I have been working at the Centre for empirical research on information systems at Örebro University School of Business for around three months now and, naturally, I started out working with material that I had already gathered from previous research. I still had a lot of material to go through especially from eHealth studies and studies on the use of social media in higher education courses. I also had ongoing work with eight journal manuscripts (some in review and some being prepared for initial submission), and I am the driving author of four of them. Needless to say, I experienced no problem whatsoever regarding finding things to do. 🙂
This being said, it is of course of utmost importance that I connect with colleagues at the university and start new collaborations in order to be able to fully join the group. During this last month a few such collaborations have been started and more are hopefully coming up soon.
The first new collaboration involves Gunnar Klein who has also been a member of the DOME consortium for several years. He invited me to join a pilot study focusing on the implementation of video visits in primary care in Region Örebro. A survey to patients is currently being developed and an ethical application will probably have to be written soon as well. I will get back to this rather small study later on – it is still very early in the research process and there are a lot of decisions on methods etc. that are still to be made. I really look forward to this pilot study, since it will add a new dimension to my research on how eHealth services affects the interaction between patients and healthcare professionals.
The other collaboration involves three colleagues I have not collaborated with before: Kai Wistrand, Annika Andersson and Mathias Hatakka. We have all taken different kinds of actions meant to boost students’ communication skills (one example is my work with engineering communication courses at KTH which I have written about before on this blog). This collaboration will focus on writing a conference paper about our efforts to a pedagogical research conference. I look forward to this collaboration and I think we will end up with a paper that can have a real impact on teaching practice in engineering and computing education.
This upcoming Tuesday I will have a seminar where I will introduce my research to the group, and after that event I will hopefully be able to find even more possible areas of collaboration!
I took the blog image during my last trip to Öland a few weeks ago. I think the rainbow is a nice symbol for possibilities ahead…
Jonas Moll 