Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 54 seconds

wow. you. are. so. good. with. those. sports. examples!
Keith, you’re making my head spin… your story about the soccer is like Martin Weller’s point that publishing “about” open education should always be in open access venues. I agree with it as a metaphor for that. It’s trickier when I try to apply it to “the other thing” 🙂 Because then it becomes an issue of whether the priority is a particular value: openness or inclusion? And whereas I cannot guarantee inclusion (some people have not and will not participate no matter what), I wonder if the rhizo14 story is better off with one or the other? Inclusion is already problematic. Non-inclusion is problematic on a social and emotional level for me, but also (secondarily) compromises the “research” (so far, we only have raw data, and people have opted in for that; though we can consider citing blogs by people, but that becomes choosing which posts by which people and a level of interpretation that is OK in traditional research but more complex for an autoethnography). Another approach, though, might be a mix of autoethnography and traditional research. Where part of the story is said in people’s voices as they wish to represent themselves, and another part of it interprets people’s stories via their blogs. I’m not completely comfortable with that…because it would be “authors” doing research “about” people, which I was hoping not to do…
so… here it is… responding to you has made me think that maybe the most important aspect of the autoethnography part (for me personally, I do not speak for others) is the “participatory” research part. That’s the kind of value I took out of my PhD research: is that I wanted my future research to be “participatory”.
I have just seen Jenny/Frances’ blog posts on how they plan to use other people’s blogs and they plan not to ask permission since these are public. In that case, in the collab autoethnog, maybe we could use any rhizo14er’s blog by linking to them and quoting parts relevant to analysis – possibly as authors ourselves commenting on how their blog posts affected us? In that way, we’re not imposing their participation, but as “authors” we are using their blogs as part of our story… How does that sound?