Rebecca's Research Blog

Karen has been made a professor! My supervisory team is getting more distinguished by the minute

I really enjoy my blog, and I’ve been irritated that the damn probationary report has got in the way of my posting to it recently. It just occurred to me that I spend a lot of time reflecting on the blog s and how we’ll be able to analyse them, and occasionally emailing other researchers […]

Well, I was booked to spend all day at Denise’s research day on e-assessment. I went this morning and, I must say, it was ver interesting. But having been stressed out with deadlines all week, and expecting to be stressed out agin tomorrow when my supervisors have had a chance to pull to pieces my […]

Obviously haven’t quite sorted out how to change my header!

I’m still puzzling over the big issue for Internet community research ethics. Is what we see online a virtual identity,which should be treated according to the ethical standards of human subject research, or is it published text, in which case the relevant ethical standards relate to copyright and acknowledgement? Quentin Jones article on cyber settlements […]

There seem to be a very few high-profile cases around which the discourse of Internet research ethics has been based. There’s ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’ which Julian Dibbell wrote up in Village Voice in 1993. This has all sorts of ramifications but, from the point of view of research ethics, the message is – these […]

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 […]

* 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]