Loss of focus

Dealing with the possible change in methodology seems to have brought with it some doubt as to the focus of the research. Last week, in an attempt to get a sense of what my contribution might be, I explored the possibilities of integrating the model of the Temporal Aspects of Usability (TAU), the Dynamic Model of Relapse (DMR) and possibly even the Transtheoretical Model of Behaviour Change (TTM). Looking at this in writing now drives home just how ambitious (and unwise) a pursuit this is. Needless to say, it proved problematic. Fabre’s TAU model provides four high-level dimensions to be considered when designing for a particular action: location, duration, frequency and contingency. The DMR describes a complex system and, while temporal considerations are important in the model, it is not a ‘temporal’ model of relapse prevention. A couple of simplified integrated models I attempted seemed so obvious as to almost be common sense, making me question value of their contribution.

Going through this process also made me wonder about the role of the data I was intending to collect. How would the data support the assumptions made in the models? I found myself at one of those points where it seems like you’re doing research in reverse. So, back to square one, and time to re-ask some fundamental questions – What is the research question? Am I trying to modify a model, integrate some models or just use some models to get at some information? The first of these questions really should have been more present in my mind, but seems to have been ignored. The second, about models, can only really be answered once I have my data. There’s only so much you can guess about how a model can be changed when you don’t have any data.

I’ve resolved, at least for the moment, to press on with the following research question, which I have a feeling is at a good level of abstraction and will let me get the most advantage out of the contextual data I hope to collect (more on my new methodology later).

What are the influences on the ability of quitting smokers to access online social support at times of need?

In answering this, I will explore the activity of accessing support. I will use the TAU dimensions to explore this activity, and will use aspects of the DMR to explore contextual issues and temporal issues related to smoking.

I’m going to define ‘access’ as the sending or receiving of social support ‘content’. A ‘time of need’ may be defined either by the individual (eg. a craving or experience of withdrawal symptoms, intrapersonal negative affect), their context (eg. a high risk situation, conflict with others) or by research into appropriate times for intervention. In including the last of these, I hope to be able to cover interruption or persistence as a part of the investigation. Research has hinted that this is ‘needed’, but it is not a need that quitting smokers would necessarily express (note the inability to interrupt in online social support). Online social support will be defined as support in online communities from other quitters as well as micro-blog users who publish their quit experiences to their friends online. Some interesting comparisons could be brought up between conventional online communities and new ‘lighter’ social networking in micro-blogs, where communication is not only with other quitters but with a regular extended social network. “Online” may include mobile access to online technologies, eg twitter.

If I were to pre-empt some of the findings, I would be thinking about the interplay of rhythms and interruptions. The rhythms of the physiological effects of quitting, the rhythms of device use, rhythms of social interaction and other life rhythms may all have an effect. Interruptions would feature in a couple of ways. Experiencing a craving in a high risk situation could be seen as an interruption to the activity the individual wishes to be engaged in. We could also think of ‘remedial’ interruptions such as reminder emails.

Surely this needs another iteration, but I’m going to sit with it for at least 24 hours. I need some focus at least for the next little while. And I would really, really like to be able to keep most of my literature review! A possible problem: I think I (and other researchers) already implicitly know what many of the influences are. Also, the rhythms of internet use are perhaps not as interesting and “rich” (ie tied to interesting contexts) as the rhythms of mobile use. Then again, perhaps nobody has explicitly pointed out these inadequacies of online social support. Maybe I need to push for the distinction between tonic and phasic social support, and underline that an online community supports the tonic but is inadequate at supporting the phasic. This leaves a window to talk about mobile technology in the discussion, also highlighting the capacities of the different media to convey different kinds of social support. Another idea is to look at access to support in general at times of need. This could take in a variety of technologies … but I suppose it would better to just focus on one.

Re-thinking methodology

Well, failing some kind of miracle, it looks like I won’t have time to run the trial I was planning to. Hours of work building the website for the project and planning the logistics gone to waste. I knew there was a chance it would all be in vain, but I had to be prepared. Enough negative talk – how can I make this work? What data to I have at my disposal? How would that data help me to answer the question?

Possible sources of data

Interviews with online support community members: In order to get at ‘the influences on their ability to access online social support’, I would use the TAU and DMR concepts to probe their use of the community. This should lead to some discussion on the benefits of mobile technologies From members that have already contacted me, I should hopefully be able to tee up four or five online chat interviews. I could ask the administrators of the community if I could message some other members about the interview directly. Hopefully, I would have a few more bites this time. It would be good to get a list of members that had quit in the previous month or fortnight.

