Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of Web-based record keeping, and a desire to maintain a high-quality record.
In some cases these efforts have even involved groups on the same site.
However, a common feature of all the failures is that the use of the blog was
for only a portion of the work being undertaken. In some cases this was due
to multiple projects being run, only one of which was being recorded in this
manner. In other cases problems arose due to the confi dentiality of portions
of a project that could be entrusted to the level of security available within
the system.
The clear end result is that where the record becomes split the nontradi-
tional record, usually the one that for either technical or social reasons requires
more effort to keep up to date, suffers and falls behind. Once the record
keeping falls behind or is temporarily recorded in some other form, it rarely
catches up again. This is not by any means a specifi c characteristic of the blog-
based notebook and is likely to be true of the use of any new system. However,
the lack of geographical colocation and consequent lack of “nagging” available
to encourage use as well as the limitations of the user interface for the blog
system exacerbated these issues. The lack of peer pressure that resulted from
primarily one-to-one as opposed to wider group collaborations was also a
contributing factor.
25.6.3
Scaling the Collaboration
It appears that a blog-based system, where posts and comments are clearly
attributed to one author, provides a somewhat more personal space that is
more suited to one-to-one collaborations. The splitting of each person's record
into individual blogs also seems to encourage this, making it less likely that
community members will directly contribute to or edit each other's material.
In comparison, the Wiki-based systems used in the UsefulChem and ONS
Challenge projects provide a single unifi ed space, where direct editing of
content is supported and encouraged, but commenting less so. In the wiki
systems an approach of commenting in line has been adopted, due largely to
the need for comments to be closely associated with the relevant text. The
more modular nature of the way the blog system has been used means that
separate comments do not drift away from the relevant text as much as is the
case with the talk page on the wiki system. These different approaches to com-
menting, in separate comments in the blog and directly in the text of the wiki,
may mean that the wiki provides less of a sense of personal ownership of the
text. By comparison the blog system supports a back-and-forth conversation
in the comments that may be felt to be more personal. There is a balance to
be struck here between the need to give people space to feel comfortable to
write and the need to support effective communication. The system as it cur-
rently exists requires some form of account to comment or contribute. This
has limited direct contact with external users.
Supporting larger-scale collaboration in the context of the blog system will
require careful attention to the integration of notifi cation schemes, of both
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