Research Topic: Virtual 3rd Place
Since the “Dot Com Bomb” of the early 21st Century, the uses of the Internet and World Wide Web (Web) have radically changed. The infancy of the Web saw domain name speculation, content management systems, and static directories as the dominant paradigms. The “Dot Com Bomb” forced everyone to reassess the functionality of the most powerful tool in information communication. This reassessment, coupled with the huge growth spurt of bandwidth access found in DSL and digital-cable technologies has led to the Web being cultivated for search engine optimization, wiki groups, folksonomies (tagging) and other collaborative and social software technologies. These are the innovations currently driving the global development of new online, or virtual, communities where information is being organized and shared through increasingly dynamic methods.
This new age of the Web, what some call Web 2.0, fosters many new opportunities for information gathering and sharing which are only just being realized. Our research is inspired by these opportunities which need to be explored to ascertain the benefits, costs, and overall impact that are inherent to their usages. The “Virtual 3rd Place” research project will be explicitly exploring the new research practices available in this Web 2.0 environment especially focused on the collaborative aspect of the technologies. Specifically, we will focus on researching the electronic information gathering, dissemination and collaborative practices of the researchers in the University of Washington Honors Program. Our main methods of research will be interview, observation and survey. Our primary questions are as follows:
1) How do researchers interact with their studies and each other through various collaborative technologies including: web logs (blogging), folksonomies(tagging), wikis, and other social software?
2) How do these technologies impact research and knowledge development?
This new age of the Web, what some call Web 2.0, fosters many new opportunities for information gathering and sharing which are only just being realized. Our research is inspired by these opportunities which need to be explored to ascertain the benefits, costs, and overall impact that are inherent to their usages. The “Virtual 3rd Place” research project will be explicitly exploring the new research practices available in this Web 2.0 environment especially focused on the collaborative aspect of the technologies. Specifically, we will focus on researching the electronic information gathering, dissemination and collaborative practices of the researchers in the University of Washington Honors Program. Our main methods of research will be interview, observation and survey. Our primary questions are as follows:
1) How do researchers interact with their studies and each other through various collaborative technologies including: web logs (blogging), folksonomies(tagging), wikis, and other social software?
2) How do these technologies impact research and knowledge development?
