Has anyone else attended a similar event or session? What was the experience like? Was it beneficial?

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Does Online Identity Matter In Virtual Teams?

Rebecca Jestice — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:23:12 +0000

I just returned from the Academy of Management conference in Chicago where I presented a paper that Surinder and I wrote with Professor Rui Huang. Our paper was an extension of the research we have been doing on leadership in virtual worlds that I wrote about previously. This paper focused on how one’s online identity may affect virtual team member perceptions and how virtual teams work together. Specifically, we looked at how one’s online identity affects perceptions of anonymity within the team and how that sense of anonymity affects group cohesion and satisfaction. We find this topic to be interesting and timely as organizations begin to use more online media for collaboration and communication. Organizations have to decide how much and if they are going to set rules or guidelines for how employees present themselves, especially as options for expression expand to the creation of avatars in virtual worlds.

For this study, we had student groups, who did not know the other members in their team, perform a decision making task in either Second Life or instant messaging chat rooms. Intuitively one might guess that people in Second Life would be able to and inclined to create an avatar that closely represents how they are in the real world. In instant messaging, I can only create a user name to project to the other group members, but in Second Life I can manipulate physical attributes of my avatar in order to project myself. However, research has shown that in spaces such as massive multiplayer online games, users will create identities for themselves that are more like their ideal self, or how they imagine their more perfect selves (see this article, e.g.), than identities that reflect how they really are. So, we hypothesized that people in Second Life would actually perceive their online identity in the virtual world as less like their real identity than people in instant messaging. We also hypothesized that if users perceived their online identity to be similar to their real identity, then they would feel that they are able to project who they really are more easily to the group and others can recognize them more easily in the group. In other words, those who had an online identity further from their real identity would perceive themselves as being more anonymous to the other members of their group. Additionally, we expected that when team members perceive themselves as more anonymous to other members in their group, it would be more difficult to build relationships with others and group work will be less satisfying.

Our results indicate that online identities of IM users were perceived to be closer to users’ real identities than online identities of SL users. The more the online identity was perceived as close to one’s real identity, the lower was perceived anonymity of oneself and others. We also found that higher levels of perceived anonymity led to lower levels of perceived cooperation, group cohesion, and satisfaction within the groups. In other words, how closely one’s online identity resembles one’s real identity can influence how team members experience virtual team processes and outcomes in decision-making tasks. The features available for creating one’s identity in a given medium can influence how one creates one’s online identity and how close that identity might resemble one’s real identity. The more choices that are available, the more likely a user is to create an identity that is less like their real self.

Although this is a first step in understanding the role of online identity in group processes in virtual teams, some initial recommendations can be drawn from the study results. These ideas are based on the assumption that the virtual team or collaborators do not know each other well and do not have opportunities to meet face-to-face.

Organizations may want to consider making guidelines in virtual worlds for how much one’s avatar should differ from how one looks in the real world, especially for teams in which the members do not know each other well yet or are not able to meet face-to-face, but must collaborate to finish a task. This may also apply to meeting clients or customers in a virtual world when there is not an established relationship, although this still needs to be tested. If given too much latitude in the creation of online identities in the virtual world, the results could be a lack of group cohesion, trust and satisfaction.
If business is being conducted in a public virtual world such as Second Life, organizations may want to have employees create one identity, close to their real identity, for their work-related interactions and a separate one for using the virtual world for entertainment.
Organizations that are creating their own virtual world platform may want to carefully consider the features available for creating online identities. More features may lead to the creation of online identities further from users’ real identities which might negatively impact team outcomes. Or, if given many features for online identity creation, organizations may want to also provide guidelines to employees.
Team leaders that are bringing virtual teams together may want to consider which medium to use for team meetings and tasks. For teams that are meeting for a short period of time, or that have to work together to solve a problem, fewer available features for manipulating online identity may enhance the ability of the team to feel cohesion in the group.

If you have used a virtual world for collaboration, we would love to hear your experiences and perceptions regarding the impact of identity on your team or work.

