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sources I'm using for my research and the document provided to me by my site supervisor is that some of these links are no longer active and the virtual world they refer to is no longer active.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.

Old Tools, New Tools

This week, my challenge continues to be 'thinking virtually'.  I completed my report and submitted it to my site supervisor last week.  I'd received my feedback yesterday.  While she said that overall the report was 'good and solid', she asked that I change my citations to links.  I'd never thought of that.  As a college student, I've been taught to cite things in parenthesis at the ends of sentences.  So when our instructions said to 'cite' our sources, I proceeded as per usual.  Linking in Word documents is not the most challenging thing to do, nor is it a new feature.  I'd just never needed to use it before and I'd certainly never been encouraged to explore more advanced MS Word features before.

(The table of contents creator in MS Word continues to amaze me.  Then again, in academic papers, we're generally not asked for a table of contents so I've never used it before.  It's so easy, now I want to put a table of contents in every paper.)

For this week, I will be going back and putting citation links into my report (today) and then awaiting further instructions from my site supervisor.  It's hard to believe but we're already half way through the semester.

The Report and The Practice

This week, I completed my trends report on social networks.  I'm seeing that transcribing the interviews helped me learn much more about social networks and the business world before compiling materials for this project.  While it is a bit ironic that I decided to deactivate my personal Facebook page just before starting this project, a lot of what I learned did reflect what I'd seen over the course of my Facebook use the past eight years.

While I managed to set and keep my own deadlines, communication can be a challenge in a virtual internship.  I suppose it may be due in part to the way this particular internship is structured, but it can be easy to forget or misunderstand.  Our contacts with each other and our site supervisor are generally brief and to the point.  We get directly to what needs to be said and then move on.  As we work independently, there is no real 'need' for communication except to update our supervisor on our progress and to notify her of any concerns or questions we have.  As distance learners in an online program, working independently is not necessarily a problem as we do this a lot for other classes, but communicating can be a challenge.  Learning to work in a team over long distances continues to be a challenge just because we become so used to setting our own dates and working on our own terms and with our own expectations that we sometimes forget that in a team or with a supervisor, their expectations can be different than our own.

The Intern Who Wasn't

I had dinner with one of my friends earlier this week who is doing an in-person internship (in a different field).  Having been an intern before, I've found that every site and site supervisor operates differently.  Talking with my friend over dinner, I found that her experience was very different and yet very similar to my own experiences.

It would be worth noting that she is working in a lab at a fairly reputable academic institution who work with a lot of interns.  They seem to have a fairly well established bureaucratic hierarchy that allows them to delegate tasks and manage their interns in a way that is quite different and yet somewhat similar to the way our virtual internship is managed.

After our intern group meeting this week, I began thinking more about the differences and similarities between her experience and mine.

Both our schools require a class to support our intern experiences.  She didn't say much about her class so I suppose that when compared to the actual internship it's somewhat unremarkable.

Her internship site is very different from mine.  In addition to the obvious factors like her site being a science lab and mine having nothing to do with science and the simple fact that she goes in in-person and I am a virtual worker, she works with a large organization whereas I work with a small one.  While both our site supervisors offer support and guidance, her site appears to take on more of a teaching role in that they assign mentors to their interns who act as task masters, supervisors, and career counselors.

One thing that stood out to me from our meeting this week was the notion of being alone on the internet, especially with a virtual internship.  Our blogs and class meetings sometimes feel like a one-way conversation. You put your piece out there and people read and observe.  Sometimes comments are made or questions are asked but you never really know how to respond and sometimes questions go unanswered.  (I've always resisted posting simple 'I concur' comments.  It feels like sending a text message with a smiley or a 'lol' and nothing else, but I understand that the silence can be a little scary and discouraging.)  My friend's internship site, with its large pool of interns, faculty, grad students, PhD candidates, etc, hosts weekly non-work-related meetings for all its student workers to network and mingle (and drink beer).  While I don't think this is necessarily the most practical for virtual interns, the internet does offer a host of other opportunities for people to gather and talk.

In taking on this internship, I've learned a lot about virtual worlds and I think that there is a lot of potential there.  Based on my own personal experience, I would say it's a great place for people to meet, gather and chat, but based on what I've learned so far, there are a lot of limitations to making them an accessible gathering place (in addition to the fact that 'virtual worlds' are expanding and redefining themselves in light of changes to social media).

Overall, I think that a virtual internship has a lot of opportunity to function just like an in-person internship but the new, virtual world seems to have created a disconnect in the way we communicate with each other, thus limiting the ways we think about working together when we're not physically together.

I've set my goal of completing my report by Monday (tomorrow) and the deadline approaches, but first... a midterm.

Until next time....

One-Third Point

Midterms are coming which marks the one-third or mid-way point (it's been five to six weeks already) of the semester.

This week's internship challenge: accomplishing my assigned task.  After my last post, I received details about my next assignment: a report on trends in social networking with an estimated completion date of 'two to four weeks'.  Two weeks have already gone by.  I've done the necessary preliminary reading but have yet to actually write anything.  As a result, I am determined to set goals for myself so that I don't drag it out to the entirety of the four weeks.

This week's life challenge:  Being ill, but still healthy enough to go to work.  I never have a fever but I'm always fatigued and semi-permanently attached to a box of tissue.

As a result, I am aiming to have a draft completed by Tuesday morning before work (fingers crossed that my work schedule doesn't change again).  If all goes well, I will be ready to submit my final draft by Friday or Saturday.

I suppose it's not safe to admit your faults in a professional environment but I do find this internship a challenge with a lack of designated due dates.  At work, I perform better when my supervisor gives me tasks to be completed before I leave for the day or before a certain time.  For the remainder of the internship I will work to improve on setting my own deadlines in order to have my projects completed before the maximum time allotted.