Week 9

  This week I completed my report on mobile technology for The Association of Virtual Worlds. My site supervisor gave me much positive feedback and thought it was "excellent," but wanted me to make changes to my bibliography. She wanted the changes to better meet the bibliography format needed for the report. Originally, I had listed my site supervisor as the author of the blog posts on mobile technology I used as references. I instead followed my site supervisor's advice by removing her name as the author of the information and replaced it with the original sources of the information as the authors, followed by the dates of publications, titles, and quick links to the blog posts made by my site supervisor. I removed other things (some APA formatting) that would be more appropriate for graduate course term papers, and added whatever my site supervisor wanted and that would be better for business reports.

  My advice to other virtual interns, certainly future interns, is when they have a site supervisor who has them do a paper or report, that they must closely and clearly communicate with their site supervisor to learn about how they should format and organize their work (such as title page first, table of contents second, conclusion last, or a particular order of bibliographical information). The intern should know that a site supervisor may not want the same type of formatting or organization that their graduate professors want, and that the formatting and organization of reports may have to adhere to the types of businesses they are interning for.

  Overall, it was a successful assignment and my site supervisor appreciated the work I put into it, that I had closely followed her rules, that I made some good cases in favor of some of the mobile technologies, but also that I added a section on negative aspects to mobile technology like cyber bullying and techno stress. I focused on both positives and some negatives so that I would avoid bias. I know my next assignment will be the first week of April, so I will certainly be interested to see what my site supervisor will have me do and learn next.

Week 8

  There is not as much to report this week. I completed my report on mobile technology earlier in the week and placed it into my site supervisor's dropbox. I did receive some positive feedback from my site supervisor through email, and she said she skimmed through the report and that it looked "most impressive." She also stated that she will take a closer look at it during the weekend, and if she has any problems or wants me to make a few changes, I will gladly do so. I feel quite good about the report as I followed her instructions as closely as possible by putting it in the correct format, such as starting out with a title page, and then continuing with a table of contents, introduction, observation and analysis, conclusion, and bibliography with all 96 blog posts I examined for the report. Furthermore, my observations section was done in the way she wanted in that I wrote about topics on mobile technology that was relevant to the blogs such as mobile trends, how mobile technology can change the relationship between customers and businesses, children, the Internet, education, and so forth. I focused on how mobile technology can create positive changes for businesses and their customers, but I did not ignore the negative aspects of mobile technology such as how it deepens social problems for people such as the issue concerning cyber bullying, or how it can cause techno stress.

  I believe I learned a lot about how companies can improve their relationship with consumers through mobile technology, and also about all the mobile advancements that have made significant changes for businesses and the lives of consumers. Hopefully, my site supervisor will give me more feedback about the report by Monday.

Week 7: Continuing To Work On My Mobile Report

  I worked independently this week on my mobile report for The Association of Virtual Worlds. I have not had contact with my site supervisor since last weekend, so perhaps she has been too busy to check on my progress; although she gave me up to a month to complete the report, and there are two more weeks left according to the time she gave me to finish it. Actually, I think I have adapted quite well as an independent worker and without much supervision. I feel I have done well working on my own, and perhaps that is because of years of experience as a college student. Library and Information Science is my third degree and second masters, and the work I have done for The Association of Virtual Worlds is very much like the work I have done before in college, certainly in this library science program. So perhaps I don't feel I need constant supervision. I also trust that my site supervisor will in fact contact me soon to check on my progress, and I can easily contact her at any time if I have questions even though she is busy.
 
I have collected and put together 96 of her blog posts about mobile technology dating from September 1, 2011 to February 21, 2012, and have done an analysis on many of them. I have observed and analyzed new mobile technologies and discussed how businesses and their customers can use them. My report informs them on how other industries have used new mobile technologies, and have given them ideas on how they can use these technologies to improve their business and relations with their customers.
 
Although I have not been a heavy user of mobile technologies, and only use my cell phone at the most important times rather than constantly, I am certainly learning a lot of new things about mobile technologies and all the interesting ways they are being used between companies and their customers. It is kind of a new language to me, but I have tried understanding these technologies the best I can do. 

Week 6

  This week, I started work on my mobile technology report for The Association of Virtual Worlds. The purpose of this report is to inform businesses and consumers about the recent state of mobile technologies and how they can benefit from using them. A big part of this report focuses on how businesses can use mobile technologies to not only survive economically, but to compete with one another for both consumers and skills in using the latest mobile technologies.

  I find the report challenging because it focuses on business, which I know nothing about. My first two college degrees were in history, so I have no training in business. I am literally writing about how businesses should think, develop mobile skills, compete in the workplace, survive economically, attract consumers and develop working relationships with them, and how certain mobile and Internet technologies can be used by them to benefit their business as well as their consumers. If I had majored in business, I could have probably written more interesting things about how companies can successfully compete economically, learn new technologies, and understand consumers. All I can do is try the best to understand these mobile technologies and how they may benefit companies and their customers.

  This report is intended for businesses, but I am hoping it can simply get them interested in new mobile technologies. I doubt my report will give them a full understanding on how mobile technology can affect them in the current economic, business, and technological climate.