Category Archives: Backstage

Thinking about ethics

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I’m struggling with the ethics of Internet research at the moment, which is more complicated than you might think. Depending on how you conceptualise the Internet, you need to apply different forms of ethical thinking.

If you view the Internet as a virtual space populated by human actors, then you need a human subject approach to ethics, with informed consent a big issue. If, on the other hand, you see the Internet as an accumulation of texts, then your concern is with data protection, copyright and intellectual property rights.

Blogs and newspapers may highlight this dilemma. A newspaper is in the public domain – you can research it as much as you like, unless you appropriate so much of it for yourself that you breach copyright. A blog, on the other hand, can be viewed as an online persona. It’s in the public domain, but it may have been written primarily for family or friends.

On the other hand, a blog may have been written to publicise a version of the news. To treat it as a person means limiting your study of it, and thus privileging the version of the news put out by a large or multinational company. Thus, ethically speaking, some blogs should be treated as manifestations of online identity and others should be treated as public-domain texts. But which blogs are which?

Research questions

* Which are the main subject positions to be found within a learning community which comes together in an aynchronous online environment?

* How are these subject positions introduced or created?

* Which of these subject positions work to support learning, and which discourage learning?

* How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order that participants will position themselves, and others, in ways which support learning?

How would I answer these questions? Well, first of all I’ve got to find an online community which comes together in an asynchronous environment. It’s probably best if they only come together online, because then I have access to all the whole-community activity. The other activity of the comunity eg texts, emails, IMs, meetings, phone conversations I could catch either through interviews or through participant observation.

I’d probably want more than one community so I could generalise. On the other hand, this is potentially a vast set of data, so I don’t want to go wild and have lots of communities. What about one community on which I focus, and another three where I observe but don’t collect so much data?

So, four OU courses which come together via First Class. They’d better be undergraduate, because postgraduate isn’t so generalisable. They’d better be in different disciplines, because that makes it more generalisable. If I want to be a participant observer it might be best to have a course that I’ll find relatively easy, so I don’t have to waste huge amounts of time doing the work. Or, another possibility, if I were tutoring on the course I’d have access to different sorts of data.

And position/identity has a very strong link with gender so I’d like to look at a mostly boy course and a mostly girl course, and perhaps at a level one / openings course where people aren’t used to being students, and a level three course where they’re used to learning.

And it;s probably better if they’re not being too reflexive, so not one of the courses on identity.

Identity

Reading: Identity and deception in the virtual community
Judith S Donath
in ‘Communities in Cyberspace’, eds Marc A Smith and Peter Kollock pp 29-59

I’m interested in the part on how environment influences what you know and what is knowable of others identities. It affects how you create that identity, and what sort of first impression you can make. Maybe I need to look at how identities can be established in First Class.

I’m interested in the ideas that first impressions are lasting impressions – that you tend to hang on to your first impression even in the face of other evidence. I need to get Aronson’s book ‘The Social Animal’ out of the library.

New Group Blog

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We’ve got a new group blog up and running. It should be able to import all our old group blog from Blogger, but that’s proving complicated and it keeps timing out with its connection.

Of course, the minute I can’t post to it I think of all sorts of things to post in it. I’ve just been reading a PhD thesis about writing a PhD thesis and I’m full of thoughts about being a student that should go in the group blog.

Contacting researchers: Burnett in Tallahassee (17.11.05)

I’ve decided to make a point of emailing researchers when I have read their article and found it useful.

This was recommended in U500 last year, and seems like a good idea. Apart from the fact that they might get back to me with some useful ideas or references, it also helps me to fix their identities in my head, and to consider their ideas so that I can make a short comment to show I’ve read the article, and ask a meaningful question.

Here’s what I’ve sent to Gary Burnett:

Dear Gary,

I’m a PhD student in the United Kingdom researching virtual learning communities. I’ve just been reading your article ‘Information exchange in virtual communities: a typology’ in Information Research and found it very interesting. I now have a stack of articles from your bibliography piled up on my desk 🙂

You stated in the article that ‘…all interactions within a virtual community take place in public’ but you also cite Katz, who argues that the public interactions within a virtual community are just the tip of the iceberg and that much of the most useful information exchange goes on in private, in one-to-one email exchanges. I wondered if you had considered including such interactions within your typology or if you felt them too inaccessible to be classified?

Regards
Rebecca Ferguson
Open University

Anesa commented:
Did you get any reply from him?? Was wondering if I should do this … but thought I should only ask them if I really thought I wanted a clarification. Did you want a clarification or did you think up just a question to get into contact with him?
Comment from anesahosein – 01/12/05 16:33