The blog about the blog about blogs

The blog about the blog about blogs

I didn't make it to bed until 2am thanks to the timing of Crossfit's (American) announcement of 15.2 at the Crossfit Open. So it took a special kind of tweet to get my bleary-eyed interest before breakfast this morning. In fact, it took @LSEImpactBlog's tweet about Jenny Davis's blog about blogs to make my brain wake up.

Cards on table. I'm writing a blog that Jenny won't quote. I'm an unpublished nobody with random ideas about Einstein's fish, Hindistani elephants, more curiosity than expertise and I use this blog to help me capture thoughts as they fly through my head. I'm not blogging to get well crafted worthy-of-peer-review knowledge 'out there' faster than a peer-reviewed journal process allows. And when I am ready, I will probably bill it as a 'Working Paper'rather than a blog.

But I do hope that Jenny has time to read this. Her blog about blogs has got me thinking about knowledge. In particular, it got me thinking about how I use other people's knowledge.

There are three ways that I'm aware I use other people's knowledge. There are probably more, but that's a whole other (Johari's Window) story. The ways I know I use other people's knowledge are:

• to hide behind their authority or to use their credibility to bolster my own.
• to show the stepping stones that get me from A to B so someone else can follow my thought processes.
• to spark ideas - a kind of dialectic between my thinking and another person's thinking that sharpens, refines, confuses or stimulates my own thoughts.

When I get my first peer reviewed article published, I will be indebted to all three ways of using other people's knowledge.

And here's the rub. Do we give more weight to one of those three uses of people's knowledge over another use? Do we publicly acknowledge one use and not another? Is our choice about prioritising and acknowledging more to do with the other person's contributions to our ideas or the status of the other person? I think that asking ourselves those questions guards us against slopping thinking about how and why we incorporate other people's thinking into our own work.

If we need the other person's status to bolster the status of our own thinking, then of course we will only want to acknowledge the contribution of those with high status. And in an academic peer reviewed journal, it's not hard to guess who has highest status.

But if we take seriously the need to "show our workings" so others can interact more fully with our writings, perhaps we need to become more concerned to acknowledge the thinking that interacted with our thinking, whatever its source.

And if we come from any kind of participatory, democratised, coproduced or post-whatever perspective then perhaps we need to take seriously the ethics of not attributing credit to those who contributed to our thinking.

Coming back to Jenny's blog, I quite see her logic for her choice of which blogs to cite, and her logic for having one rule for her and another for her students. You need to know how to operate within the rules before responsibly breaking the rules. And you need to know how to decide for yourself how to treat any information or knowledge from whatever source. Without well developed critical reading skills, it's really only safe to be spoon-fed via other people critically reviewing everything for you and telling you what is worth reading.

Jenny has made me wonder:

Will I cite blogs in my first peer reviewed paper? I don't know.

Will I incorporate thinking that only came about because of what I've read in blogs? Undoubtedly.

I'm left with a number of questions about how we do/don't attribute (or perhaps even recognise and trace) other people's contributions to our thinking. 

Perhaps more profoundly, it leaves me with the question "Do I value knowledge more for the status of the thinker than the value of their thinking?"