This morning at Blogtalk, I presented a brief overview of our case study relating to an 18-month knowledge community development project with the National Institute for Mental Health in England.
The web version of my slides is now online here, and the session notes are on a wiki here.
The essential message here is about the offline work and engagement required to make a project like this work, and I tried to outline some key aspects of the methodology we employed. I will be trying to complete a more formal case study of this work soon, and we hope to be doing ongoing work on monitoring the system's usage and usefulness throughout this year. Updates will follow.
I should add a note of sincere thanks to our very talented team, whose work I am representing here, plus of course to the many people within NIMHE who have played an equally important role in making the project a success.
If anybody would like any more info about this project, please feel free to get in touch or add a comment below.
The feedback from the talk has been positive so far, and I hope to pick up conversations with a few people here to get some more specific input into what is an ongoing process. Here are a few mentions of the presentation so far:
- http://matt.blogs.it/2004/07/06.html#a1514
- http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/blog/archives/2004/07/000671.html
- http://www.rolandtanglao.com/archives/2004/07/06/lee_bryant_informal_joined_up_knowledge_sharing_using_connected_weblogs_in_pursuit_of_mental_health_service_improvement_blogtalk_20
- http://elmine.wijnia.com/weblog/archives/001330.html
- http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/_d10/_v10/__show_day/_w2004-07-07#000010-001314
- http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/7/8/101784.html
- http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/07/07/blogtalk-20-compte-rendu/
- http://boozle.de/wordpress/index.php?p=120
- http://nelh.blogspot.com/
- http://www.roell.net/weblog/archiv/2004/07/06/my_talk_at_blogtalk.shtml
- http://www.scalefree.info/2004/07/blogwalk_20_mem.html
- http://blog.wirearchy.com/blog/_archives/2004/7/8/101850.html
- http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/13.html#a1280
Also, another issue which I didn't mention in my post is regarding theoretical groundings of information science(s)/studies. Here as well, there are theories regarding separate research focuses (information retrieval, information seeking, information behaviors, etc...). However, these sound like theoretical frameworks for various sub-disciplines of information studies rather than Information Science (singular). What is that 'thing' that ties all the information sciences (plural) together, besides for the fact that they all claim to be dealing with the 'thing' called 'information' - which is not necessarily defined the same across the various concentrations and research areas within information science/studies.