What happened to the "fav lines" thread?

[snowblizz]

@snowblizz
perhaps you could organise that at a certain number of posts, members receive an email survey that might help your research. if your research is actually legitamate, many here who are from the academia will be glad to help, im sure.

I've had both the rigour and relevance of my research questioned, but legitimacy is a new one.

At this stage those I'd want to pick the brains of are as many MVPs I can get hold of and anyone else who is a "helper", the term used by some other researches was "information providers".

The most problematic thing is to formulate questions, I'm finding it difficult to construct a normal survey out of the things I want to ask. I was considering trying to leverage the medium and have a more fluid interactive exchange by posting a thread with questions and peope could then PM, e-mail or simply answer in the post to allow for a discussion. I expect it would bring up issues I had not yet thought of.

I made a pretty nice argument for why I think forums are a pretty darned smashing source of support (not quite formulated as such in the paper of course) but so far I've found very few people use them.

And yes I was hoping the helping would extend to answering not only questions on Excel but also questions about answering questions about Excel.

 

[diddi]

@snowblizz
im not running down your research! its just that i have a research background, and theres informal 'thought i might do a bit of research about...' and theres 'im conducting a longitudinal study into the effects.. '

both sorts of research are valid in their context. what i was trying to say, which i didn't do entirely well, was that if your stated aims seem reasonable to others, they will come on board and help out.

i would be pleased to be involved in your work without acknowledgement. do you have a draft proposal yet or a methodology in mind. i think that forums are an interesting source of raw data and in the context of your question i can see the importance of the 'missing thread'. i also find it interesting from a teaching and learning point of view.

 

[snowblizz]

@snowblizz
im not running down your research! its just that i have a research background, and theres informal 'thought i might do a bit of research about...' and theres 'im conducting a longitudinal study into the effects.. '

both sorts of research are valid in their context. what i was trying to say, which i didn't do entirely well, was that if your stated aims seem reasonable to others, they will come on board and help out.

i would be pleased to be involved in your work without acknowledgement. do you have a draft proposal yet or a methodology in mind. i think that forums are an interesting source of raw data and in the context of your question i can see the importance of the 'missing thread'. i also find it interesting from a teaching and learning point of view.

No worries, I couldn't help chuckle at the idea of having to be legitimate as well. I attended a seminar on rigour and relevance recently where it was mentioned how previously "relevant research" was whatever your supervisor thought was OK, (this was aimed at Ph D students like me) but nowadays apparently one should be trying a bit harder in making an argument for the "why I'm wasting time on this".
In my case it's "I have to try and get a PhD together somehow". Few peopel have the time to do longitudinal studies in the IS field it seems.
Draft proposal eh, yeah I think some years ago I told my supervisor "this is what I'm interested in" and she said "ok, whatever". And that was about it. It wasn't quite as informal as that of course, but we are slowly moving towards a more shall we say form-centric way of doing things.

For this particular "question" I was thinking that something along the lines of Kozinets' (sic?) "netnography" is the way forward. In so far as I understand how it works (I haven't read the full book on the subject).
In other words ya'll are under the microscope already. Including me. I have been saving bookmarks of "interesting threads" since about I joined here. But I must say that it really didn't occur to me how ephemeral the data could be. Well it did, but I wasn't expecting that thread to disappear just like that.

I was discussing with some colleagues about the potential use of text mining on forum data but apparently the preprocessing need is so extensive as to almost render the idea infeasible.

 

[Cindy Ellis]

The most problematic thing is to formulate questions, I'm finding it difficult to construct a normal survey out of the things I want to ask.

This is pertinent to the thread on how to help first time posters!
Not intending to divert this thread into that topic, but how to ask a question in a way that can be answered with relevant information is not easy, and is a really valuable life skill.
(BTW - very interesting concept, to do real research based on forums)
Cindy