Integrated Telematic Services and Communication Through Scientific IRC: Virtual User Communities of Biomedicine in UNInet

Re: No title!

Dr. Coma: Frankly I was hoping that you had worked on these criteria so that we could use them to monitor the success of INABIS98. I would find it difficult to measure the success. Is it the number of posters, the amount of discussion, the lack of personal touch?

On Tue Dec 8, Maria Jesus Coma wrote
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>Dear Dr. Grover,
>Thank you very much for you interesting questions.
>One often hears about the necessity for stating hypotheses explicitly before the data are collected and analyzed, but there is no reason why research data that test a theory in social science must be collected after the theory is presented. (See any basic book of methods of social research).
>Related with the definition and measurement of outcomes, our outcomes are not defined nor measured differently than you will measure the outcomes of the INABIS 98 “5th Internet World Congress for Biomedical Sciences “ (actually, we have done several Congresses in UniNet). The outcomes we consider are: number of activities and participants, cost of access, convenience, and quality of scientific activities.
>The evidence we show is based on: number of activities (more than 200 different activities including only masters, congresses, workshops and conferences), number of participants in the project (more than 1500 different users in the ten month of UniNet), cost (hundreds times lower cost than similar activities in person), convenience (possibility to access most activities any time, anywhere), and quality of activities (internationally recognized scientists and professionals, and accreditation for continuing education, and university degrees).
>

Tue Dec 8