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Virtual Worlds: A Potential Tool for Cross-Cultural Training

Rebecca Jestice — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:37:46 +0000

Previously, Surinder wrote a blog post on his observations about different cultural expectations and implicit communication patterns. He discussed some ways that virtual team leaders could help limit cultural snafus in teams. As more companies are working with partners around the world and multicultural teams occur more and more often, understanding of cultural differences is important for team members and leaders — for both face-to-face and virtual teams. Companies are purchasing seminars to help educate expatriates and those working in varying cultural contexts. (See this NY Times article about cross-cultural training effectiveness). However, companies are also trying to cut down on costs for training and other “extras”, and some intercultural training methods, such as one-time seminars, can be of limited effectiveness. For these reasons, intercultural training may be an excellent candidate for transfer to virtual world environments.

In this post I discuss social learning theory and how it could be applied to cross-cultural training in virtual worlds. The discussion of social learning theory is based on an article from the Academy of Management Review by J. Stewart Black and Mark Mendenhall.

Social Learning Theory
Social learning theory is the basis for the design of many business trainings used today. It describes how people learn new behaviors through not only their own experiences and the results of those experiences, but also through observing the behaviors and consequences of others. In other words, people can learn behavior modifications from the modeled behaviors of others. In fact, learning through observation of others can be of critical import for socialization and assimilation into new cultures. One study found that people entering a new organization relied most on observing others for learning about their role and the organizational culture and that observation was the most useful method for gathering the appropriate knowledge. Examples of modeled behavior currently used in trainings include watching films or role-plays from which trainees gather information on behaviors and the consequences of those behaviors. Lectures can even serve as a sort of behavioral modeling if connections are drawn between actions and consequences. Social learning theory describes 4 elements necessary for learning:

Attention
The trainee has to pay attention to and notice the behavior that is being modeled. Some factors that influence whether or not the trainee pays attention and how much attention is paid include: the status of the model; the attractiveness of the model; the similarity of the model to the trainee; and the repeated availability of the model.
Retention
The information has to be stored in memory and understood.
Reproduction
The trainee has to be able to reproduce the behavior and check his/her performance against the modeled behavior.
Motivation
There must be some sort of internal or external motivation for the trainee to change his/her behavior, such as the belief that the behavior will lead to better job performance or ease stress in new situations.

Using Virtual Worlds for Cross-Cultural Training
Cross-cultural training in virtual worlds could aid in attention and retention through features that aid immersion. Reproduction can take place multiple times in virtual worlds without the need for trainees to visit a specific place. And motivation could be enhanced through a fun or game-like atmosphere. For example, 3-D immersive spaces can be designed that represent the target culture and avatars that wear clothing worn in the target culture (for example, the Virtual Forbidden City is an immersive replica of the Forbidden City in Beijing, and all the avatars wear clothing historically appropriate to the Forbidden City). Gestures and animations could be used to give appropriate non-verbal communication cues. The use of avatars also allows users to practice appropriate interpersonal distances. Voice communication capabilities would allow for communication in the target language. The training environment could be developed so that multiple users interact in a space at once or “non-playing characters” could be developed to interact with users and help simulate real world encounters.

Based on elements of social learning theory, Black and Mendenhall have offered several propositions for making cross-cultural training effective. Three of these propositions should transfer very well to utilizing virtual worlds and their features for effective training.

The first proposition is that using models similar to the trainee will result in greater attention to the modeled behavior and more effective training. The malleability of identity available through the creation of avatars in virtual worlds should help trainers create avatars that look, and possibly act, similar to the trainee. Or, as suggested by the Proteus Effect, the trainee’s own avatar could be used to show the desired behavior and reinforce it. The Proteus Effect occurs when experiences that take place via an avatar translate into transformed behavior, such as people who watch their avatar exercise are more likely to exercise themselves. Viewing their own avatar should enhance attention to the behavioral modeling and reinforce it through direct experience at the same time.

The second proposition is that modeled behavior that is similar to already familiar behavior is easier to retain and reproduce. Although in cross-cultural training situations, trainees may be learning behaviors that are not readily similar to their own everyday ways of behaving, virtual worlds could help assimilate the new behaviors into more familiar situations that help create mental connections in trainees’ minds. For example, the environment in which the behavior is modeled could be made to resemble a familiar place that brings some level of familiarity to the trainee. After the behavior is modeled in the familiar environment, the environment could then be changed again to one that the trainee is likely to face in the future.