Interviews with quitext users: Quitext is a new service launched by an Australian company that sends SMS messages of advice for quitting smokers on a schedule defined by the individual. They’re quite a new service, though, and I’m not sure how many subscribers they have. I don’t think it’s that likely that this option will come through.

Channel on Jaiku of quitting smokers: These guys formed the group I was hoping to in my study. I could join the group and ask them to post more often, also ask if they’re posting from mobile or web. Could then do email pre-interview and web-chat post interview. Could be a bit risky. This is the last chance to get the micro-blogging trial idea off the ground. Otherwise, just interviewing some/all of them would be interesting. They seem to have stopped posting about their quit so much recently, but they have been posting to each other on other topics. I don’t know how many of these people knew each other beforehand. There is surely something interesting in here, I’m just not sure how relevant the TAU is to this any more. Need a rethink on the question if I go down this path.

Twitter feeds of people quitting: Across both micro-blogging platforms, there is one user on Twitter that posted the most about her quit attempt. About 20 times over the course of three weeks. She was already a regular twitterer, and she slotted her quit-related posts in between all her regular posts. She kind of ‘hijacked’ the communication channel in her quit attempt. The feeds themselves would be interesting to look at and the intervening posts would give some idea of the context. Interviewing her would be great, and her micro-blog would serve as a perfect aid to her memory, to get her back into the moments when she was posting and how she was thinking/feeling. If I could land an interview, then there could be a valuable methodological contribution regarding the use of micro-blog feeds to aid in interview recall.

I better stop crapping on now. I’ve read, re-read and re-written this post about 20 times. I’m feeling that focusing on the temporality of Quitnet use is a bit dull. I would ideally like to look at the micro-blogging quitters, but I need to define a research question and a contribution angle. I don’t know if TAU is going to cut it any more if I make so many changes to the methodology.

Hmmmmmm

Meeting Summary

A productive, focusing meeting today. Most of the discussion focused on data analysis, which led to speculation about the product of the research. The dance between existing research, contribution and practical issues continues.

Methodology

We discussed in detail my proposal for analysis of the data. Yesterday I went through the four dimensions of the TAU as proposed by Fabre, and thought about how I would get at them through the data. I was assuming that they would be the ‘lense’ and that the relationship between it and the theories of behaviour change/relapse (the Transtheoretical Model and the Dynamic Model of Relapse) would come out in the discussion. Steve suggested that I need to get at the constructs in those theories more clearly in my methodology, rather than just focusing on the TAU dimensions. This led to a discussion on what would actually be produced in the discussion section of the thesis – what will the contribution be? I’ve given up assuming that this question will have an answer before it’s handed in.

My intention to do some simple statistical analysis was questioned. We resolved that we would have to wait and see what data I get to see whether it can be made to play any part in the story.

Contribution

Our discussion today formalised what had been floating around in the back of my head. I’m going to look to synthesise the TAU framework with the temporal aspects of the models of addiction and relapse. The product would then be:

An model for the temporal aspects of usability in technology to support smoking cessation.

Obviously a shorter, snappier title needs to be formulated, but this is essentially what I’m trying to do. The solidification of this goal means that I need to make sure I can get at the temporal aspects of all of these in the data. Steve said he wanted to see a more definite indication as to how I will get at all of the constructs through the data. I think my mind map from yesterday demonstrates most of that, though I need to do some work on pulling out the constructs from the TTM and the DMR (maybe even just the DMR… we’ll see).

Contingency

Ethics clearance was finalised last night. I’ve contacted QuitNet and hopefully the message will go out to thousands of QuitNet members in the next couple of days. I need to come up with a contingency plan ASAP – what will I do if I don’t get any interest, or it takes participants too long to organise themselves into groups?

Timeline

I need to get participants going ASAP. I also need to make a call on whether there is enough time to do a one week pilot. If I get some participants by the end of this week, that may be possible, otherwise I really don’t know if I’ll have enough time.

