A fasinating article from Pedablogue highlights the problems that can occur when large organizations like universities and colleges take sweeping moral/ethical/political stands.

At first blush, making a ruling agains "human research" seems a laudable idea. After all, who really likes the idea of those "cold cure" or sleep deprivation trials which exploit penniless students, or testing the effect of nuclear fallout on prisoners and the like. But what constitutes human research?

As a trainee teacher, I'm frequently encouraged to probe my students with learning-style question sheets, course feedback forms and many other such written instruments. Every day I study my students with the aim of understanding them better to improve my teaching. Sometimes, I even plan a new teaching approach for a lesson, try it out, and evaluate the results to determine under what conditions it might be an effective teaching strategy. Worst of all, I encourage my students to produce questions of their own to ask each other and people wider afield. Then they return to the class and produce a report summarizing their findings, which might even be peer reviewed or published on a course web site.

All of these things might be counted as human research. It may be absurd, but it does show that a blanket ban on "human research" might need a little more thought.