Comfort Levels

Think of the communities I am part of. How comfortable would I be if someone studied them? Why?

The type of community would determine the comfort level. When I was part of the the WebMD message boards I would have been uncomfortable with someone studying the site but as a member of a webboard for webmasters would not bother me at all. As I write this though I begin to wonder what they would study and whether that would bother me. I think the subject matter of the study could also make a difference. If the study was unobtrusive and nondamaging to myself or my career again it would be okay.

I think this is an important exercise to remember as I move through the research process. Without putting myself in the shoes of those I am researching I might find it easy to overlook their feelings. It looks like I have a new important step to include in the process.

The Digital Age - Questions and Interesting Places

What are the questions I think are the most interesting in the digital age?
Hum. I am fascinated with how people use the Internet. With it's emergence it felt like such a cold and cumbersome technology that was not overly intuitive. As it has evolved though more and more people have become comfortable with it and I would say some have become very comfortable. Out of this comes a number of questions;

1. In an age where we are trying to conserve and move more to a paperless, digital society do people really trust the Internet enough for all of their needs such as banking, bills and medical information or should the Internet serve as a supplement to the physical environment?
2. Can a faceless computer allow people to reach across physical boundaries to make/find friends that span beyond the online community?
3. Are literacy skills enhanced or reduced due to the slang used in programs such as aim or through text messaging?

What are the most interesting online environments? Why?
There are so many online environments out there now that it is absolutely amazing the number of directions you can go in. I find that I am interested in different ones at different times based on my current position in life. Four and half years ago when I was expecting my first child I spent a number of hours a day on WebMD's pregnancy message boards. I will admit I was mainly a lurker during my time there but I found solace in the post of others in my similar situations. Women I had never meet before became my digital friends and their problems and solutions were helpful to me. Now that I am removed from that stage in my life I find myself more interested in blogs. They provide such a fascinating digital record of the experiences and the life of the author. A number of them lend themselves to a soap opera in a new age.

The future and what it holds will be interesting. I think we have only begun to scratch the surface of how the Internet will affect our lives.

The Power of Friends

Friends are a wonderful thing and the Internet has allowed us to stay closer to our friends on every corner of the earth. I have to admit I am running very behind the eight ball this week and although I have been thinking about my project and paper all week I had yet to put a word on the virtual paper until last night. I was dealing with some pretty hefty life issues that have not allowed me to focus the way I should in order to get my school work done, basically life just got in the way. So, you say how do friends figure into that. Well last night when I was half dead and reeling from the stress in life and tried to sit down to write my thoughts were so fuzzy I couldn't wade through them. To my delight a great friend popped online and chatted for a few minutes. Outside of the usual, "hows life going?" banter she offered, unpromted to be a sounding board for my research. We had an excellent conversation that helped me to weed through the clutter in my brain and clarify the ideas that I felt I could succesfully run with.

Now I am writing, clarifying and research as I move through the paper that I will have finished for tonight. I have decided to focus on the sense of community that the virtual environment may or may not have created. I feel that I can determine this through observing the posts on the "wall" and an online survey of self-reported particpant data. I will look at demographics, participation levels, types of discussions, and other self-reported items like the number of friendships created virtually that turned into face to face relationships.

So now my task in to just write and crank it out. I took a minute out to do this because when I write for a paper I find I am trying to be too much of a perfectionist and can't just pound out the ideas but for some reason the blog allows me to do just that.

All jazzed up and ready to go

I have never been so excited to begin a class project before and write a twenty page paper. I think I have really gone crazy and have no life. As long as my second idea works for the project scope I will be on solid ground. There is a lot of work to do before I am anywhere near completeling it and I keep reminding myself that there is this stuff called learning about the process along the way that I need to be doing as well but this whole process just seems like so much fun and I have gotten really wrapped up in it. Hopefully that means I have found the right topic.

Bringing it into focus
Since there are still alot of things up in the air and I really want to move forward and complete the IRB process so that I could publish the paper or at least present it at a conference once I finish I thought I should get moving. I sat down with the site last night and started cataloging all of the 354 members on the site. I have captured their names, hometowns, class year and intended purpose for using the site (mentor, prospective information, etc.). I figured I could use this information to determine a couple of things; participation, who attened or walked away, general demographics and what kind of questions they asked. I am only part way through this step that seems very daunting but I think it will prove fruitful in the end to have for reference material. I have also used this time to generate some questions that I may or may not use for a survey of a random sampling of participants.

