We interrupt your regular scheduled programming….

  by  jaci XIII 

…… for a brief commercial break to shout out a big THANK YOU to the world of social media.

As I took a break from my journey of discovering research ‘ontologies‘ and ‘epistemologies’ today and took my bike out for a cleansing and reinvigorating ride…. I worried about my poor neglected blog and the discoveries I had planned for this week that weren’t to be. What could I write that would be of interest, that would let the world know I’m still out here and remain engaged in this topic of social media.

But then it came to me…. most of what I accomplished these past few weeks for my research class, was either made possible by or enhanced by social media.

I looked back at a paper on this topic (co-authored by none other than our famous class Prof) written in 2002 and thought how the concept of ‘open learning’ has changed our world.

I found myself smiling at the encouragement/direction I had received to physically spend time in the library (been there & done that on-line) to create this work. I thought about the request (similar to Shauna’s) for that face to face interaction with my classmates (done by e-mail) and the need to create a report and a power point presentation (set up an account on prezi, but just didn’t have the time to delve in).  I traveled back and forth to Wikipedia – when the terminology just didn’t make sense, I found a wealth of resources (that people are openly sharing) on slideshare,  some fabulous artwork at flikr (that I was free to share and remix) and poll everywhere will be making its debut this week.  AND lets not forget my most favorite Windows ‘snipping tool’ which allowed me to quickly bring much of this referenced information together.

I listened to a really interesting podcast where Sam Ladner talked about Research Design and the opportunities for sociological researchers related to working in groups in an on-line community………. and just when I thought I was ready to quit, ‘You Tube’ helped me in understanding inferential statistics.

Would what I’ve accomplished this week even have been possible in 2002? How much richer is my work because of these opportunities?

So in a week when I thought I’d failed you poor blog, I think I might have had one of my greatest revelations. This ‘open world’ really has the ability to take us somewhere ‘higher’.  And as my friend Thomas Kuhn suggests, sometimes we really need to shift more than just an individual theory…  we need to shift our whole world view in response to evidence.

PS – My 2011 version of Quantitative Research is to be ‘open’ and ‘shared’.

Now back to regular scheduled programming…..