Blogs as Teaching Tools

Actual case studies and personal narratives are oftentimes the optimal jumping off point in teaching ethical theory, methods, and stimulating discussion. In addition to the standard hardcopy tome, why not use the real-time lived experiences of bloggers? Here are a few blogs to check out, which might serve as discussion starters in your bioethics class:

A Little Pregnant [http://www.alittlepregnant.com/] Description: Madcap misadventures in infertility, pregnancy, and parenthood.

Hospice Blog [http://hospiceblog.blogspot.com/] Description: Fighting for quality hospice care for those that need it.

A Single Woman's Journey To Motherhood [http://kajohn345.blogspot.com/] Description: I am 30 and ready to start my family. I am beginning TTC in January. If that doesn't work (after 6 months to a year), I am heading to adoption. These are my random thoughts and obsessions about TTC, adoption, weight loss, teaching, and working on (actually procrastinating) my Master's. If you stop by, please leave me a short note! I like to know when I have visitors.

Code Blog: Tales of a Nurse [http://www.codeblog.com/]

Death Maiden [http://www.deathmaiden.blogspot.com/] Description: The following postings are all fictionalized. Names and circumstances have all been changed to protect the identity of persons in the stories. Any resemblance to real life people and circumstances is purely coincidence. This blog has been created to explore my personal feelings and professional experiences with death and dying. --Dominic Sisti

Lord Blogger... Yes, My Master? Rise...

ABC News reports - as has Time Magazine, BBC, and, well, everybody else - that bloggers are now among the most important sources of information, and thus are "people of the year." For example, beyond their election role, bloggers have emerged as the key source of information in the recovery from Tsunami, providing virtually the entire fabric for identification of the missing and for requests for aid:

This week, their incredible and rapid influence has become readily apparent. Dozens of bloggers have been filing firsthand reports from the areas devastated by southern Asia's deadly tsunamis. "There is kind of an immediacy that people can relate to — can't help but relate to that in a very intimate way," said Jardin. "Day three," one blogger writes from the scene, "this may be an unexpected challenge and responsibility, and it hurts to see people in pain. But it's also a remarkable experience to be on hand to do something modest, but useful, in the aftermath of a disaster." Bloggers around the world have made themselves useful, encouraging donations to relief groups, posting the names of the missing and expressing sympathy for the victims.

Guest Blogger Linda Glenn

New to the bioethics.net blogosphere is Linda MacDonald Glenn. She's great and an old friend. Here's some info on her:

LINDA MACDONALD GLENN, JD, LLM (Biomedical Ethics, McGill) is a bioethicist, attorney, educator and consultant. Formerly a fellow with the Institute of Ethics with the American Medical Association, her research encompasses the legal, ethical, and social impact of emerging technologies and evolving notions of personhood. Prior to returning to an academic setting, she consulted and practiced as a trial attorney with an emphasis in patient advocacy, bioethical and biotechnology issues, end of life decision-making, reproductive rights, genetics, parental/biological "nature vs. nurture", and animal rights issues; she was the lead attorney in several "cutting edge" bioethics legal cases. She has advised governmental leaders and agencies, and published numerous articles in professional journals. She has taught at the University Of Vermont School Of Nursing, the Medical College of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School and the University of Health Sciences Antigua, and has addressed public and professional groups internationally. Her extensive experience and passion for the issues facing the legal, nursing, and healthcare professions make her a compelling and thought-provoking lecturer. More about her background can be seen here.

Tommy Thompson's Parting Words

Chris Mooney blogs Thompson's last comments on stem cell research before he is to depart his Bush administration role. MSNBC/Newsweek covered the final conference by Thompson.

What is a Blog?

Inquiring minds want to know. [Instapundit]

Move Over, ISI Citation Index

Off topic a bit, but very important news for anyone who uses the web in research for scholarly papers and books: for years now, the ISI indices, a costly system of interrelated citation databases that track thousands of publications in dozens of disciplines, have been pretty much the only way to track how papers are cited and used. Many universities actually grade faculty on the basis of a "citation count" from ISI, and journals (like ours) make claims about their influence on the basis of similar ISI searches. Enter Google Scholar. This service will literally revolutionize the tracking of the lifetimes and reach of articles, because it at a minimum provides a much, much wider scan of articles than does ISI, and the implication of Google providing this service is that it can be integrated into the Internet at large. It is pretty easy to speculate that if John Dewey were alive, he would mark this event among the more important possible links between the scholarly world and public discourse. According to MIT's Blogdex, the best ranking of "who is visiting what on the Internet," scholar.google.com was the single most visited site on the entire Internet today. Needless to say, bioethics journals and their publications show up all over this thing, which is still in beta by the way, and it will be fun to pick around. If you find anything (after you do your vanity search) let us know.

Votes & Values (Multiple Sources)

Just about enough time has passed for the Monday morning quarterback essays to come out in earnest about the election. Equally notable are the essays proclaiming victory. One of my favorite essays is Jeff Weiss' in the Dallas Morning News which analyzes the rhetoric of values in the election. The most read blog on the Internet, Daily Kos, summarizes his take on the most prevalent theories as to what the election means, and the discussion includes almost 400 responses many of which are from health policy analysts. Also around the blogs, Matthew Holt of Health Care Blog opines on winners and losers. The quite conservative San Francisco Chronicle discusses the role of celebrity endorsements, which really have reached an unprecedented pitch in this round of elections. Christian Science Monitor discusses the demonization of big pharma, which is interesting since the discussion of drug companies does not seem to have played a significant role in the election.

