Friday, December 09, 2005

Blog This: Why are we using a blog for an online course?

Blog This: Why are we using a blog for an online course, for Information Ethics? Blogging is an important new way of communicating for library and information science professionals and in libraries.

Are we still going to use our Blackboard course site? Yes, indeed.

We're going to be innovative and brave in this course, using blogging, the course site, and lots of other new ways to learn and communicate. For me, part of studying ethics in a graduate, professional course is experiencing moral and ethical challenges. In actual practice, we find ourselves confronting new technologies and needing to decide whether or not to add them to our professional and/or personal lives. If we think of new technologies as potential technologies of the self, then all new technologies require our moral imagination to accept or reject them. Let's get concrete and think what difference it makes to use any kind of personal technology-- silverware for eating, cars for transportation, TV's and movies for entertainment. Now translate that into the professional context of the information professions and ask how we understand our use of online systems and databases, printers and fax machines, and now blogs and podcasting? How do these technologies change us, our work, and self-understanding. Think about all of this as you are using various technologies of the self to do the work in this course.

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