What: LA Times article about President Obama conducting a virtual town hall meeting to reach out and connect to Americans Posts it is related to: What President Obama Teaches Us For Leading Virtually Bottom line: President Obama continues to be innovative in embracing technology to engage his constituency, the people of America. Last week, he hosted a virtual town hall… Read more →
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 →
What: NYTimes article about Cisco’s showcasing its TelePresence system. Posts to which it is related: Supportive and Critical Communication in Virtual Teams, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology Bottom line: This article reviews the use of Cisco’s TelePresence system during a press conference at which the company announced new servers. According to the author (Ashlee Vance), the press conference was too long, felt unnatural and… Read more →
In response to my last post (Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging), Andrew Meyer of ‘Inquiries Into Alignment‘ commented about the problem of getting contributors. He points out that the number of active bloggers within a firm is typically low. In fact, in one of the research papers that I included in my post, the authors found that in a… Read more →
Blogs have been around more than a decade now, but corporate blogging, or the use of blogs within firms, is still limited. From my teaching of business executives and professionals, I believe that this is probably due to a general lack of understanding of blogs and how they can improve social relationships and task performance. In this post, I focus… Read more →
What: New York Times article on how to manage e-mail overload Posts it is related to: Freeing Yourself From Email , Emergent Collaboration: Why Email Should Not Be Used for Collaboration Bottom line: In this Personal Tech article, the author gives some good ideas for getting our overwhelming amounts of email under control. His suggestion–an in-box that is always empty… 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 →
What: Research article on communication in virtual product development teams Posts it is related to: Freeing Yourself from Email, The Evolution of Harmful Email Habits, How do I begin to Improve the Functioning of my Virtual Team? Bottom line: The authors of the article studied members of virtual teams engaged in new product development. Responses from 184 team members spread… 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 →
What: Story on NPR about the use of video conferencing in immigration courts. Posts to which it is related: Supportive and Critical Communication in Virtual Teams, Lessons from Victorian Technology Bottom line: This piece demonstrates some of the issues that arise when a form of virtual collaboration is used strictly for efficiency with no adjustments made for interacting virtually instead of… Read more →