By the end of September:

• All data should be in, with most of it having been analysed
• Draft of the methodology
• Draft findings

For October, this leaves:

• Draft dicsussion
• Finesse literature review
• Hand it in on October 26

Summary

I feel like I’m pretty well on track. I need to finally sort out the issues with the stage of change questionnaire, which have been bugging me for quite a while. I think I need to just put some together and get someone at TCCV to check over it. Also need to finish the mini-site with all the help info for participants in the study. And address all the issues brought up in the meeting. My work is cut out for me – it’s time to get cracking!

Interpersonal Awareness – another possible angle

In an effort to find a focus that will get the most out of the rich qualitative data I will be collecting, I decided to revise some of my earlier thoughts. As part of my exploration of self-efficacy, I came across the idea of interpersonal awareness, a term proposed by Neustaedter et al (2006).

Drawing on studies of context awareness and CSCW, Neustaedter et al. develop a model for interpersonal awareness through a qualitative analysis of the relationships of a number of participants. Relationships were put into three categories. These are placed on a spectrum in order of decreasing need for awareness and decreasing need for detail: home inhabitants, intimate socials and extended socials. The analysis also explored the types of information needed and the reasons for needing awareness. Fundamental reasons for needing awareness were distilled to co-ordination, promoting connectedness and desire to share personal knowledge. The three fundamental types of awareness information were of location, activity and status.

This study is relevant to the current problem situation as it deals with context awareness in a social context. Many studies in IS research have focussed on awareness needs in a work context. My first thoughts on possible ways to expand this model are through investigating:

• how online relationships with no face to face component fit into the model
• how support relationships fit into this model
• people’s need to express their status or convey information. Neustaedter et al. focus on the awareness of others that people require. Apart from cases involving co-ordination, they do not mention people’s own need for others to be aware of their location or status.
• how aware people are of others in an online support community, and whether increasing awareness is of any benefit

I was also thinking of looking at the relationship between interpersonal awareness and perceived social support through obtaining a subjective account of their perceived supportedness before and after the trial.

Anyway, these are thoughts that require a bit more rumination over the weekend, I think.

References

Neustaedter, C., Elliot, K., & Greenberg, S. (2006). Interpersonal awareness in the domestic realm . Proceedings of OZCHI 2006, 15-22 .

Questioning research questions…

Things seem to stay stable round here for a maximum of about five minutes.

After settling on the following research question:

What effect does interpersonal awareness have on self-efficacy for behavioural change?

I became increasingly concerned that my view of self-efficacy, the confidence in one’s own ability to refrain from engaging in a particular behaviour, was too simplistic. I believed it was something that could be easily measured and something that needed to be high in order to effect behavioural change. After reading a few papers and meeting with Ron Borland at the Cancer Council Today, I have realised that Self-Efficacy, and indeed many of the internal and external variables in behavioural change, is a strange beast. Depending on the stage of the quit attempt, and depending on the strength of other characteristics, high self-efficacy can have either a positive or negative effect. For example, high self-efficacy combined with insufficient coping skills results in the individual being overconfident and failing to refrain from the behaviour. Also, with a small sample size a measure of this kind would be next to meaningless.

Ron then suggested a different kind of study, where I could attempt to identify what characteristics of micro-blogging address the psychological constructs known to be important in behaviour change. I could get my participants to sign up to twitter and use it for a couple of weeks. I could then observe their posting behaviour and survey/interview them with a view to finding out how the technology was used in relation to those key constructs. For example, did they use it to reflect on their position or to request help. Did they feel it was useful? Do they feel it had an effect on the outcome? While I was taken with this idea for a couple of hours, when talking it over with one of my supervisors I was alerted to the fact that this is merely a technology review. In order to make a contribution to the literature I need to go a step further. Being able to elicit some design guidelines from the data may be enough, but it may not be. I will find out tomorrow when I talk to my main supervisor.

I have since fallen into the idea of focusing on the concepts of temporality, placedness, reflexivity and social supportiveness, which have been identified as possible important characteristics when designing technology to assist in behavioural change. Rather than using the psychological concepts as a lense, I could use these as a lense to probe the users’ experiences and see if they are sufficient, what they mean in the context of micro-blogging (how they manifest) and how micro-blogging services could be better to designed to enhance these characteristics and any others which become evident through the investigation. Again, I’m not sure how significant the contribution is here. The only real difference between this and the previous option is the choice of lense. In this one I am taking for granted some design guidelines and seeing how they hold up and can possibly be elaborated upon or added to. In the previous one I am making no assumptions on design guidelines, instead I am starting from principles of behaviour change and hopefully waiting for design guidelines to emerge. It may be that the existing research into technology for behavioural change has already taken this into account and there is no need for me to dive to that level again. Perhaps it is useful to refine, elaborate and extend the existing guidelines in the literature.