IRB
The IRB is were I can tell I am going to have to spend a lot of time figuring out. Luckily one of the girls who works across the hall from me works in the Department of Research at Clarkson and was able to help me out with a few questions in regards to the process. From what we have determined thus far I will more than likely be extempt but there are a few finer points I have to figure out which may say the decision. As I said above I am thinking about doing a survey of a random sampling of participants and my access to these students through my position at Clarkson might skew the publicly available information that I am using through facebook. The second item is that some of the students posting on the site are what we call "schoolies" these are Clarkson School students basically seniors in highschool that skip their senior year and head off to college a year early. Many of them are still minors and part of the protected class in the IRB process. Their information may need to be eliminated for the exempt status to work. Since my college is new to the process of an administration member needing an IRB to conduct research on their students for another college they are recommending that I contact TTU and beginning the process there. I believe I will finish cataloging the members of the site and try to wrap up my survey question formulation process since that will be needed for the IRB anyway and then zip Angela Eaton an email with a series of questions.

Off to finish this weeks readings
Well I am off to finish the readings for this week, so far the pieces I have read have been very helpful and my margins are full of comments and highlights that could find their way into my final paper. If anyone has any thoughts or questions about my process or direction please feel free to submit a post.

Welcome & Getting Started

Welcome!
This blog will be a collection of my thoughts, observations and musings while I progress through ENGL5377 - Digital Research Methods taught by Dr. Rebecca Rickly at Texas Tech University.

Getting Started
In the first night of class I felt very daunted by the final project in our course. A twenty page paper researching an online community. Hmm, I had no idea what I was going to look at or how I would get it done within the shortened summer session. This is not to say that I have figured it all out and miraculously have finished the project (that would be great wouldn't it) by now less than a week after the first class has started but I do have lots of ideas.

I knew that I wanted to relate what I would do to my interests and my daily work activities. I often do this for two reasons; 1. I can really get into it and be excited about what I am doing 2. If I focus on something that relates to my daily job I can draw on my resources there as well help to advance what I am doing in my current profession as Director of Web Development at Clarkson University.

Idea 1
So my first idea out of the gate was to look at online tools in social communities created by colleges for prospective students. I was thinking about seeing if tools like these decreased the melt in matriculation colleges often experience during the summer before classes begin. Clarkson has often talked of implementing tools like this but in the interest of time, money and experience have yet to do so. There have been a couple of recent articles about colleges that have done so in various forms. SUNY Plattsburgh has created an application for facebook designed to encourage a sense of community before students place foot on campus, https://mymail.clarkson.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/03/facebook . Wilkes University came out with a wonderfully creative advertising campaign to lure prospective students, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89551878 in addition to this cheap but elaborate marketing method they also created a social networking community just for incoming freshman called http://www.hellowilkes.com/. Although both of these projects really excited me we didn't have anything similar and I did not have access to either of the tools or the students to gauge their effectiveness so this sent me back to the drawing board in the quest for an idea.

Idea 2
The SUNY Plattsburgh application gave me an idea and I begin to do some hunting around on facebook to see what I could find. I found a group created by an accepted prospective student for the Saint Rose College in Albany, NY, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8122686977 which had a number of members and had lots of discussion going on around the process and the college. My next thought was to find something similar for Clarkson. I did a lot of searching but was coming up blank so I began to think about creating such a page, seeding it with my summer interns as mentors for the prospective students and then requesting that admission send the link to all accepted students and watch it grow.

A good idea can always get better
My idea was starting to come together but I still had a few bumps in the road that I had yet to figure out. I didn't want to taint the process by having and administrator (myself) or the admission crew involved but I wasn't sure how to get around it. Luckily for me I have a wonderful student that has worked for me for two years that really loves Clarkson and is also extremely helpful to anyone who wants to know anything about Clarkson. I remembered him telling me he answered a lot of questions for incoming students last year via facebook so I sat down with him and had a chat. He agreed that anything with the scent of administration on it would not get me anywhere near the results I was looking for at such a late date and pointed me to the group for the class of 2011 which was started in February of 2007 by a student after he received his acceptance letter. The site has 1314 posts on it's wall and 354 members. I read through only ten of the 67 pages of posts and found a goldmine of information. I think I can zero in on something here and make this work. Thank you so much for your help Dan!