Last month I posted about blogging as a scholarly activity.
I linked to Stephen Downes’ observations about blogging including the point that “blogs have a readership to which you have to be accountable”. I liked Stephen’s suggestion that “a blog is not a single blog post, it is a totality of blog posts, with a myriad of purposes, all blended together”.
Earlier this week I wrote about accidental reading and the role of editors. That post was prompted by a Radio National discussion about changes in reading habits. I mentioned the program trail that asked “Is the switch to a more visual medium just an aesthetic shift or is it part of a broader trend of simplifying our knowledge base?”
This morning I received an alert to Kent Anderson’s post, Data Integrity and Presentation – Journalism, Verfication, Skepticism and the Age of Haste, in The Scholarly Kitchen. In his post Kent looks in detail at an Atlantic post about PLoS One browsing metrics and access. At the time I accessed Kent’s post there was a vibrant discussion taking place in the Comments section.
In his post Kent observes “We’re in a data-driven era, and we need to become better at presenting, analyzing, critiquing, and drawing conclusions from data”. His exhortation took me back to Scott Flemming‘s thoughtful comments on blogging as a scholarly activity. I share with him a desire for rigour and quality assurance in blogging that seeks to advance scholarly debate away from formal peer review processes.
Kent’s post took me back to a course I attended at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s. The course was titled Deciphering Sociological Research and was taught by Gerry Rose. In that course Gerry sought to encourage forensic insight into reading published papers. I thought it was an excellent introduction to veracity and validity.
My juxtaposition of these sources and experiences is a way for me to develop my own thinking about integrity in the presentation and sharing of ideas. I have used two of my trusted sources (Stephen and Kent) and insights gained from an outstanding teacher.
I am an inveterate sharer and realise that the act of sharing has responsibility and accountability. I do find blogging a wonderful way of sharing these ideas transparently and aspiring to bisociative vision.
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