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… Read more →
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. … Read more →
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… Read more →
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… Read more →
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,… Read more →
Second Life has been in the news again recently. Despite recent changes in upper management and a recent stagnation in new users, the popular virtual world seems to be on an upswing again. Second Life is looking to corporate participation as a key element in their future business (see this CNET article).
I had an interesting experience recently that reminded me of Surinder’s post on what he sees as some negative trends in email communication, only this experience happened in Second Life. I was visiting an area dedicated to online learning when I ran into another avatar–I’ll call him Mike–who began speaking with me. Mike immediately told me that he was… Read more →
I have several email addresses, and I use them each for different purposes. I never receive personal emails on my work account. The account that came with my Internet at home has been sacrificed to spam since I use that account for every website registration. I keep an old email address that’s hardly used just in case someone I haven’t spoken to in 10 years… Read more →
Surinder and I are currently attending the Mardi Gras conference on virtual worlds in Baton Rouge along with our colleague Rui Huang. We are here to present our paper that I discussed in last week’s post and also to hear the exciting work that others are pursuing in and around virtual worlds. I am amazed by the breadth of interests… Read more →
Effective communication in electronic environments can be vexing to virtual teams. We know intuitively that we need proper communication to achieve high quality and efficient outcomes, but we are not always sure how to best achieve effective communication or even what effective communication is for the task at hand. We have mentioned issues around communication in past posts, such as… Read more →