Week 10

Whatsapp is an app that I use regularly on a daily basis. However, I use it almost purely for as a social app for talking with my friends and group chats. It has only been recently that I have started to use it to help with me research; there is a prospect for a joint experiment with another EngD student and we have used whatsapp as our main communication method. This has been to set up meetings, and to discuss the things that can and can’t be done in the experiment. As we have not yet started the experiment we have yet to share any data or images through whatsapp, but that could become something that we utilise going forward.

Whatsapp is a very informal and casual method of communication, especially compared with the use of email. As a young researcher I would feel more comfortable using whatsapp with other young researchers. This is more significant where I use it a lot for personal use with my friends.

My friends and I are quite keen cyclists. We time ourselves up the “100 best hills of the UK” and record the times in an excel sheet (yup pretty sad I know…). We use google drive to share this between us so we can all update it when we cycle a new hill or set a faster time than previously; google drive enabling this to be done with ease.

As part of my research google drive can become very useful for co-working on pieces of data or reports. When it comes to writing the article for journal publishing (see previous post), this will be worked on by a few people; myself, other EngD students, and our supervisors. Google drive could provide a great platform to use for the joint sharing of writing.

I have used webinars very briefly before while on my placement year as part of my undergraduate course. I was part of an international collaboration which meant that physical joint meetings were nigh on impossible to achieve. To conduct our meetings we used Webex which among other features, provides screen sharing and phone ins via a computer, mobile, or landline.

I am based away from University for the entire duration of my EngD project, requiring travel to be made by some of the parties when meeting with supervisory team. Webinars could provide a good alternative to this, allowing for time and cost savings on the travel. As with webinars, video conferences could become useful during my research.

Crowd sourcing is not something that I can envisage becoming a part of my project. It can be useful to use for some research, mainly that which contains very large data sets and does not require significantly high levels of understanding.