The third proposition is that successive modeling aids retention of the target behavior. Training areas could be set up in a virtual world that allow for multiple interactions over time without the need to travel to a special training area. Behaviors could be practiced with other trainees in different stages and over several times so that the behaviors become gradually more intuitive and reproducible. As mentioned above, this could also be done through the creation of non-playing characters that the trainee interacts with over time. One group at the University of Texas is doing this in order to teach people about Afghani culture. Variations in the characters that are brought to the world each time it is played allow for many iterations and varying circumstances that trainees can learn from. (Article information on this project can be seen here.) The company Alelo is also using this premise to provide cross-cultural and foreign language training for educational organizations and for military organizations.

Cross-cultural training is one promising area for using virtual worlds to deliver efficient training as well as cut costs and resource commitments from organizations. We may see over time that some of the features available in virtual worlds may actually increase the effectiveness of training over traditional seminars. Does anyone have any experience with or know of any other instances of virtual worlds for cross-cultural training? I would love to hear about them.

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Useful Technologies for the Remote Worker

Rebecca Jestice — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:36:30 +0000

I do a majority of my collaborating and individual work remotely, which I couldn’t do without the support of various programs. In this post, I thought I would share some of my favorite tools for working remotely. They may be useful to you in your collaboration work as well. I use most of these as a single user for private use. Those of you seeking to use them with commercial licenses might face different pay structures.

Google Docs: I mentioned in my previous post that we at Leading Virtually like to use Google Docs for collaborating on written projects. The spreadsheet and presentation capabilities also allow us to share data and work on group presentations together. Adobe has recently launched its own set of collaboration tools at Acrobat.com. The document, spreadsheet and presentation tools are designed to replace many of the functions for which one would use Microsoft Office and it offers many of the same functions as Google Docs. Acrobat.com is offering both free, basic accounts, and subscription based accounts. A review of the new tools can be read here.

Skype: Although most people know Skype as a way to communicate via instant messaging and VOIP with other Skype users for free, Skype also offers some services that make communication with non-Skype users inexpensive and easy. Skype account holders can purchase an Online Number, which acts as a regular telephone number and can be given out to non-Skype users or people that you don’t necessarily want to share your home or cell phone number with. You can choose the location for your phone number as well. For example, I can choose to purchase a phone number local to Indiana to give to associates from there so that the calls remain local for them when calling me. The phone number will ring your Skype account; when you are not online, you can always forward the calls to your home, office or cell phone. I can even use the call forwarding to forward to my pay-as-you-go cell phone I use in Germany–so those who need to get in touch with me can call a local US number and reach me on Skype or on a cell phone in Germany for only a small cost to me.

Another great service that Skype offers is Skype To Go. This is a number that you can use to call internationally from any phone using your Skype account. One US based phone number can be linked to up to 6 international numbers. When I want to call one of those numbers, I dial the US number and am prompted to choose which contact I am calling, and then I am connected. So I can make very inexpensive phone calls to international locations from my cell phone or home phone! I use one or both of these services several times a week and pay less than $15 a month on average in Skype credit and subscription fees.

Another potentially useful communications tool is on its way from Google. In a previous Leading Virtually Digest, we covered an article on Google’s new project, Google Voice. The new service will allow users to manage all of their phones (home, office, cell, etc.) through a single phone number that will ring them all simultaneously, so one can be reached anywhere without setting up call forwarding services. Previously, Google Voice was only open to subscribers of its previous incarnation, Grand Central. It has been announced that Google is now opening the service up more widely to those that requested invitations.

Team Viewer: Team Viewer is an easy to use client for remote desktop access and control. I use it for getting remote support when I encounter a problem, transferring large or forgotten files between my office and home computers, and meetings in which I need to share visual data or presentations. A great feature of Team Viewer is that you can set up permanent access to a computer with a computer ID and password. I set up permanent access to my office computer and access expensive statistics software that I don’t have at home. The speed and quality are excellent–far better than LogMeIn, which I used to use. Team Viewer is free for non-commercial use.

