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Research Collaboration in the Ephemera of Web 2.0
3/19/2008
http://pownce.com/) to see if this new site might add value.- Preserving work over time. Researchers need a record of their work. E-mail was useful to get started and still useful for announcements and updating. The e-mail client must search very quickly, of course, so that the "archive" of e-mail discussions can be retrieved to keep the conversational cohesion elements alive: who said what and when?
But what about our proposals and research reports, and other core documents? We have yet to face this issue as our initiative is still young, but we do see out there The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) -- "universal access to human knowledge" (wow!).
As we disseminate ideas and hold important meetings, we'll of course be looking at Webcasts and or podcasts to supplement face-to-face meetings. We'll need a Wiki to collaborate on documents or for application development. We may need a Sakai account. We may meet in Second Life.
What technology do researchers use at different phases of the project? With the new options available now and, it seems, each month, we consider all the possibilities. Part of research now is not just the research, but keeping abreast of new collaboration technologies. We all need to be ethnographers.
Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is currently a Communication Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT. batsontr@mit.edu
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