It would be interesting to examining the content of websites about a specific community, to gain a sense of what is communicated online about that community. General sentiment toward traditional media in poor, urban communities is that only the bad news concerning crime and poverty gets reported. Is it the same with what is published online? The results might provide suggestions for possible directions for community media group's publication focus, or motivation to produce community media in general.

Maybe if you ask people in the street how environmentally conscious they are and how they recycle, you may get positive answers, maybe if you took a survey of a region, you may get a fairly positive answer. If you want to verify that, one way you could do so may be to look at what people recycle and what people throw in the trash that they could recycle and come up with an indication of - on average - how environmentally conscious a town, city, state, region etc. is vs. another town, city, state, region etc.

As an often studied videogame, World of Warcraft has been looked at in a myriad of ways. To my knowledge, no research has focused on how this online game spawns player action with the addition of new game content through patches and game expansions. Similarly, study has not focused on the many websites, hosted by the game's creator Blizzard Entertainment, and how changes in the game correspond with changes in the activities of players on the game-related websphere.

This is a brief introduction to the design I'd like to implement:

Plastic time research is about human behavior. I will use a method that collects data from the real world: an un-intervened setting, yet a relatively particular situation.

In my undergrad years I was a residence hall network technician and one of the oft-repeated mantras of my coworkers was "the user is always wrong." I think most people really aren't as busy as they say they are -- they're just not often completely free to do what they want to do. They're constrained at certain times to certain places (workplace, lecture hall, etc) but often their undivided attention is not required. "Who is doing all that internet browsing?" I contend that it's people that are supposed to be doing something else.

Roger's use of the metaphor, "the death of cyberspace," is a productive way to conceive studies of the Web. In attempts to understand this "place-less space," researchers often did not find this "open-ended" debate (cyber)space for "great conversation," but instead the "groundedness" of "a place" to, domestically or internationally, geographical proximity, existing social/political structrures, and power hierarcy.

Using the notion that plastic time is able to “shrink and expand around the time available, molding around other activities” I devised a non-obtrusive measure of the infiltration of technology into plastic time.  I will explore this method and share some base-line results.  But first, it is important to define what I think constitutes plastic time.

What modes of communication work best to elicit engaged dialog between instructors and participants in undergraduate courses? How do the assumed expectations of participants in face-to-face communications and in online course discussions differ when there is only one communication mode, and when there are multiple modes. We might expect that if "plastic time" is an idea of merit, then we might examine its use during asynchronous course activities.

The computer itself provides a very good record of time use and plastic time use. There are 3 components in this experiment.