Winding Down

This week I completed my updated list of virtual worlds and enterprises that provide virtual world services.  I discovered that many of the virtual worlds in existence today are actually branches of other, larger virtual worlds.  Perhaps the internet gives us too many options.  I have been looking at my learning objectives for this semester and thinking about the implications of the work I am currently doing for a 'real' library setting and I understand some of the issues that have come up in discussion such as the reluctance to use new technologies.  I fully understand this sentiment as there are a lot of options and the whole thing can be very intimidating.  Also, not have people in the same place can provide many options which can be a good thing but also, having so many people and options spread across the internet, what's an organization to do if they wanted to market their brand?  Pick the best fit for their target demographic, I suppose.  I wish I'd been more interested in marketing and business in my undergraduate years.  This is fascinating.

And then while updating my resume I came upon an interesting situation... I have my previous work sites listed on my resume with dates worked, the name of the organization and the physical location.  In this case... what do I put down?  I thought perhaps the URL to the AVW's website would suffice as 'The Internet' may not look good to certain employers.

The Audience

This week (besides Blogger's new format, which looks a lot like Google Docs), I've been working on updating the list of virtual worlds and companies that make virtual worlds.  Our site supervisor provided us with a list of virtual worlds she had already collected and asked us to research and make additions to the list.  While I have found some additions, her list is fairly inclusive so much of what I'm finding is already included.  As is true of almost anything related to the internet, checking to make sure links remain active throughout a document's life (be it a text document, PDF, or web page) is very important.  What I've been finding is true of both the sources I'm using for my research and the document provided to me by my site supervisor is that some of these links are no longer active and the virtual world they refer to is no longer active.

This week's challenge? Scale.  When doing research on virtual worlds, I'm finding a lot of interesting virtual worlds that only serve China or Germany or Australia or some other non-North American country.  What is important to consider here (which I should have considered earlier but didn't think about it) is that in the vastness of the internet, there is a place for every place and documents we create here in the US may be viewed by many people from other countries so when creative a resource such as the one we're working on presently, do we include resources for other countries?  What is the scope of our work?  Do we build our resources and materials for our own community (in the U.S. in this case) or do we build for a global audience?  In this case, it appears that we are focusing on the North American audience.  I'm surprised this hasn't come up in discussion before.

Punching In, Punching Out

One thing we hadn't discussed in depth at the beginning of my internship were additional projects outside the three major projects.  I put my time logs into an Excel spreadsheet and the total number of hours so far has barely reached half of the required 135 hours worked.  I'm somewhat surprised and yet, not really.  In my work experience, aside from 'special' tasks, one usually is assigned a general list of tasks to complete in your 'work time' when you have no special projects to do so you aren't just standing around.  In the virtual environment, it would be difficult to accurately gauge how long a project will take someone (especially in cases like ours where we only interact with our site supervisor once a week) and sometimes a new assignment is not given immediately after the completion of one task.

This week I am working on making additions to two lists of virtual worlds currently available.  I've learned a lot from the past two projects and am making a list of virtual worlds not currently included on the published list.  What is interesting is the broad spectrum of 'virtual worlds' and the audiences they serve.  Without saying too much, there are definitely some that I hadn't thought of as 'virtual worlds' that would be interesting to businesses until I'd started working at this internship.

The one Golden Rule of this internship is to not email the site supervisor on Sunday because it is her one 'unplugged' day.  As such, I will be emailing her on Monday to ask about any additional tasks I can help out with around the site or reports to write to fulfill my hour requirement.  I should hope I can squeeze them in as soon as possible.

Time sure is flying by.

Belated Spring Break?

This week, I have nothing new to report as I am still awaiting my next assignment from my site supervisor.

I think a challenge that should be mentioned at this time is starting out strong and establishing a schedule of communication.  I'm not entirely sure, but I think that had we established a regular schedule of communication at the beginning of the internship, there would be better communication overall without these long periods of silence that feel empty on one end while the other person is working on a project.  I learned a lot this semester about how one should or should not operate as a virtual worker and I feel like those lessons may be some of my greatest takeaways from this experience.