Skip to main content

Research Essay



A major assessment component for the Design, Development and Creativity module was conducting a research essay which involved working individually or in pairs.

Myself and my partner, Beth conducted our research essay on updating a digital product, the UCD student portal through the introduction of a digital collaboration tool as a core offering for all students studying at the University.

This essay involved conducting both primary and secondary research. In terms of primary research, we conducted a questionnaire, interviews and observational research to understand how students currently interact with the UCD student portal and how it can be improved.

Once we understood the problems associated with blackboard and how it could be updated by making it a more engaging site, we conducted secondary research, studying existing literature and case studies on the topics of collaboration and utilising collaborative tools.

Upon decision on the update required, a usability, requirements analysis and feasibility study were conduct to understand the scope involved in embedding such a tool.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Soul of a New Machine

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Tracy Kidder’s, The Soul of a New Machine, particularly as it tied many concepts discussed during the module together. Topics and themes which stood out for me were Management and the Importance of hard work. The management style visible in the Eagle project was Mushroom Management. That is, management appeared almost absent. The “kids” were given a general idea of work expected of them and then they were expected to complete the work independently. No one knew who to go to and any issues that occurred between the “microkids” and the “hardy boys” needed to be negotiated among themselves. It can be argued that this management style brought out the best in the “kids”. Many of them commented on the level of responsibility they were given, something they would not have received at rival companies, such as IBM. Something which stood out for me was the way that Carl Alsing announced that it was Tom West who built the Eagle. To me, this underlined th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Iona Technologies

·        Iona was founded in 1991 by Chris Horn, Sean Baker and Anrai O’Toole ·        The company progressed from a Trinity campus company, releasing Orbix in 1992 and going public in NASDAQ in 1997 ·        Trinity College Distributed Systems Group (DSG) was a small group of academics and engineers conducting research and development into the problem of inter-network computing systems, essentially connecting systems which were developed as independent systems to work and communicate with one another ·        Their research was initially supported by Trinity and then the EU ·        They took a brave leap from academic to the commercial world due to the attractive opportunity of industries like banking and telecommunications embracing networks and internets ·        Iona found that their c...
Post a Comment
Read more