AOM 2011: PDW Reactions

AOM 2011 Coverage: Schedule Planning | PDW Reactions | Scholarly Day 1 | Scholarly Day 2

It’s Sunday night, which means the “practical” program is over, and the academic program is beginning Monday.  It’s been an eventful few days for me personally, both in terms of presentation and attendance.

On Friday, I presented a piece of @AOMConnect‘s session, Connecting the Academy through Technology.  My section was entitled, Social Media and Gameification in the Classroom, in which I discussed various social media platforms that one might use for teaching, as well as a preview of a gameification research project that I’ve been working on.  Thanks to my lovely wife/camera assistant (the order of those terms is important), I am able to share that presentation, which you can find on our lab’s Facebook page or embedded below.

On Saturday, I spent the morning attending Introduction to Social Media Analysis.  Never having used social media analytic tools, I was very curious what was possible, especially in the context of examining the evolution of online social communities.  What I heard was very promising – especially regarding its ability to ask cross-level questions (e.g. what characteristics of this social network or its members are related to relationship formation?).

Later that day, I spent two hours giving another workshop, Researching and Teaching a Second Life: A Tutorial on Virtual Worlds.  We had nearly a full house (much to my surprise!) although no one brought a laptop.  My original plan had been to bring the group in attendance along with me as we cavorted around the virtual environment, so I had to make a last minute gameplan change – but I think it worked out for the best.  I gave my first 30 minutes of content via a presentation, followed by 75 minutes of live demonstration in Second Life, followed by 15 minutes of questions.  Several folks were really engaged – which is always fantastic to see – and there were a lot of interesting questions on top of the usual newbie questions.  So it was great!

Today, after a morning at the national landmark “The Alamo,” I attended the annual meeting of the executive committee of the Organizational Behavior division (for which I serve as Technology Czar), followed by @AOMConnect‘s tweetup (at which I received an almost forgotten award for being an active social media participant), followed by our executive committee dinner.

Tomorrow is a long day starting at 8AM, and I’ll be actively covering the academic conference via Twitter, so make sure to tune it.  You can find my Twitter transcript from the first few days below: