Montréal.
We're now starting the post-lunch session on the first day here at WikiSym 2007, and the first paper is by Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman, who examine the use of wikis as a toolkit for collaborative learning. Andrea begins by noting tha there is a significant deficit in media literacy amongst high school students - they don't necessarily have sufficient skills to evaluate the information they're confronted with. She suggests constructionism as a pedagogic framework for building such literacies.

Constructionism has been articulated by Seymour Papert - he suggests that people learn particularly well when engaged in the construction of public artefacts: when others see what you know and have done, when you can take pride in the work, and when the work is persistent into the future. This connects very well with working with wikis, of course, but also goes beyond them - it builds on students working on personally meaningful goals, and harnesses learners as capable, curious, and tenacious active practitioners. Online, especially, there are constantly new opportunities to employ constructionist learning.

Montréal.
The next session here at WikiSym 2007 begins with a short paper by Sarah Guth from the University of Padua, on wikis in education. She's done some work using social software in teaching environments, and discusses the question of whether such teaching should take place in public or non-public social software environments. Using (public) wikis enables collective authoring (which enables critical reading and responsible writing); raises issues of individual and collective ownership (challenging conventional Western epistemologies of individual intellectual property); and highlights content as ego-less, time-less, and never finished while enabling continuous development. Publishing online also empowers students, and history and discussion functions focus on writing as process, not product.

Montréal.
After the fun and excitement of AoIR 2007, I've made the quick but painful overnight trip to Montréal for the two-day International Symposium on Wikis, which takes part here in association with the much larger OOPSLA conference (in case you're wondering as I was: apparently this stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications). Happily, Montréal is enjoying a very pleasant Indian summer which is a welcome break from Vancouver's incessant drizzle... Naturally, the WikiSym conference also has its own wiki, which should be worth checking for comments on the presentations over the next few days.

Vancouver.
Wow, time has passed quickly (and very enjoyably). We're in the final session of AoIR 2007 here in Vancouver, and Chris Wells and Justin Reedy are the first speakers; their interest is in the use of Internet in direct democracy. Direct democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere is increasingly common, increasingly important, and different from conventional democratic forms in important ways (the European constitutional referenda in a number of countries are one key example here, while in a number of U.S. states there have been referenda on limiting property tax rates).

Vancouver.
We're coming towards the end of the last day here at AoIR 2007, and Kirsten Foot is the first speaker in the post-lunch session, presenting a co-authored paper on link structures and engagement practices in U.S. and U.K. fair trade networks. Fair trade movements aim to develop more equitable practices in international commerce in a variety of commodities (not just coffee), and Kirsten and her colleagues examined fair trade movements' historical roots (since the end of World War II) in a previous study; in the U.K., contrary to the U.S., there are also important relationships with government bodies (and there are a number of official 'fair trade towns' in the U.K., but only one in the U.S.). U.K. movements are now having some impact even on European Union policy, in fact. In the U.S., targets of such movements are usually corporations, by comparison.

Vancouver.
We're in the final keynote for AoIR 2007 already (I missed the morning session this Saturday as I was having breakfast with Henry Jenkins this morning) - the keynote speaker today is John Willinsky from the Public Knowledge Project. He begins by noting issues of civic participation and access to knowledge as a key question of today, and relates these especially also to academic publishing: 'you make all the content, they take all the wealth' also applies in this environment, and the moral economy of academic work must be carefully considered. Fan writing, fans going public with their work - something that Henry Jenkins talked about yesterday - also translates into important challenges for academics: we, too, should aim to make our work more public, and connect it to wider civic concerns. This goes well beyond questions of technologies of access and distribution - it requires a shift of thinking; we need to 'get in the game', to allude to the 'Let's Play' theme of this conference.

Vancouver.
The second keynote at the AoIR 2007 conference is by MIT's Henry Jenkins, speaking on the moral economy of Web 2.0 (in a presentation coauthored with Josh Green and emerging from the work of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT). The central principle of Web 2.0 is to embrace the power of collective intelligence, as Kevin O'Reilly has said; another take on this is that users make all the content, but corporations keep all the revenue (according to Bash.org). There's a proliferation of pronouns (you, we, us), which opens an interesting tension of individual versus collective action (is 'you' singular or plural here?). Indeed, YouTube is a meeting place of so many different communities that talking about it in general misses most of the specificities of individual uses.

Vancouver.
In the post-lunch session at AoIR 2007, I'm in a session on Second Life, which starts off with Slava Kozlov and Nicole Reinhold from Philips Design (the design division of Dutch electronics giant Philips) in the Netherlands. The begin with an introduction to the many spaces of Web 2.0, and note that many users have existences, identities, experiences in a number of these spaces, engaging with them in a playful manner which includes experimentation and exploration, role-playing, active and imaginary work, and a focus on experience and process rather than efficiency and results. How playful, in this context, is Second Life?

Vancouver.
The next session at AoIR 2007 begins with a paper by Ralph Schroeder and Mattijs den Besten on the section in the Pynchon wiki which has sprung up to collaboratively annotate Thomas Pynchon's much-anticipated novel Against the Day. There are some interesting statistics on how user participation shifted from the Pynchon mailing-list before the release of the book to the wiki once it was released; today, the wiki works as a reference source, as a tool highlighting connections to other Pynchon novels, and interpreting the content of the book. By July 2007, it had 200 contributors, 5000 entries, and contained some 400,000 words.

Vancouver.
I may be at AoIR 2007 in Vancouver, but back in Australia our Club Bloggery series as part of the ABC's online Australian election coverage continues. The third instalment of Club Bloggery has now been posted on the ABC site, and we've also posted a version of the article to our Gatewatching group blog:

Beyond Gotcha: Blogs as a Space for Debate

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, and Barry Saunders

The mainstream media and critics of Web 2.0's "cult of the amateur" often suggest that blogs and citizen journalism will never replace their mainstream counterparts because they "don't break stories". Notwithstanding the fundamental furphy - who ever said anything about "replacing" the MSM anyway? - there is some truth in this. It goes without saying that most bloggers don't have the resources, pulling power or proximity to the pollies to do much original political reporting: this is something that most sensible public affairs bloggers concede. (Though how often the mainstream media really break stories - as against exploiting deliberate, calculated 'leaks' from party spinsters - is a separate question.)