Once again, I have to apologise for my absence at the last research
network meeting. (I think weekends are problematic for getting
everyone together, though I know we're in different timezones - it was
saturday night for me - and there's probably no other solution than
doing it on weekends - a bit Catch 22). Erik (M) noted we need more
psy-soc input, which is definitely my slant on all this, and I feel
bad about not contributing to something I'm very much interested in.
I'd even assured Erik I was coming... bah.
I've responded to some ideas on m:Research, specifically Erik's (Z)
idea on a general user survey, which I'd like to lend a hand to - also
wikis in education, which is the focus of my masters. Which then got
me thinking about that I'm currently restarting work on my
dissertation, which is on "Wikipedia as a learning community" (and
which I'm writing a paper on for Wikimania) and which raises a lot of
issues on how information and experience is collated and used within
the organisational schema of Wikimedia and what lessons need to be
learned on an ongoing basis. Basically, I'm proposing that I could
slant my dissertation to incorporate a study that was needed, broadly
within the aforementioned framework. I'm happy to collaborate on this,
ie. make my study a part of a wider one, or even a starting point to a
survey/project, like testing a particular methodology for quality of
data, response rate etc.
I'll be doing this in some way anyway (and you can get a picture of
what I've been doing so far in my wikimania paper, link below) but
essentially what I'm doing here is throwing it open to other ideas and
see if we can work on anything together, or if there's something that
you'd like to see done. No guarantees mind, and bear in mind that too
much technical stuff tends to fry my brain :)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-CL1
All the best,
Cormac / Cormaggio