blogresearch

grant meeting 12/6

Met yesterday with some people from our grants and contracts office to talk about the ITR program and the angles this could take to fit that solicitation.

They told me that up 'til now, ITR has primary funded more "hard" research, as opposed to "soft," although the solicitation this year has a lot more "soft" language in it.

We'll also need to focus in on the research question(s) to be addressed.

As we talked, I started to see some directions emerge.

First, there's the issue of determining what professional fields blogs are currently being used in (we know, for example, that law, computer technology, and journalism are early adopters), and whether the technology will diffuse into other professional/academic fields. Finding a way to track and describe that would be one interesting area of research for a multi-year project--since I think we're close to the "tipping point" on this technology, it would be a great time to be taking a longitudinal look at the changes as they occur. Related to that is the cross-cultural component--blogging seems to be big in a couple of specific geographic areas--US, Scandinavia, Japan. The same areas that Rheingold looked at in Smart Mobs.

Second, what impact is blogging having on more traditional publications--not just the traditional news outlets (which is getting discussed already), but also scholarly publishing. Will there be "peer reviewed" blogs that carry credibility similar to peer reviewed journals? Can a "slashdot" style karmic moderation system play a role in scholarly publication? (Alex, seems like this is up your alley...)

Third, how can blogging provide new channels for academic collaboration--with what we're doing here being a meta-example of that. It seems clear that blogs provide researchers with the ability to quickly find others with similar ideas... through the automated tools (like waypath) that can do semantic analysis, through trackbacks and links, and through "matchmakers" (like Seb!).

Finally, how can blogging change pedagogy, particularly in science and technology education? There are people looking at this in the "edublogging" circles, but so far I haven't seen any research focused on this in higher ed, and specific STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) areas. Of particular interest here may be the fact that blogging gives teachers and researchers more of a "human voice," which could well have an impact on attracting women into STEM fields, an area of particular interest for NSF at this time. Research done to date on why women have been coming into computing in smaller numbers seems to point to their impressions of the field as being unwelcoming, impersonal, etc.

We also tossed around the idea of proposing things like an academic blogging research/resource center ("blogging center of excellence"?) where tool development, research, etc could be centralized and made available.

So...comments? Are people still interested in this?

Posted by liz at December 7, 2002 09:04 AM | TrackBack