Aug 4, 2005
Blog as Research Aid
I’m working on a school project this semester. The first half of the project is mostly literature review to get some background about the project topic, identify any open issues and try to propose a solution or research to be implemented on the second half of the project. The project topic is, tentatively, Context-Aware Mobile Applications. I will have implemented a working prototype by the end of this semester (around end of November).
The subject coordinator (not my project supervisor) mentioned that one of her students uses blog as a research aid. The student posts his annotations for the literatures as he reviews them. Towards the end he will then use these annotations to summarize, analyze and write a nice report. This seems like an excellent idea. The notes become available from anywhere with internet access, and it is shared with people so they can give comments and/or have discussion about it. An example of such blog is iclouds (choose “Literatures Reviewed” category).
I will probably do the same for my project, for literature reviews as well as progress on the project itself. I’m hoping to post as much as I can about the project as soon as I have the permission from my supervisor. I can only say that I will most likely be developing a mobile application that runs on mobile devices like a PDA, it will most likely be using the .NET Compact Framework since most powerful PDAs or smart phones nowadays use Windows Mobile as the OS, and from what I heard .NET CF is actually not that bad even though it’s from Microsoft. So I’ll definitely be doing something different this time.
Update: Found another blog that is used to record progress for research, coincidentally the topic is very similar to what I’m interested in.
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close, but not the same, I’m using wiki (pimki/instiki) for the similar purpose and it’s a better choice for me/us since it’s easier to share/edit and easy to export (even to diagram/mindmap) :)