Trust Tommy

As the closing date was 7 hours ago – I don’t think anyone can plagiarize me – anyone who does manage to steal my idea in minus 7 hours deserves to :-P Here’s my one-page proposal :)

Examining the attitude of secondary school students towards blogging

My name is Tommy Collison. I’m a second year student in Castletroy College in Limerick. I’ve been a personal blogger for the past 18 months and now wish to do a scientific study on the subject of blogging among secondary school students. In February of this year, my blog won the “Best Newcomer” award at the 2009 Irish Blog Awards.

The term ‘blog’ is a contraction of the words ‘web log’. Blogs are a type of website (e.g www.sampleblog.com) with regular entries of commentary, descriptions and/or pictures or videos. Blogs can be maintained by groups or individuals. Each post is also its own webpage (www.sampleblog.com/post-1) where people can leave comments on what has been written.

There are a number of different types of blogs; examples include technology blogs, news blogs, fashion blogs and personal blogs. Blogs are changing how people access information – previously, newspapers and magazines were the primary sources of written information, more and more blogs are replacing these – amongst young people in particular. For example, on January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 crashed into the Hudson River after being struck by birds. A nearby ferry was on hand to help survivors. One of the passengers on the ferry took a picture of the plane and uploaded it to popular micro-blogging website Twitter.com. This was before any traditional media had arrived on the scene and to date, the picture has been viewed almost half a million times.

Aims of the Project:

- to form a complete database of secondary school student bloggers.

- to investigate the attitude of secondary school students (both those who do blog and those who do not) towards blogging.

Methodology:

- To gather comprehensive information on secondary school student blogs.

- To design a questionnaire to examine the attitude of secondary school students towards blogging.

- To get secondary school students to complete the questionnaire

- To summarize the findings and report the results of the questionnaire.

- To draw conclusions and to compare with those found in previous research.

Work already completed:

- I have started bringing together all the secondary school student bloggers in one place. Getting help from a web designer, I set up a syndication website for secondary school bloggers. The list I am compiling is available here: http://trusttommy.com/secondary-school-blog-directory/ while the syndication website is available here: http://irishstudentblogs.com/. The first link is a mere static list, while the IrishStudentBlogs website is an interactive aggregator, which brings together the posts of secondary school student blogs from across Ireland and allows people to read them all on one website.

- I have obtained permission from 3 schools (including my own school), guaranteeing a minimum 300 pupils, who will be available to complete the project questionnaire.

- I have begun designing the questionnaire. I have experience with questionnaires as my Young Scientist project last year included one. (What are the issues faced by children with Cerebral Palsy in mainstream education?)

- I have been in contact with a post-graduate student who did her Master’s entitled “Blogs: A study into current uses and perceptions in Irish society.” In her research she did not include under-18 participants. In my discussion, I intend to look at her findings and see what correlates with mine.