Personal Archives - Leading Virtually

Not all kinds of happiness are the same

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 18:51:55 +0000

In one of my past blog posts, I had talked about happiness and how it can lead to success. I had also covered some ways in which one can be happy. Now we have some research that suggests that we seek the eudaemonic kind of happiness, whereby the focus is on serving others and a higher purpose, over the hedonic kind, whereby the focus is on seeking personal pleasure.

Research is suggesting that in case you seek eudaeomonic happiness more than hedonic happiness, you may be doing your health a big favor! Such people’s antibody genes are 30% more active and their interferons, which help our immunity, are 10% more active than those of individuals preferring hedonic pleasures. In those preferring hedonic happiness over the eudaemonic kind, the inflammation causing genes were 20% more active and those associated with the production of virus-attacking antibodies were 20% less active.

It looks like Socrates, who advocated pursing a virtue filled life for happiness, was right all along!

In the long run, selfless, public-serving happiness may be winning over the selfish, pleasure seeking kind by leading to better health!

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Social Media is a Matter of the Heart

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 15:48:18 +0000

Many in my generation question the value of social media — the kind in which people engage in social chit-chat. A father, whose 31 year old daughter married recently, was no different. It was at his daughter’s wedding that he learned about the usefulness of social media for staying connected on a human level and enriching one’s life. His earlier thinking was that social media took time away from one’s career, family, and deep relationships. Over the years, however, he lost touch with his friends because they had all moved away from each other and began to focus on their careers and families.

His daughter, unlike him, did not lose touch with her friends. He finds out during her wedding that people in her generation don’t choose between work and friendships. They choose both. With the help of seemingly mundane exchanges via social media, they maintain their friendships while also pursuing their ambitions. Inspired by what he saw in his daughter’s case, he begins using social media with greater vigor and posts pictures and videos from his daughter’s wedding. Soon, his old friends reconnected with him. Their comments and “likes” piled up. He sent friend requests to his daughter’s friends, which were quickly accepted. Though these were small gestures, he found them to be intimate and nourishing.

This whole experience affected the father deeply enough to prompt him to write about it in a touching article at NYTimes. I strongly suggest that you read it. His concluding paragraph, in which he refers to his daughter Kate, gives us a sense of the true meaning of social media.

I see now how much I’ve given up over the years by keeping my work focus so central and my circle so narrow. I understand more viscerally why Kate and her friends spend so much time keeping up on social media. It’s nearly a week since the wedding, the “likes” keep coming, and my heart still feels wide open.

Social media is a matter of the heart. If you’re not touching someone’s heart or if others are not touching yours, then you’re probably not using it right. Unlike most other things which lessen when used, our heart only gets bigger when we give place in it to others.

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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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Free productivity tools to be thankful for

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 03:54:30 +0000

Among the many things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving was a set of free tools that I have been using for years now. Many of my students find the tools useful when I share the tools with them. I thought I should share these with my readers who might also find them useful. Several of the tools I have shared below would benefit virtual team workers because of their collaboration focus. The others would benefit them by helping them manage and access their documents or Internet resources more easily.

Google desktop for search. I have been using this for over two years now. I collect a lot of articles, some scholarly and others from popular press, for my research and teaching. Most of them are in pdf format. I find Google desktop for search to be invaluable for quickly locating the documents or Outlook emails I need at any time. On my Windows laptop, I press the Ctrl key twice and in the dialog box that shows up I enter a few keywords. When I am looking for a document and I know that it is in pdf format, I enter filetype:pdf along with the keywords. Or when I am looking for a PowerPoint file, I enter filetype:ppt along with the keywords. Google’s search algorithm goes to work for me and shows relevant documents quickly in a drop down that appears below the dialog box. With an additional click, I am able to open and use the document. In January, my university shifted to Gmail (we call it Bmail for Binghamton mail). But my old emails are still in Outlook. Google desktop is very helpful in searching through my old Outlook emails as well.