Similarly, DimDim is a popular, easy to use web conferencing tool that allows the sharing of presentations and web pages. It offers the added capabilities of sharing voice and video, which Team Viewer does not have.

YouSendIt: YouSendIt allows you to send files to others that are too large to go through regular email. YouSendIt is free as long as files are 100 MB or less. You upload the file you want to send and the recipient receives a link to the download site to retrieve it. There are several services similar to YouSendIt such as TransferBigFiles and DropSend,

Twitter: Although technically it may not be considered a productivity tool, Twitter is proving indispensable to me in learning about new developments and products available for remote workers. Twitter is an excellent place to keep up to date on what is happening in technology, remote work, and virtual collaboration. Quick searches on any of these topics or following knowledgable others uncovers a wealth of new sources of information, even from seemingly unlikely sources. For instance, today I discovered through Rachel Maddow’s feed, a service called Read The Words. This is a text to speech program that allows you to create audio files of RSS feeds, documents, and web sites. These can be saved and transferred to an mp3 player, embedded in your website (with a talking avatar), or made into podcasts. I used a similar service for listening to articles and keeping up on news while traveling, however the service I used was slow and only compatible with Windows. Read the Words seems much easier to use, is web-based, and, although the free account doesn’t offer much, the price for a year subscription is rather inexpensive. The voices are still rather robotic, however.

Here is an article on the best search tools for Twitter that take searching a step above Twitter’s own search capability. Lastly, although it is less talked about in the press, Google also has its own micro-blogging service called Jaiku, with many of the same features as Twitter as well as the ability to see friends’ calendars and availability.

By the way, Leading Virtually is now on Twitter @leadvirtually.

What do you use to help you accomplish your goals? I’d love to hear about your favorite tools!

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Communication is Key in Virtual Work

Rebecca Jestice — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:21:16 +0000

Surinder is my advisor and mentor in the doctoral program at Binghamton University. We have written several conference papers and collaborated on other projects together with Betsy and Professor Rui Huang at the university. Very often the two of us, or all of us, have worked together while geographically far apart. We have used tools like Google docs, Google groups, Yugma, Skype, e-mail and Team Viewer to communicate and collaborate. This has worked quite well and is often more convenient than trying to meet face-to-face, even if we are all in town. These days, however, I am working on my dissertation and we have found it different from working on other projects virtually, with its own challenges.

I am in the developmental stage of my dissertation proposal; I’m developing my research model, hypotheses, and methods for completing the dissertation. This is very time consuming and requires a lot of reading, reflection and creativity. Surinder and I have been connecting over Skype to discuss ideas about how to proceed and the direction my dissertation should take. These discussions help me formulate my thoughts more clearly for the next round of revisions. After our meeting last week, Surinder asked me to keep him updated on my thoughts as I went about writing the next draft. What happened, however, is that I didn’t speak with Surinder again or share any thoughts with him until I sent him the next draft, which sadly was also incomplete. It was incomplete because working alone without sharing my thoughts and bouncing ideas off Surinder slowed me down considerably and I was unable to finish before the deadline.

Why didn’t I discuss things with Surinder as I thought about them? Well, because we didn’t have any set meeting times during those days and we didn’t see each other face-to-face; I wasn’t sure when he might be available. Often, my ideas seemed so trivial that I didn’t want to disturb him with something that seemed, at the time, frivolous. So I found myself spinning my wheels, trying to get my ideas solidified and down on paper before interrupting him at home or on Skype. Had he been across the hall in his office, I probably would have dropped by to bounce some ideas around rather than continue spinning on my own. We had another meeting over Skype recently which quickly cleared up a lot of my troubles in further developing my ideas and put me back on track for writing my proposal.

The lesson we learned from this experience is that, for some projects or project phases, frequent, set meeting times are very important for continuing progress when working virtually – especially in a situation that requires a lot of creative energy and when one person is teaching or mentoring others for the project. Even if instructed to contact one another when something comes up, the tendency will be to not bother the person or try to save up all the ideas for one phone call or email that never seems to happen. It might be a bit more time consuming in the beginning to set up regular check-in meetings, but I’ve learned from this experience that it is, in the long run, the most efficient way to complete intensive, creative projects while working virtually.