Ok, so, any other big ideas before I sign off? I think some kind of contribution related to design guidelines is a useful one. I’m pretty much following the model of Consolvo et al’s (2006) trial of their mobile phone application to encourage physical activity, only in my case I am not designing the artefact to be tested, I’m just taking advantage of an existing one – just being a connectionist. Whether this contribution is significant is the subject of tomorrow morning’s meeting.

Nailing a research question…

… is really not that easy.

I felt a bit disillusioned after my meeting with my supervisors a few days ago. The realisation about research that was forming when I wrote my last post still hadn’t really kicked in, so I ended up diverging a jumbled mess of words and desires. I also really struggled to grasp exactly what my supervisor was on about at times, as he put forward ideas that I thought were irrelevant or by changing a couple of words in one of my sentences rendered it seemingly incomprehensible or changed the domain entirely. I started to feel like I needed 20 years of research up my belt in order to get anywhere. On later reflection, I realised that this is what research is all about. There are many kinds of stories that can be told about any situation, problem or relationship. You just have to follow your intuition, logic, interests and (of course) the literature until things start to settle down. And they finally have:

What influence does micro-blogging have over perceived social support?

This is the question I settled on yesterday, and already it has started to change. Firstly, a justification for watering down my desire to design something. In order to evaluate a user interface within the scope of an honours degree, it would have to be quite simple and targeted on a specific kind of interaction. The design ideas I have in my head for a twitter/facebook mashup to help people quit smoking are waaaay too complicated for me to tackle in the time I have. So instead I decided to focus on the assumption that was the underlying motivation for making the choice to use twitter: that micro-blogging will help people feel more supported. By pairing up or forming small groups, quitting smokers will be able to share their thoughts about their quit attempt, express frustration and joy and maintain an awareness of how others are in the group, an awareness which may encourage direct support in the form of an instant message or SMS.

As I write this, however, I’m beginning to wonder if social support is the right construct to be measuring. While trying to find an established questionnaire to measure it, I noticed that studies often measure a variety of constructs, including:

• Perceived social support
• Self-esteem
• Hopefulness
• Self-efficacy

One may expect that levels of self-esteem, hopefulness and self-efficacy would increase as perceived social support increases, although they may be affected by other things as well. Micro-blogging has two major affordances for wellbeing: reflexiveness and awareness. Users can reflect on their trajectory (as well as that of others), as well as enabling others to have an awareness of their thoughts, feelings and actions. This awareness may lead to an increase in the amount of support given …. but it may not.

Perhaps reflexiveness is the major benefit of micro-blogging (at least as it exists at the moment), so maybe I should just be measuring constructs more indicative of general well-being (eg self-esteem, hopefulness). Alternatively, if I want to focus on behavioural change, I could look at self-efficacy. Again, self-esteem and hopefulness may help in the interpretation of the data.

In summary, I have to choose whether I’m focusing on social support, which may have a more general application, or self-efficacy, which will the contribution to aid in the field of behavioural change. In either case measures of self-esteem and hopefulness will also be useful indicators. (Aside: increases in perceived social support would be reflected in these two variables, so the effect of social support would not be abandoned entirely if we focus on self-efficacy at the expense of perceived social support).

Since the affordances of micro-blogging in its current form do not have interaction as a focus, perhaps self-efficacy is in fact the construct I should be looking at. Reflexiveness is, after all, important in behavioural change and I’m not sure how it is relevant for other forms of social support. Maybe it’s only relevant when there is some kind of goal-driven journey. (Aside: Preece refers to tasks and goals in her analysis of the online knee reconstruction support network).
Yes, I know things got a bit hairy back there. But I think I’ve sorted it all out now (for the moment…). Looks like I’ll probably be changing my research question to:

What influence does micro-blogging have over self-efficacy in smoking cessation?

Next up: defining micro blogging. At the moment it’s just floating in the air – I really need to ground it in the literature.

What is research?

I suppose I should have thought about this question before I started undertaking a thesis. I’ve been really struggling the last couple of days and have finally realised why. My main motivation for action is to solve problems. While it may be possible to solve a problem while undertaking research, there is the added requirement of making some kind of contribution to knowledge. Up until this point I’ve been solving problems based on what I’ve read from the literature, but I’ve rarely gone beyond this to think what these solutions may be adding to knowledge.

