E-Research Collaboration of International Scope in Social and Political Sciences

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of three case studies (all from the field of social and political science) on global e-research collaboration, describing how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are facilitating the overcoming of geographical barriers. Previous research points out that physical e-research collaboration meetings play a relevant role. This chapter explores whether this requirement of physical meetings in e-research collaboration is independent of the scale and complexity of the collaboration established. The findings suggest that high complexity can be achieved using communication tools if the scale of the group is small, while very large groups can collaborate using communication tools if their target is a loose collaboration. However, if the collaboration involves both a large group and a considered complexity of collaboration, establishing a balance between communication tools with the requirement of physical meetings becomes a relevant issue.

Investigating eResearch

Why and how do researchers collaborate, share knowledge resources, data, and expertise? What kinds of infrastructures and services do they use, and what do they need for the future enhancement of collaborative research practices? The chapter focuses on existing and potential eResearch from a “user” perspective. Drawing on a study of ICT-enhanced research practices and needs conducted at seven Australian universities, it discusses how researchers engage with distributed research and use ICT for collaboration. Findings show significant current engagement of the majority of researchers in collaborative research, their acknowledgement of the potential of eResearch, and researchers’ general willingness to engage in collaborative eResearch. While there are some essential differences in the collaboration practices of research students and academics and between practices and challenges in different disciplinary domains, researchers who are more involved in collaborative research also adopt eResearch more extensively, more often use ICT-enhanced collaboration tools, share more of their data, and more often disseminate their findings via digital media.

Collaborative and Distributed Innovation and Research in Business Activity

This chapter describes how Value Networks (VNs) can be applied in multi-stakeholder business and research environments to characterise different approaches to collaboration. In an attempt to highlight some of the issues, the authors compare a couple of communities that adopt different approaches to Knowledge Exchange (KE) and resource discovery. A collaboration framework is used by one of the communities for on-line discussion, chat, and Web conferencing to supplement KE between fairly regular in-person meetings. The other community applies more traditional collaboration tools such as e-mail to supplement face-to-face meetings. One of the research objectives was to establish the extent of multi-dimensional KE, i.e. from academic to business sector, business sector to business sector, and government to business sector. Conditional on successful e-facilitation, a quickening in KE was apparent in the community that used the collaboration framework. This was observed to a lesser or greater extent across all stakeholder groups. E-facilitators are those that engage stakeholders into making on-line submissions. The authors discuss the importance of satisfactory levels of support for collaboration frameworks in community projects. They compare the role of the e-facilitator with a more traditional “business broker” and compare the behaviour of the communities with and without particular collaboration tools. The authors conclude that VNs helped provide a useful characterisation of the roles that the various contributing community elements play and the types of interaction between them.

Collaborative and Distributed e-Research Environment for Supporting Scientific Research and the Education Process

The efficient use of a scientific application service built on a computing environment requires technology that integrates each application service into a workflow so that the workflow is executed in a cooperative environment. There have been a number of attempts to automate research activities as a scientific workflow. However, there are practical problems in the full automation of research activities for a number of simulation programs and researchers. In the cyber environment for Collaborative and Distributed E-Research (CDER), the types of workflows need to be studied and supported separately and with different methodologies. In this chapter, the authors analyze the scientific research and education processes and categorize them into four types: simulation, experiment, collaborative work, and educational activity. They then describe the applications needed for each category. To justify their categorization of the CDER workflow, they examine the workflow of e-AIRS (e-Science Aerospace Integrated Research System), a problem-solving environment for aerospace research.

E-Research Methodology

Electronic scientific databases (ESDs) such as “ScienceDirect,” “GoogleScholar,” and “Scopus” became popular in the scientific community, because scientific contents and diverse scientific Web services such as scientific communications and collaborations have taken place electronically in the ESDs. In this way, scientific research has evolved accordingly, yielding electronic research (e-Research) process in which scientists initiate their research, drive it, and reach its determined goals electronically. In this chapter, the authors focus on the ESDs’ scientific Web services role in the research process. After representing a classification for the scientific Web services, a comprehensive methodology for the e-Research process is proposed. Also, the effects of scientific Web services on the e-Research process adoption are studied. The findings show that scientific Web services of information storage and sharing, searching, and communications are the most popular and useful Web services in scientific community.

