Week 8, August 7 – 13

This week I kept working on the projects I was given, especially the Lectora created training for Portfolio Edge, a financial investment product. I had an interesting conversation with Mary di Mora about her background, the virtual office, and where I could fit in with BAC. I spoke with Greg Nicossi about his feelings toward the virtual office, too. I also heard about a new marketing trend – Virtual People on MySpace.

Mary Dimaria

Mary Dimaria  was not originally an Educational Technology professional. She entered the field through the banking industry, specifically stocks and bonds.

In college she got a bachelor’s in psychology and then an MBA. The MBA led her into working for an investment company. Initially she was assisting one of their top stockbrokers. Then the company had all the assistants for their top people obtain their own broker’s licenses so they could perform some of their more mundane work. While she was with this company they started to transition to online stockbroking. The old-line brokers were scared to death of the new technology. Mary embraced it and was soon tapped to start training the old pros. Eventually, doing this informal training turned to holding regular formal classes. Next, her company developed a business of training other companies in the new technology. Mary, who has a warm, open personality, combined with strong organizational skills, was a natural to create and conduct the courses.

Mary explained the financial industry is very cyclical. In boom times companies do a lot of hiring. When there’s downturns many of those employees become consultants. She said as long as you understand these cycles you can do well as a trainer in this industry.

I asked Mary how she handles being a mother of three and her work responsibilities. She said that one thing that really attracted her to work for BAC is their embrace of the virtual office. It allows her the flexibility to be both a mom and a professional. She emphasized that you actually end up working longer hours at home than at the office, but you can more easily take care of a family responsibility, such as participating in a carpool, when you need to.

In fact, the book her group has selected to use next for professional development is Virtual Teaming by Jude-York, Wise and Davis. She said it describes methods to help office workers in virtual teams interact better and become more productive. Especially important is being able to build comradery, trust and avoid miscommunication.

One thing Mary mentioned was the importance of phone communication as a substitute for face-to-face interaction. One technique the book mentions is to try to match the voice of the person you’re speaking with. If they are speaking fast, speed up your voice, if slow, reduce your speech rate. If the other person speaks in high tone, raise your tone a bit, too. According to the book it makes the other person feel more at ease and improves mutual understanding. Another interesting idea was to do things socially together by phone, such as eat lunch together and talk about personal things, not business. She said you do have to meet in person from time-to-time, though, to really get to know the other person. There is one person on her team that lives in Dallas. They had not met in person for two years. About a year ago they finally got their entire team together in person offsite and held some team-building activities. She said that made all the difference. Even though she hasn’t seen this other person since, their working relationship is vastly improved.

Another employee, Greg Nicossi, seconded what Mary told me. He works from home 2-3 days a week. His supervisor is in Charlotte, so I doesn’t matter to her where he works, as long as the work gets done. He's thrilled. His wife is about to have their first baby, so this flexibility is very welcome. He also said he actually works longer hours at home, too. When he comes into the office it’s a one hour commute each way, then he needs to spend time getting ready for work. When he’s home, he still takes a shower and brushes his teeth, but he doesn’t spend the time getting “suited up” and especially driving to the train station and riding on a crowded train. (In this office no one drives a car to work. If they drive, it's to a train station.)

However, the phenomena that I started to experience teaching online is that after a while you feel like you’re on call 24/7 and you’re never really off work. Students demand your attention on their schedule. In addition, there’s a real sense of disconnect after a while. I'm hoping to use some of the techniques I learned here when I teach online.

Virtual People

As an aside to Virtual Teaming I just heard of a new trend in marketing a couple days ago. They are now creating virtual people. This mostly revolves around MySpace.com, the personal Web page phenomena. For instance, movie promoters are creating mySpace pages for fictional characters and and pretending they are real people. For instance Ricky Bobby, aka Will Ferrell, of the movie "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" and some of the Pirates in the “Pirates of the Carribean” movie have their own sites on MySpace where they give personal infomation and even respond to email. SecondLife is also a big venue for this, but there you interact with 3D avatars instead of Web sites.

The worlds depicted in “The Matrix” and “Minority Report” are getting closer to reality.