PrimoPDF. I save many web pages and popular press articles on my computer as pdfs. I use PrimoPDF, a free tool for Windows, to make pdfs. PrimoPDF installs itself as a printer by the same name. To make the pdf of a web page or an article I am reading online, I proceed to print the article. When prompted for a printer, I select PrimoPDF. I then proceed to indicate the name with which I wish to save the file as well as its location. It is as simple as that.

Google docs. I collaborate extensively for my research. I also share my class notes with my students. I find Google docs to be very useful for collaborating on research papers and for sharing my class notes with students. With Google docs, my collaborators and I work at our own pace and we don’t have to wait for someone to finish her/his part on a paper and email the paper to us before adding our own contributions. When I share my class notes with my students, they are able to add to the notes when I say something that is not on the notes. Different students adding different parts and the whole class ends up benefiting from comprehensive notes. With the addition of new features on a regular basis, Google docs is only getting better.

Zotero. A good bibliography management tool can be a great lifesaver for an academic like me. If the tool is free and makes it easy to add items to my bibliography and cite them in my research, it is even better. Zotero is one such tool. Zotero is a Firefox extension that requires just a few clicks to add an item from Google Scholar, New York Times, or elsewhere to one’s bibliography. Once an item is added, you can just drag and drop it into your list of references in a Word document or a Google doc. Zotero even allows you to share your bibliography with someone else.

Firefox. I switched to Firefox as my browser more than five years ago. I like it because of the several extensions that make my life easier. Zotero is one of those extensions. Another reason I continue to use Firefox is that it lets me create ‘smart’ keywords for sites I visit frequently and search for information there. For instance, I use Google Scholar almost daily. I have created the keyword ‘s’ for search on this site. To initiate a search on this site (say, on virtual teams) when I might be elsewhere (e.g., I might be working on a google doc), I just press Ctrl-L on my Windows keyboard (to take me to the URL box in the browser; if you are on a Mac, use Cmd-L) and type in ‘s virtual teams’ and hit Enter. The next thing I see is the Google Scholar page with results for ‘virtual teams’. I have set up similar, easy to remember keywords for other sites where I conduct search frequently (e.g., g for Google, n for Google News, y for Yahoo, t for thesaurus.com, d for dictionary.com, bd for Binghamton University Directory, a for Amazon, and so on).

Avast anti-virus. I got tired of the bloated anti-virus software from Norton or McAfee. I would get free versions with a new computer but then I would be prompted to pay for a new version after a year or so. I would also find myself dealing with software I did not want and which took over my computer and made me less productive. After some research for free anti-virus software, I settled on the free version of Avast’s anti-virus software and have been very satisfied with it. It is currently installed on all of my Windows PCs.

Skype. I use Skype extensively to collaborate with my co-authors. I also use Skype to conduct interviews for my research. If I am in a Skype call with just one person, I also use Skype’s screen sharing feature to show the work I am doing on my PC with the other person. In case I on a Skype call with more than one person and I wish to share my screen with them, then I use a separate screen sharing tool. Until recently, I used Dimdim for screen sharing. Recently, I began using join.me and I am very happy with that.

Join.me. Unlike the other tools I have listed in this post, this is a new tool that was released about a month ago. I have had a chance to use it on four or five occasions since its release. Join.me is a free screen sharing tool that allows you to share your screen with up to 250 people. It is very easy to use. Just visit join.me and click on the button for sharing your desktop. A small program is downloaded on your computer. To begin sharing your desktop, click on the downloaded program and a link shows up on your screen. Share the link with your collaborators via email or other means (e.g., instant messaging) and they are sharing your desktop within seconds. I find it to be extremely useful when I am on a conference call with remote collaborators and I need to show them the work I am doing on my PC (e.g., data analysis or a presentation). By the way, you can do more than screen sharing with join.me. You can chat, transfer files, and even take over your collaborator’s desktop.

These tools have certainly made life easier for me and I am thankful to their creators for making them available free of charge. What tools are you thankful for?

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