It’s time to start looking at what contribution to knowledge my solution is making, that is, in what ways it is innovative. My current concept, which involves integrating ’status blogging’ services like twitter with an online social support network may not really innovative in a technical sense. Services like twitter wear their APIs on their sleeves, this is exactly the kind of thing they expect you to do. However, various insights could be gained from this research to contribute to a number of fields. Some random thoughts:

• How should interfaces be designed to encourage support of people sending their status to online support networks?
• Is the opportunity to self-reflect a motivator for the reciprocation of social support in online social networks? If so, are people more likely to give support in discussion threads (compared to the twitter-based solution) where they have more opportunity to self-reflect?
• What effect does group size have on the reciprocation of social support?

As is finally becoming clear, you can spin something however you like. I’ve had my moments over the last couple of days when it’s seemed like considering reciprocity in this situation is a bit arbitrary. I feel like this is the ill-advised desire for the ‘right’ answer rearing its head again. In research, I feel like perhaps things don’t ‘click’ into place quite as often, or at least the clicking takes so much time that you don’t even realise it’s happening. While I realise that delving into the world of research is something that I need to do, part of me just wants to smack down some serious interface designs and get stuff happening. Patience and focus are the order of the day…

So, I’m still feeling a bit lost and I have to have a decision for my supervisors this afternoon. But that’s ok, I feel like somehow this is a reasonably normal process to be going through, especially when moving from the ’solution-based’ mindset of computer science (my undergraduate degree) to the ‘contribution-based’ mindset of scholarly research.

Thesis topic crunch time: theoretical indigestion

The context

A couple of weeks ago my research question looked something like this:

How can existing online social networks be used to assist in behavioural change?

The context for my investigation is smoking cessation. So far I’ve been focusing on how online social networks are being used for social support. I’ve found that some substantial research has been done into social support online (Maloney-Krichmar & Preece 2005), but little has focused on extending this support to pervasive technologies such as mobile phones. Some studies in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) – which is where my thesis is supposed to be placed – have investigated text message support services for behavioural change, while others have looked at social support in particular using mobile applications (Consolvo et al. 2006). A study by my supervisors (Graham et al 2006) found that temporality, placedness and reflexivity were important factors to consider when designing technologies to aid behavioural change.

To my knowledge, none of the existing online social support networks are addressing the concepts of temporality and placedness (context awareness). All of them allow interaction only through the website – unless you are fortunate enough to have the internet on your mobile phone, you can’t access support when and where you need it. So I started thinking about how peers in a social network could start to address these temporality and placedness issues – delivering emotional or even informational support when the concerned individual needs it, with an awareness of the person’s context. This is not to say that the technology does not exist, only that it is not yet being effectively employed towards the end of social support.

Web 2.0 services like twitter and facebook allow users to post their status from their mobile phone while they are on the go. A quitting smoker could post their status (having a good/bad day, in need of help etc) to the online group, which could observe the stream of messages coming from community members. Members that are online could reply, sending messages of support. There are a whole host of other ways to exploit this technology in this context (eg buddies, subscribing to users’ feeds) but for the moment I’m trying to keep my focus small, lest my imagination run away with me. The concept underlying all this has something to do with reciprocity, either between individuals or between the individual and the group.

Theoretical indigestion

The idea of reciprocity between an individual and the network came to me while reading Barry Wellman’s Network capital in a multi-level world (2001). The paper is a multi-level analysis of social support. It is multi-level in the sense that it looks at the individual, relational and network characteristics of a social support network, and tries to observe any emergent network properties, instances where the ‘whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts’. Although the paper was more a demonstration of the technique of multi-level analysis, some interesting conclusions were drawn on the nature of social support:

• Reciprocity is a multi-level phenomenon. Small acts are likely to be reciprocated quickly by the receiver of support, whereas more substantial support may be reciprocated at some point by some other part of the network. A family is a good example of this latter form of reciprocal support.
• Particular kinds of relational ties are more likely to be supportive when embedded in a network of similar ties. These are cases where network capital is generated:
  • Less intimate but active relational ties between individuals were more likely to be supportive in a network with more active ties
  • Ties with high accessibility (eg ease, frequency of contact) were more likely to provide support when embedded in a network of accessible ties.

