Writing

Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Posted by Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin 2 comments
I am reviewing my "To Do" list. I have some interesting things to do. Apart from developing this virtual community for PhDs I have to write some papers. This is what I got in my list:

1. A Chapter in a book titled: Systems Thinking and E-Participation: ICT in the Governance of Society -- the chapter will go in the "Current Trends on e-government and social networking based on ICT" section of the book. Actually I have to write an abstract to be accepted first! I know very little about e-goverment, I know about software, social software and software development! But this book could be perfect for me. The editors of the book want to focus on the both sides of the e-goverment coin: the goverment and the citizens (i.e. the people). So here is where I come, I am going to write a chapter on virtual communities, how they are created, how they evolve, what happens there, etc. Hopefully my experience at participating in several online forums, weblogs, etc will help. Also, although not directly relevant, I could draw on my experience in the project I am working in at the moment: designing a virtual community for educational purposes.

2. This is a paper I am going to write with my boss. It will draw on our experience and the data we got from our last project: E-learning and E-Mentoring to improve skills of Unemployed Women. It's going to be something like: Adding a Structuration Dimension to e-learning and e-mentoring. I used Structuration Theory in my PhD thesis, and my boss is doing the same. So we thought that using it to explain some of the issues in that project could be a good idea. We actually would like to see if e-mentoring really exists. Most of the mentoring activities that our project participants performed were done through other media, so there is was no e in mentoring. The question I am thinking at the moment would be something like Can Social Software (or Virtual Communities) be used for mentoring purposes? We'll have to investigate the mentoring process in detail ... We are still brainstorming....

3. A Project Report to be published in the Research Memorandum Series of the School. Of course it will be based on my experiences at designing and implementing the Virtual Graduate School. Perhaps I could adapt some of my posts in this blog .....

hmmm What else could I write about?
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The other day I asked a friend of mine to draw a picture representing research experiments with students. This is what she gave me. I have posted it in a blog article next to a video about a marketing experiment.