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Focusing on the Positive for Positive Team Outcomes

Rebecca Jestice — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:30:33 +0000

The other day I found a link to a book review on Twitter. The book is called Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. It provides summaries of research about persuasion and how to be successfully persuasive. One study in particular had me thinking about an approach to change and innovation that I am very interested in. The summarized study concluded that ads that quoted negative behavior en masse reinforced the negative behavior in individuals. In the study, visitors to a national park were exposed to two different signs. The first sign stated that large amounts of petrified forest had been previously taken away and to please not remove any pieces. The second sign simply said that visitors should not remove pieces of the forest. The first sign tripled the amount of theft because it portrayed the theft as a common occurrence. The same effect was realized when an ad targeting women voters mentioned the number of women who didn’t vote previously. The attention given to the negative behavior reinforces that it is socially acceptable and increases the occurrence of the behavior.

I found this to be an interesting insight for leaders to think about, especially when faced with the need to make a team intervention, work with a continually evolving team, or introduce change into a team. I was reminded of an approach to change called Appreciative Inquiry. In the simplest of terms, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approaches change from a positive standpoint. Rather than looking for what is not working, AI encourages those involved to think about what is working and how to intensify that effect. The AI approach seeks to bring out the best in people and their organizations. (For more in-depth information about AI, see the Appreciative Inquiry Commons.) Perhaps an AI approach to virtual team leadership could help minimize negative behaviors in a team that is having or facing difficulty by focusing on positive interactions and outcomes and reinforcing them, rather than pointing out trends of negative behaviors. This may be an especially useful method in virtual teams in which people don’t know each other well or depend heavily on technology that can obfuscate meaning of complex messages (such as using email to send sensitive or ambiguous information). Basing interaction in an AI framework for tasks such as an after action review may relieve some defensive reactions in team members when something doesn’t go according to plan and strengthen team unity through concentrating on what went right.

I’d love to know if anyone has experience using AI in teams or organizations and lessons learned from the experience.

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Social Presence and Team Satisfaction

Rebecca Jestice — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:52:23 +0000

Surinder and I are currently conducting research on the use of online media such as virtual worlds for education and training. In my readings I came across an interesting article about the perceptions of social presence, or the feeling of being with others in an online environment, and perceived learning and satisfaction in an online course. In this study, researchers measured student perceptions of social presence and perceived learning and satisfaction with an online course and found significant correlations. Students who reported higher perceived social presence also perceived that they learned more than those who perceived lower levels of social presence. Students with higher perceived social presence were also more satisfied with their instructor overall. The limitations of the research and the paper have to be considered when making inferences from these results, such as the fact that we can’t infer causation from correlations, and the fact that all of the data used was perceptual and self-reported by the students. However, I still found the results quite interesting because the researchers looked not only at overall levels of perceived social presence and perceived learning, but also at each of these things based on the learning activity (e.g. discussions, team projects, lectures, written assignments). As might be expected, the correlation between social presence and perceived learning was highest among group oriented activities such as discussion and group projects, but statistically significant correlations were found for all activities, including lectures, notes and readings. It seems to imply that social presence has an impact on the students’ perceived outcomes of the course even for activities that are completed individually.

What might this mean for virtual teams and virtual team leaders? I am careful to make too large a leap from this research to best practices for virtual teams, however, a virtual team working under a leader, may have similar outcomes. That would mean that perceived social presence could have a large impact on team outcomes like satisfaction or perceived learning, especially in situations where the team is trying to understand new concepts or project objectives. This seems to have been a theme throughout some conversations Surinder and I have had with people who use virtual worlds regularly to conduct team meetings. Although the teams might encounter technological issues with using and running a virtual world, many users cite the sense of presence and being with others as one of the benefits of using the virtual world to conduct the majority of team meetings as opposed to other tools available such as a team wiki, instant messaging, or email. It is not realistic at this point for all virtual teams to use virtual worlds all the time, but it might be more important than originally conceived for virtual team leaders to engender a sense of social presence amongst distant team members regardless of the task type. One way that this can be done is to ensure that there is some sort of shared object that team members are working on together. A shared work space can add to social presence as well, such as shared documents stored on a shared group website from which team members can work.

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