Category: Blogs and Blogging Culture

Podcasting: rabble radio

rabpea.jpgWayne Macphail of W8NC alerted me to the new rabble radio – fresh Canadian podcasts from the left channel. It is a new feature of rabble.ca for which Judy Rebbick is the publisher (and Wayne is on the board.) Given the CBC lockout, this could become an alternative source of “radio” news. Wayne did a series of podcasts for the McMaster Faculty of Engineering and has been developing interesting ideas about how to use podcasting.

Now, what could do with podcasting in the university?

Blogging and the Chronicle

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum: Why I Blog Under My Own Name (and a Modest Proposal) is a response to a piece of tosh in the Chronicle for Higher Education. Matt follows up with a call for people to comment on how blogging has helped them. If you have reasons for academical blogging post a comment so that he can send a response to the Chronicle.

The Chronicle article “Bloggers Need Not Apply” describes how some people may not have got jobs because their blogs revealed too much. While this is a general problem I suspect it is more true about e-mail than blogging. There is an ethical issue here that needs to be teased out – why would it be best to hide ones thinking? Would you want to get a job for the wrong reasons?

Ethics and Blogging 2

Today I had another (see Ethics of Blogging) interesting discussion about the ethics of using blogs for research with folks from health studies. We taped it and hope to put it up as a podcast. Some of the participants are from a team that is exploring this and they have started a blog, Web Finds. I think there is something consistent in a circular way about a research team using a blog to keep track of, link to, and ping, other blogs they are reading as evidence. They, in effect, make their research trajectory open in the same way as that of their “subjects”.

Buckets of Grewal

An interesting Canadian example of a political and timely blog is Buckets of Grewal which looks closely at the Grewal controversy and the tapes. Buckets has been systematically tracking the changing transcripts and politics around the tapes. He/She has a very nice use of Flikr to show slides of the trascripts with the differences (between old and new transcripts) hightlighted. See buckets’ Grewal’s meeting w. Dosajnh & Murphy slideshow on Flickr.

CTV.ca | Rookie political blogger tackles the Grewal tapes is a good article about the Buckets of Grewal blog and its reception.

Ethics of Blogging

Today I participated in a meeting of the Bioethics Interest Group in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University on the subject of ethics and blogging where we had a lively conversation around the use of blogs for medical research. For that I created (with Lisa Schwartz who organized the meeting) a fictional case to problematize the issues. See the extended entry for the case. BIG is a monthly informal discussion of topics related to ethics in health care and biomedical sciences. Some interesting questions that came up:

  1. What can we assume about a blogger? Can we guess at how they assumed their blog would be used?
  2. Is quoting a blog comparable to quoting an online article? or should we try to get consent? More generally, what can we compare blogs to was we try to work out the ethics?
  3. Would getting consent change what was being written?
  4. Would podcasting conversations like the one we had help develop community awareness around the issues?

Continue reading Ethics of Blogging