The Web as a Platform for e-Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

As a consequence of the joint and rapid evolution of the Internet and the social and behavioral sciences during the last two decades, the Internet is becoming one of the best possible psychological laboratories and is being used by scientists from all over the world in more and more productive and interesting ways each day. This chapter uses examples from psychology, while reviewing the most recent Web paradigms, like the Social Web, Semantic Web, and Cloud Computing, and their implications for e-research in the social and behavioral sciences, and tries to anticipate the possibilities offered to social science researchers by future Internet proposals. The most recent advancements in the architecture of the Web, both from the server and the client-side, are also discussed in relation to behavioral e-research. Given the increasing social nature of the Web, both social scientists and engineers should benefit from knowledge on how the most recent and future Web developments can provide new and creative ways to advance the understanding of the human nature.

Effects of the Drewlite CSCL Platform on Students’ Learning Outcomes

This chapter presents a case study of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) in the field of human nutrition and health at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. More specifically, this study investigates the effect of the type of collaboration (personal discussion in front of a shared computer vs. online discussion) in CSCL on students’ learning outcomes. A pre-test, post-test design was used. Eighty-two students were asked (as an individual pre-test) to design and analyze a study which evaluates a certain dietary assessment method. Subsequently, they were asked to discuss their evaluation studies in randomized pairs. The pairs in one group discussed their task results online and the pairs in the other group discussed their results face-to-face while sharing one computer, in both cases using the CSCL platform Drewlite. As an individual post-test, students had to re-design and re-analyze the same evaluation study. Learning outcomes were measured based on the results of teachers’ regular evaluation of students’ achievements as well as on the quality of the students’ knowledge construction. The results showed that both teachers’ marks and the quality of knowledge construction of all students improved significantly from pre-test to post-test. However, the type of collaboration had no significantly different effect. Furthermore, the scores on knowledge construction were consistent with exam results as obtained by teachers’ evaluations.

Collaboration within Multinational Learning Communities

This chapter focuses on the investigation of essential features of a multinational virtual community that can promote effective collaboration and research among its members so as to overcome space, time, and language barriers. Specifically, a multinational Virtual Community Collaborative Space for Sciences Education has been formed in the context of the Socrates Comenius 2.1 European Project: “VccSSe – Virtual Community Collaborating Space for Science Education.” In this project, researchers from five European countries (Romania, Spain, Poland, Finland, and Greece) participated in a multinational learning community where blended collaborative learning courses were formed in order to train teachers from these countries in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in their real teaching practices. Within this framework, a number of specific software and pedagogical tools were formed to support collaboration and learning for the teachers and the researchers who participated in this virtual community. After the end of these courses, the teachers were asked to design their own virtual experiments and lesson plans and then to implement them in their classrooms. The analysis of the data shows that the researchers-partners of VccSSe effectively used various collaborative methods to produce the previously mentioned software and pedagogical tools. It has been also shown that teachers who participated in the VccSSe project were encouraged—by the use of the collaborative tools provided and the aforementioned collaborative blended course—to develop interesting virtual experiments and use them in their classrooms. Finally, it is worth noting that students who participated in those classes provided favourable feedback related to the implementation of virtual experiments in their everyday learning experiences.

Addressing Conflicting Cognitive Models in Collaborative E-Research

Most existing collaborative tools assume that partners share the same perspective on the entities they are working on and therefore these solutions cannot be applied directly to the types of cases this chapter addresses. By exploring geophysics and its peculiarities, one understands its inner dynamics, so that possible solutions can be proposed. These rely on the creation of “boundary objects” capable of bridging different cognitive models. These solutions are based on the integration of diagrams, where concepts and their relations are expressed at an optimal granularity and shared spaces where information can be made available to all partners. These ideas have been implemented in a Web-based Computer-Supported Collaborative Research (CSCR) system that is currently successfully used within many international research projects in this disciplinary field.

E-Mentoring

This chapter introduces the interrelated concepts of e-Research and e-Mentoring, reviews some recent works related to them, and discusses their importance in a global, Internet-based world. In this chapter, a conceptual framework is proposed to distinguish among the concepts of e-Research, e-Science, and Cyberinfrastructure, which are frequently used synonymously in the existing literature. Then, some issues related to e-Mentoring are discussed, including its characteristics, benefits, challenges, and a review of different Web 2.0 tools that can facilitate and promote e-Mentoring practices in most research organizations. Some personal experiences in e-Mentoring are then related. These experiences involve different universities and international programs, and their study points out several key factors of a successful e-Mentoring collaboration.