This is a guest post by Martin Böhringer which was originally posted on his blog but has been reprinted with permission.
As I was strongly involved in the creation of Communote, I enjoy still being connected to the team. However, after finishing my studies as a PhD student and research assistant, I am now a lecturer at Chemnitz University of Technology. The job at the university is highly communicative and full of multi-tasking activities. Naturally, my answer to this was: “Let’s use Communote.” Communote has been in production use for several weeks now. Here is how we use it:
Research Group Information Sharing
As in every team context, there are several colleagues with similar interests. The field of research is characterized by lots of new stuff every day. Without Communote, there was the problem of information sharing. I discovered a great piece of information or have an idea: who should I send it to? The microblogging approach is great to spread the information to all colleagues. And everyone can pick the information she likes and needs. Although our central research microblog only has 6 members, I am glad to have tagging and the extended filtering functionality. As we use microblogging not so much for real-time communication like instant messaging but for quick and easy information publishing it is very important to find the knowledge pieces afterward.
Student Supervision
Microblogging is an outstanding technique for supervision. Communote allows you to create as many microblogs with different participants as you like. Therefore, every thesis or student project gets its own microblog with the student and the supervisor as members. In this way, the student cannot see the other microblogs (since there could be confidential information).
I encourage my students to track their activities in the microblog. I suggest that they write down what they are reading, what chapters they are working on, and what new ideas they have. In this way, I can help them much faster as in the traditional meetings after several weeks. In addition to this, it helps me to participate in the student’s work and understand her working process. Finally, such microblogs are a great help to create a history of the student’s work and your own activities. Do you know exactly what you told the student about your citation guidelines three months ago or not?
Special Interests and Projects
Of course, you can create microblogs for everything. Writing a new research proposal – microblog. Working out a new website project for the research group – microblog. Documenting the weekly Scrum meetings – microblog. The big advantage of these separated microblogs is the noise reduction due to the topic-centric approach. And in case the research proposal does not work: just end the special microblog. But it is still only one click away if we want to recycle the idea half a year later – and not on page 152 of my Twitter history.
Martin Böhringer is PhD student and lecturer at Chemnitz University of Technology (Germany). He focuses on Social Software and does lots of research on internal and external microblogging. He blogs at thingthatthinks.com.
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