I’m presenting a paper at a 17th Biennial Conference of Asian Studies Associations of Australia (ASAA). It at Albert Park Hotel, in St Kilda, Melbourne.
In this paper I will discuss about the earliest project in the beginning of my PhD, the Online Forum and www.malaysianidentity.com is the case study of this paper. As my PhD is a practice-based design research project, it is challenging to explain it to the non-design background what is design research and what is practice-based research. Here’s the abstract of my paper. If you interested to read the whole paper, please do email me.
Can an online discussion be used as a new research practice? A case study www.malaysianidentity.com
Nurul Rahman
With the rise of web 2.0, and collaborative web sites and communication platforms, there is the temptation and the possibility of utilising innovative technology for research methods and practices.
As part of a practice-based design PhD research project, I used an online discussion forum as an environment to enable focus group discussions. The aim was to gather together a selection of research participants (artists and designers) involved in creative fields, to start a conversation, and explore ideas about, Malaysian identity and its representations within cultural artifacts. I facilitated this discussion, exploring particular topics; and through the use of open-ended questions and threads within the forum, encouraged participants to present their ideas and engage with others.
This paper will discuss how an online tool can be used within a research project to experiment and confront ideas, to find new directions for investigation or to have a general discussion about a specific subject with research participants who are located in diverse international locations, asynchronously.
The forum malaysianidentity.com will be used as a case study to explore the advantages and challenges such a solution may present.
Can online discussion be used as a new research practices? by Nurul Rahman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.