blogresearch

let the brainstorming begin!

Okay, I know I started this and then dropped the ball. Our winter quarter starts today, so I've been involved in trying to get syllabi ready. But I've also been turning this research topic around in my head, and have made some progress.

Where I'd like to focus is on the ability of blogs (and other microcontent publishing, but especially) blogs) to enable connections among scholars in a way that traditional media have not. That's the "scholarly communication" piece. On that topic, take a look at this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which a Princeton CS professor talks about blogs:

But he and other researchers who are challenging government efforts to regulate technology are expressing themselves more broadly through blogs, as Web logs are known. Besides Mr. Felten's there are also Zimran Ahmed's winterspeak.com, Maximillian Dornseif's dysLEXia, and Frank R. Field's FurdLog, to name a few.

Mr. Felten says Freedom to Tinker allows him to refine his thinking about technology and law without going through the traditional academic-publishing process. "I get a surprising number of really good, thoughtful comments from people I've never heard of," he says. "I've access to these ideas ... which I never would have had otherwise."

Sometimes he uses the blog to float ideas for regulating technology -- and then he debates those who respond.

(Thanks to Hylton Joliffe's Corante on Blogging for the link.)

Of particular interest would be the ability of blogs to foster cross-cultural and international collaborations (like this one!), and looking at how acceptance/use/impact of the technology varied across cultures. If we could do three cultural environments--Norway, Japan, US--it woud strengthen any conclusions.

The second area I'm interested in exploring is looking at the effect of microcontent publishing on scholarly publishing models. How can these systems, with their associated "reputation systems," change the traditional publish-or-perish models in academia?

So, there's some stuff to start the brainstorming.