Blogging #openthread

In this brainstorming session, we’re specifically looking at how online communication is reshaping the way professional anthropologists communicate with each other. This can include blogging, as well as Twitter and all manner of Internet conversation.

What role should blogging play as a medium for professional anthropologists to interact with each other?

• Discussion of topics, debates in open format, quick turnaround and input. Develops collaboration
• Rapid turnaround, wide dissemination, open dialogue and debate
• Keeping professions current on important and emerging issues
• Disseminate early results and explore other possible perspectives
• Sharing relevant and research in progress, acting as a discussion forum
• Bring blogging into peer review process, open it up, make process visible and public
• Far and wide, free information exchange and access. Not limited to those we already understand to be peers
• Write better and communicate the best parts of our work (not all the boring stuff)
• New kinds of written production (i.e. not just short journal articles, but novel forms of analysis, ethnographic materials)
• Blogs made available to those we study – to help our work have relevance/ validity
• Making disciplinary conversations open to interdisciplinary contributions
• Democratizing dialogue, getting not only academics involved, but also our research participants and people outside the academy
• Build new conversations that lead to new questions to pursue collaboratively
• Collaborative development of theory, practice, etc. Constructively critical dialogue
• A central mode of scholarly engagement alongside pub of peer reviewed work potential to shape sub-inter-disciplinary directions of research
• Exposure and discovery of new ideas and looks.
• Post new ideas and get feedback before publishing finished ideas
• The start of an idea conversations about these ideas to shape them for outsiders
• Critical peer review, interdisciplinary conversations, online for a to promote digital anth
• Blogging can be a valid form of scholarship
• Blogging will lead to new ideas and new methods of addressing problems
• Access to information and narrow down the physical distance of information
• Ways to meet others with same research / ways to collaborate
• Develop ideas and projects, network with others with similar interests
• Brainstorm quick and efficient constructive criticism, idea growth playing with the idea of intellectual ownership of theories and ideas
• A way to sustain creative and accessible research communities
• Sharing and developing research ideas in a collaborative environment which fosters mentorship to innovation
• IRC, group live chat, post blog, synchronous and asynchronous
• Have blog site that reaches down into topic focus area
• Blogging allows for exchange of commentary on topics, methods, ethics
• How do we presume the record? where does it live for the long term?
• Blogging for the future, or blogging as a blip in time?
• Blogging is best when it serves as a site for active discussion of current questions, not as individual soapbox
• Introduce new ideas to younger generations / students
• Become a conduit for increasing scholarly debate around ongoing and completed work
• Bringing attention to each other’s work

 
What can we do to make blogging, tweeting, etc a legitimate and necessary part of professional development?

• Change tenure process
• Integrate or validate blogging into tenure decisions
• I’m not sure this is an important objective
• Change disciplinary standards and promote review/ accreditation type activities among ourselves
• Create innovative panels/ volumes/ collaboration that is only available through online
• Workshops and classes on blogging in a professional academic context and role
• Provide rewards for excellence
• Connect them with departments and use as outreach
• Share with administrators and peers our results i.e. when our blogs ripple out in the world tell them
• Alt metrics/ impact story to show spread of online discussions narrative examples of broad public impact
• Show them how blogging can bring attention to their work
• Have university/ college dept administrative blogs and refer in references
• Demonstrate that those forms of communication lead to growth of field engage previously unheard voice in professional dialogue
• Part of professional development
• Peer review of blogs or to read a blog as a scholarly dialog – culture shift
• Making public engagement a part of tenure requirement
• Demonstrate the instant peer review and public feedback of online communication – provide a session to train non-DANG people
• Make it clear that online interface is becoming mainstream interface and that comments and response are as important as citations
• Count blogging as a kind of article
• Has to be recognized and valued in hiring, tenure, and promotion. Need way to evaluate quality and impact.
• Demonstrate value in context of a digital future
• Find a way to articulate its elements of peer review