Some marching orders from Neils
August 25, 2009
Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) know that I have some genuine enthusiasm for Research 2.0 or Connected Research or whatever we call MR in the age of Web 2.0 and social media. Yet I still find it largely undefined, mostly a collection of buzzwords still awaiting a real definition as a research method. Niels Schillewaert at Insites Consulting in Belgium is doing some of the best thinking of anyone about what this future looks like. I've recommended his stuff before and I follow that up here with the suggestion that you have a look at this video of one of his recent presentations. I could nitpick with a couple of things he says, but not with the central thrust and certainly not with what seem to be his two central points: (1) we need to think long and hard about what all of this means and (2) begin defining the the skillsets and the tools we need to do research in a fundamentally-changed world. A tall order for someone who has been doing what I do as long as I've been doing it.