Designing e-research: A framework for researcher’s social online knowledge

Abstract

Design strategies to support and enhance scientific collaboration are still ambiguous. The ability of universities and research institutes to support a collaborative scientific research environment among researchers through appropriate methods needs to be further investigated. The lack of understanding about the human factors behind collaboration, the nature of scientific tasks, and the institute’s cultural environment are motivations for this study. As a part of our work on a European integrated project, Edu-Tech, this study investigated which factors of collaborative research are important to give us a clear picture for enhancing the social perspective of the project’s webpage. This research purposes a model, Time Environment, Individual and Group (TEIG), in order to provide descriptive variable necessary to understand the transformation of online social knowledge. Accordingly, we provided a new prototype for designing our online community, Edu-Tech, which is now ready to facilitate collaboration among researchers.