Academic discussion by blog: anatomy of a blog tank
Another example of using Web 2.0 technologies for academic discussion comes in a "blog tank" exchange.
An author at a national security blog recently blogged up a request for political science analysis of a specific problem.
Anyone who wants to participate should post a scenario (or scenarios) on their blog or, if you don’t have a blog, in the comments to this post.
The post includes references to sources academic (here, here) and journalist (NYTimes; source of this post's image, below), along with a Harvard physicist's reply. Scenarios were called for, set to a deadline (one week after posting).
Replies came via two venues. Comments on the post include questions, suggestions, and links to external commentary. Other bloggers posted their thoughts (scenarios, analysis) on their sites: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Several days after the deadline WhirledView followed up with a second post. This includes summary links to the eight other bloggers, along with a synthesis of observations.
The first post was later edited to include a link to the followup as a summary.
The term "blog tank" is meant to recall "think tank." In the blogosphere, this sort of blog-based call for collaborative feedback is linked to "bleg."
How does this work as an exercise in scholarly communication? Pedagogically, how and when do students connect with such blog tanks?
(thanks to Charles Cameron)
Comments:
Hi Bryan,
Here's a paper(PDF) on the concept of Think Tank 2.0 by Michael Tanji
http://haftofthespear.com/The%20Think%20Tank%20is%20Dead%20Final%20Online.pdf
The first "blog tank" convened by Cheryl Rofer was also on nuclear weapons and drew a larger response than the most recent one.
In addition to the blog posts and comments, there was at the time, some discussion via email. With many, though hardly all, of the participants and other national security bloggers like Michael Tanji, Sam Liles, John Robb, Shlok Vaidya and others, we have batted around ideas from time to time on the microblogging platform Twitter or coordinated attendance at certain conferences like Boyd '07 or the upcoming OSINT conference in DC in September.
My students are too young for this format but there are others, like Sam Liles (Selil Blog) and Michael Tanji (Threatswatch.org)who might have done exactly that or who could offer advice. Dan Nexon (Duck of Minerva), an IR prof at Georgetown also uses blog related materials with his students with some frequency.
Comment by zenpundit [Visitor] 
· http://zenpundit.com 07/23/08 @ 12:07
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