It's Already the End of the Week

I'd forgotten today was Sunday.  Such is my strange schedule these days.

This week in virtual internship land, I've started work on my next assignment: another trends report.  After the first report, I've become a little more confident in my ability to format a report to precisely the way my site supervisor would like it.  Admittedly I've taken a few days off to put the finishing touches on some final projects for other classes, but I'm determined to finish my internship hours in the next week as well as the project in order to give myself, and my site supervisor, some time to complete our administrative paperwork including rating and reviewing each other.

An ongoing challenge that I've found throughout this internship that became readily apparent when I began researching and compiling reports, was that the terminology has changed so drastically in the past few years that even looking at information from 2000 or 2002 seems terribly out of date.  The rate at which things change and become obsolete is blindingly fast for some of us who still love things from the past.  I am perhaps too much my parents' child in this sense.  While I like new technology, I approach with extreme caution and I think this internship has been good for me to learn just how fast I have to move to keep up in this new day and age when all my friends are texting and tweeting and pinning and all sorts of other things.

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.

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.