Over the last couple of months I've had a bit of a crisis looming. Some academics and students had been discussing setting up a Wiki (or something similar) for general sharing of resources between students. In one sense, it was great - it demonstrates a clear demand for these things among students and staff, and a willingness to put work in. On the other hand, despite knowing about my project, they were kind of shutting me out of the discussion. From my point of view, this stood a chance of undermining my PhD project completely - if students were presented with two resource sharing systems, one seeded with content and supported by academics, and another (my project), they would naturally choose the supported, seeded system. Leaving me with no data, and no project.
Fortunately, in the last few weeks the folks in that project have started talking to me - some of them didn't want to undermine my project, and understood the risks of having two competing projects in the same space. I think they also started to realize the amount of time, energy, and money they would need to put in to build and support the system they were talking about. Last week and this week I've had a few meetings with the team, and we've all agreed to work together - they'll proceed with their plan to seed some shared resources for students, and I'll make some modifications to my system to support what the students are wanting to do, and everyone wins :) I'm very lucky to have supportive colleagues who are willing to work with me in this way, and I owe James a beer next time I'm at the pub with him.
This is nicely in line with my research plans anyway - I'm exploring ways to kick start and sustain a social learning network. If this seeding works, it will hopefully start a snowball effect, where students see the value of contributing, and start to use the network; and once that happens, I start to have enough data to work out how students are using the system, and how it can be improved.
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