Chris C Mooney - Kerry Speech

Chris C Mooney is always on top of everything. He blogs the Kerry speech, which included an introduction by Reeve's widow.

Drug Industry Ghostwriters

The Health Care Blog noted some new analysis and numbers about drug firms writing major articles on behalf of clinicians - articles that continue to make their way into major peer reviewed journals. David Healy is quoted. Industry Veteran fumes about THCB's seeming moderation on the issue.

Blogging the "Healthcare & Science" Aspects of the Debate

You know blogs have come a long way when the best debate coverage concerning healthcare - hands down - is on the blogs. The partisan stuff includes The Official Kerry-Edwards Blog and The Official Campaign Blog of Bush/Cheney. But virtually every analyst has a blog - most have a special blog for the debate! The most popular blogs are also the most anachronistic - yet they demonstrate why they are popular in that they all have much more polling and other information than CNN or MSNBC websites. See the DailyKos and of course, at your own risk, Wonkette.

Blogs and Politics - The Paper of Record

NYTimes Magazine has at long last staked out a position on the increasing importance of blogs. This is an interesting piece particularly in terms of the potential role of blogging in biopolitics.

What is This?

This weblog is written by the Editors of The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB). We are told by research librarians in a position to make such claims and whom we did not pay off that this was the first editors' blog for a medical or biomedical science journal, and that this seems true was confirmed in an article in Nature in December. But now, lots of editors are blogging in that capacity, including editors' blogs at Nature Neuroscience, Nature Genetics and Scientific American.

The blog format allows the editors to tap an incredible stream of information that relates to bioethics as it flows through our offices.

If you like the blog, you may indeed want to try the dry scholarly stuff - The American Journal of Bioethics itself can be found at http://bioethics.net and represents the collective, peer-reviewed efforts of a traditional scholarly journal, one that represents the diversity of methods, views and institutions that characterize the rich field of bioethics.

The Editors are: Glenn McGee PhD - Alden March Bioethics Institute (AMBI) of Albany Med - Editor in Chief, David Magnus PhD - Stanford University - Associate Editor, and Paul Root Wolpe PhD - University of Pennsylvania - Associate Editor.

Glenn McGee, in combinastion with other members of the editorial group, authors any post without specific attribution to someone else. Art Caplan of Penn and Stuart Rennie of UNC Chapel Hill are regular guest bloggers these days, and each of their posts are identified by name; others have contributed as well, recent regulars include Alicia Ouellette. Guest blog postings are always identified by name.

We have spawned several other blogs and most of them keep close touch with us, and Karama at sowhatcanido bought us a cup of coffee in thanks. We link to every one of them, and as many others as we find.

FAQ:

WHY WOULD A MEDICAL JOURNAL'S EDITORS WRITE A BLOG? Plenty of people wrote us and complained that the Journal's web site 1) did not cover all the news (only a few things fit there), 2) did not discuss the news or put it in context. So, now we think we've solved that problem. Editing a journal makes this a much, much easier proposition: not only do we get news items from lots of reporters and other contributors, we are happily blessed with students and others who volunteer time to help synthesize it.

Bioethics clearly needs a good blog and AJOB is trying to create it. That we happen to run bioethics' most-visited web site does, admittedly, make it much easier to get feedback quickly and from lots of people. We hope you like this thing enough to add it to your daily diet. And please send us your advice.

SHOULD I USE INFORMATION IN THIS PAGE TO TREAT MY PATIENTS OR MAKE HEALTHCARE DECISIONS? Only if you are out of your mind, or are Jack Kevorkian, or both. Ok, no, seriously, this is our disclaimer:

Statements on this site do not represent the views of anyone other than those writing the posts, nor do views expressed in comments reflect the views of any authors of posts or of the Editors and Editorial Board and publishers of The American Journal of Bioethics. Views expressed herein are not represented in any way to be those of Albany Medical College or Albany Medical Center or Alden March Bioethics Institute or of Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, or their hospitals or other associated institutions, or the Editorial Board of The American Journal of Bioethics, or Taylor & Francis Health Sciences. Nor has any editor been in any way induced or compensated for expressing any view or discussing any subject on the blog, and, where apparent to the Editor in Chief, any conflict of interest or commitment pertaining to any post will be disclosed as a subtext to any message in which the potential conflict obtains. Nor do the editors profit from the blog or any portion thereof while part of the blog, although of course the authors retain all copyright through the terms of the Creative Commons license on the site, and thus may use or publish any post elsewhere in compliance with U.S. copyright law.

The information on this site is intended for discussion purposes only, and not as recommendations on how to diagnose or treat illnesses. There is no link whatever between blog.bioethics.net and any research project involving any subject of any kind: human,animal vegetable or mineral. No confidential patient or research subject information held by any author of any posting will be placed on the blog, nor should any information you post in comments or email written to the authors or managers of the blog, authors of its postings, in comments, to management, or to our design or technical support staff be considered confidential. Do not post or otherwise utilize confidential information of any kind on this site.

WHO FUNDS THE BLOG? Here's a list of sponsors from 2005, but in brief, the blog was funded in part by a grant from The Greenwall Foundation (#5-39182 (8), "Bioethics Education Network") to PI Glenn McGee. The blog is independent from the Journal in one very important sense: Taylor & Francis do not fund, support or hold copyright on it. That said, as editors of the Journal we take care to ensure that ads on the blog not detract in any way from the AJOB mission or compromise in any way the editorial process.

THIS FAQ LAST UPDATED: 3/8/6