Training> Online Symposium: The Ethics of Research in Virtual

[Betty Dawn Hamilton <bhamilt@TENET.EDU>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------

This was forwarded from my training group.....looks interesting.

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thought this might interest y'all.  I might also point out that we need
to encourage students to use their local libraries, which if adequate,
are there for the purpose of serving their constituencies.  I am amazed
that students will email me and tell me they don't have time to go the
library where they live because they do all their research on the
internet, which is not considered as valid a reference site as a good
library, not yet.  Many internet sites are wonderful.  Many are awful.
There needs to be some sort of validation and peer review for reference
sources.  People need to get local information at their local libraries
or the internet equivalent thereof.  Rant rant.

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Marge Wood   woodm@nicanor.acu.edu   (915) 674 2341
http://www.acu.edu/~woodm

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 97 12:31:57 -0500
From: Amy Bruckman <asb@media.mit.edu>
To: mediamoo@media.mit.edu, ni@media.mit.edu
Subject: Online Symposium: The Ethics of Research in Virtual Communities


I thought this might be of interest.  Hope you can join us!
-- Amy
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                The Ethics of Research in Virtual Communities

                             An Online Symposium
                    in honor of MediaMOO's Fourth Birthday

                             Monday, January 20th
                       Symposium: 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM ET
                                 Followed by
           The Fourth MediaMOO Anniversary Ball: 4:30 - 6:00 PM ET

                           To connect to MediaMOO:
                      telnet mediamoo.media.mit.edu 8888
                Or see http://www.media.mit.edu/~asb/MediaMOO/


THE SYMPOSIUM

Electronic communications media pose new ethical dilemmas for researchers.
Can a post from a mailing list be quoted without permission?  Should the
character names of participants in a MUD be changed before publication?  Under
what circumstances does the researcher need to announce his or her presence to
the community?  Is logging a conversation in a chat room more like overhearing
something in the park, or going to someone's home with a concealed tape
recorder?  To complicate matters, the answers to these sorts of questions are
often contingent on the profession of the researcher--anthropologists,
journalists, and political scientists are all subject to different
professional ethics standards. It's no wonder that participants in such
communities lack shared expectations about when they can expect privacy and
when they are subject to observation.  In this online discussion, attendees
will discuss these issues, and evaluate several proposed statements of
professional ethics for research online.


FEATURED PANELISTS (in alphabetical order):

Amy Bruckman is a doctoral candidate at the Media Lab at MIT, where she does
research on virtual communities.  She is the founder of MediaMOO (a text-based
virtual reality environment or "MUD" designed to be a professional community
for media researchers), and MOOSE Crossing (A MUD designed to be a
constructionist learning environment for kids.)  MOOSE Crossing includes a new
programming language, MOOSE, designed to make it easier for kids to learn to
program.  Amy received her master's degree from the Media Lab's Interactive
Cinema Group in 1991, and her bachelors in physics from Harvard University in
1987.  More information about her work is available at
http://www.media.mit.edu/~asb/

Lynn Cherny is a researcher at AT&T Labs--Research studying electronic
communities.  She has an M.Phil.  from Cambridge University in Computer Speech
and Language Processing and a Ph.D. from Stanford in Linguistics.  Her
dissertation, forthcoming from CSLI Publications, was an ethnolinguistic study
of conversation and community in a social MOO.  She is the co-editor (with
Elizabeth Reba Weise) of _Wired_Women: Gender and New Realities in
Cyberspace_, a collection of essays about gender and women's experiences in
different Internet communities (Seal Press, 1996).  More of her work can be
found at http://akpublic.research.att.com/~cherny/.

David Jacobson is a professor of social anthropology at Brandeis University
with an interest in virtual ethnography. He is the author of _Reading
Ethnography_ (and other books about urban Africans and nuclear espionage) and,
more recently, a paper about mooing, "Contexts and Cues in Cyberspace."

Lee-Ellen Marvin is a graduate student in Folklore and Folklife at the
University of Pennsylvania.  She brings to her studies of narrative and
creative speech events, many years of experience as a professional
storyteller and radio producer.  She's published one study of MOO culture,
available on-line at:  http://shum.huji.ac.il/jcmc/vol1/issue2/marvin.html,
and is working on a second paper to be presented at the Western
Communication Conference in February of this year.

Malcolm (Mac) Parks is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the
University of Washington.  His primary research line is concerned with the
development of personal relationships and social networks.   His recent
work on relationships in computer-mediated settings includes a study of
relationships formed through Usenet newsgroups and an on-going study of
relationships development in MOOs.

... and other members of the MediaMOO community.


Please join us after the symposium for the annual MediaMOO Anniversary Ball!


ABOUT MEDIAMOO

MediaMOO is a MUD designed to be a professional community for media
researchers.  MediaMOO first opened to the public with The MediaMOO Inaugural
Ball on January 20th, 1993.  New members are welcome.  More information is
available at http://www.media.mit.edu/~asb/MediaMOO/

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