Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

A few months ago I wrote a to do list of things I needed to write. Today I want to check how all this blah blah write write went. I have to say I haven't done my homework as I wished because I had some interruptions. I moved cities and then I changed jobs! In my new job I am working with digital repositories and the semantic web. I will definitely write about that in a future post. Hopefully it won’t be about RDF, or similar standards, but maybe about what you need to design the “inputs” and “outputs” of such framework.


As the end of the first stage of the VGS project was coming, I wrote a short Project Report, which was part of all the documentation we needed/wanted to produce to explain what we did with the money we got. I guess people liked it because we also got more funds for one year and a half to expand the project's pilot web site. The VGS project was about building an online environment for PhD students and Researchers with research resources created from their own material and or personal accounts that I recorded in video/audio tapes. The report was far from being technical; on the contrary, it was very qualitative as it explained the process I went through from identifying candidates for interviews or focus groups, to running those and analysing the data collected. That data justified the approach I took at creating and providing the research material.
Structuration paper.

Structuration paper: In December my ex-boss and I submitted a copy of that paper to a journal (don't know if they will like it.) As I thought, the objective of the paper changed several times during our discussions and writings. My ex-boss is more into e-learning and learning theories, I am more into online tools and communities and software. We managed to find a middle ground where we were both comfortable. At the end we used some Structuration concepts such as the dimensions of structuration, time-space distanciation and Orlikowski’s model of Enactment of Technologies-in Practice to explain what happened in this e-mentoring project I worked in 2 years ago. If you wonder why I would write a paper like that or if there is any “technology” involved... well yes, a lot. E-mentoring is mentoring carried out by using online tools. So what I was interested in is in seeing the effects of the technology in the reactions of people, the way they used the available tools and the overall outcome of the e-mentoring process in their professional careers.


The book chapter... I am now working on it. The editor liked my abstract, although I think it was awful! The chapter is about online communities and governance. What I am trying to do is to explain the dynamics and norms of online communities. Those dynamics and norms show the way online communities self-govern and keep control of what happens there. This is the only way they can stay alive. Hopefully by seeing how these things are done online we can learn some useful lessons as to how we can go about e-government and e-governance. I just started a few days ago and it still needs a lot of work (have written only 2000 words which may not like later), but as a good friend of mine told me a while ago, when I asked him about his PhD upgrade report, it's not the Mona Lisa, but it's smiling :)