I have been away from writing for Leading Virtually for a little more than a year. I didn’t intend for my absence to be so long, but it was a very eventful and busy year for me. I am happy to be blogging again for Leading Virtually at the start of this new year! Although I was away from Leading Virtually, I was not away from the realms of leadership and computer mediated communication. I’ll tell you briefly what I was doing the past year and few months.

One thing I was doing was getting married! Leading Virtually readers will be able to relate to my story. I met my husband in Second Life in 2007. He is from Europe and I am from the US. So we developed and grew a relationship using online and mobile tools like Skype and Picassa, and virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft in between our opportunities to visit. After four years I consider myself a veteran of online communication! We look forward to the day these tools are unnecessary, but we are so thankful that we live in a world in which they exist and make our communications easier and instantaneous even across the Atlantic.

The other thing I was doing was finishing my dissertation! I successfully defended my dissertation in November. My dissertation focused on using virtual worlds for education and training. I completed two different studies using two different virtual worlds. I’ll give a brief description here of the two studies and will write subsequent posts with details of each. In the first study, I used the Virtual Forbidden City to look at student learning about the Forbidden City in Beijing. The study had students learn about the Forbidden City using an online PowerPoint presentation as used in a lot of distance education courses as well as taking a virtual field trip to the Forbidden City using the virtual world. The second study focused on using online tools for leadership development. In this study, a comparison was made between using Second Life and WebEx for delivering some basic leadership training materials and activities.

Again, I’ll give more details about the studies and what we found in my next posts. Today I wanted to say happy New Year, and I look forward to writing again and continuing our conversations.