I have the feeling that both of these observations will be useful to me at some point, but for the moment I’ll try to focus on reciprocity. When interpreting Wellman’s conclusions, it is important to keep in mind that the data it draws from is based on very broad definitions of emergency support and everyday support, and that the sample was from a middle-class British-Canadian population in a Toronto suburb in 1968. Is the emotional support needed by a quitting smoker emergency or everyday support? Could patterns of reciprocity have changed since 1968?

The next step

So perhaps now it is time for me to find a theory of reciprocity (or some other related concept) and see if it is evident in online social support networks. If a theory already exists for technology-assisted reciprocity, then this will be used, otherwise a theory of face to face reciprocity will be employed.

Once the theory has been selected, I have two choices (as suggested by my supervisors):

Option 1: Contribution to user interface literature

In this option I would look at the theory and see how web 2.0 techniques could be used to employ the theory. My empirical component would then be a laboratory study comparing a ’standard’ web 2.0 technology, such as twitter, with a solution which I would develop. While part of me would like to develop something like this, I have my reservations

Pessimisms

• A laboratory setting may not reflect the usability issues that would become apparent in the real world
• I may not be able to develop a solution in time
• Unreliability of the technology. Facebook does not allow text messaging from Australia and Twitter has currently disabled text messaging from Australia. (This may not be a problem – in a lab environment we could just use IM to simulate messages)
• The contribution to UI literature may not be all that significant. People are churning out web2.0 interface designs.

Optimisms

• Output may actually be significant – ‘designing for reciprocity in online social support networks’. Output would be what works and doesn’t work in the UI design.
• I would get to do some development, have a product at the end
• Designing – may be easier to tap into some kind of ‘flow’

Questions

• Would there have to be a couple of different prototype designs to compare?

Option 2: Contribution to reciprocity literature

In this option I would look at the theory and do some empirical study of existing online social support networks. For example, I might look at a number of posts over a period of a week and observe reciprocation between community members. I could then see if the theory was verified or whether it needs to be extended to account for the observed behaviour.

Pessimisms

• This may only be useful if no study has already been done into reciprocation in online support communities (suppose I better find out, huh?)
• I won’t get any technical experience with the new technology. This may effect my employment options after graduation

Optimisms

• Providing it hasn’t already been done, this would be a meaningful contribution

Questions

• Would I still design a prototype GUI?

Where is smoking cessation in all this?

It seems like the context of smoking cessation may be becoming irrelevant in all this. My intuitive assumption that smokers will need more immediate support than members of other social support groups (eg depression, injury recovery) may actually be incorrect. If it is incorrect, then we could use any context. If I do go ahead and use the smoking cessation context, I will have to justify my reason for doing so, citing reasons other than the fact that there is research being done in this context in my department. Alternatively, I may be able to argue that temporality and placedness are in fact more important for smoking cessation in particular, since the consequences of missing support (ie. a relapse) are more severe than in other contexts.

Do you care?

I honestly don’t think anything I’ve written today will be useful (or comprehensible) to anyone other than myself, but I certainly do feel a lot less confused for having written it. Hopefully once my theory and methods are locked down I can start writing posts that are more useful to more people

A beginning

Wow, after all this talk I’m finally starting my first real blog adventure. God knows if anyone will actually read it…

So, why Connectionist? Well, I’ve recently discovered a common theme in all my endeavours – connecting things. I’m riding the ‘wisdom of crowds’/web 2.0/collaboration wave because it’s the first time in my whole life I’ve found an area of enquiry that I am both willing and able to engage in. It’s beginning to become clear to me that my ultimate aim is to enable both the efficient sharing of knowledge and collaboration so that we may sort this world’s problems as quickly as possible – it increasingly seems like we’re running out of time. My underlying belief (which I seem to forget all to often) is the rather unoriginal concept that the ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, that out of a collective consciousness unexpected and amazing emergent structures and solutions will be born.

All this may seem a bit vague or misguided. I suppose that’s why I’ve started this blog, to get more experience at articulating what I’m thinking, and (hopefully) to get your valuable feedback. The Connectionist is not just me, but everyone with whom this current wave of connectionism (read web2.0/collaboration) resonates – and I know there are a lot of you.

This year I’m doing my honours thesis in the department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne (Australia). Over the next few months this will be a project blog of sorts, which will hopefully keep me on track and clear about where I’m at with my thesis, what my beliefs are and where I think I’m going to go next.