Snurb's blog

Vancouver.
This Friday morning at AoIR 2007 I find myself in a pedagogy session, and Gary Natriello and Anthony Cocciolo have made a start. Their interest is in the effect of Web 2.0 learning environments on student learning. PocketKnowledge is one project which they've designed, in which users maintain a high level of control of their information, a high level of community trust, and a non-authoritative organisation of information, which ideally generates a playful attitude. Users create 'pockets' of information, and get to determine organisation, access and copyrights for this material, but user-to-user comments are also possible.

Vancouver.
I came in a little late to the next session at AoIR 2007, and Alex Halavais has already started. He's starting by talking about a series of search engine tests he's done using a set of 25 random English nouns, using Google and Yahoo! in a number of their country-specific versions. He coded the first 100 results of these searches for their country location (mostly assuming that the ccTLDs were accurate) and examined the whois records.

The result has that in most cases here, links were mainly to sites in the U.S. (except for Australian search engine versions, interestingly), and otherwise to the home country. The question, then, is how Google decides where to guide people - shouldn't localised search engine versions be more strongly localised in pointing to domestic sites?

Vancouver.
The post-lunch session on this first day here at AoIR 2007 starts with a paper by Lars Kirchhoff, Thomas Nicolai, and me, and Lars is here to present it with me. The PDF is already online, and I'm recording our presentation and will add it to our slides below as soon as I can.

| View | Upload your own

PDF of the paper

Vancouver.
The first keynote at AoIR 2007 is by John Lester, the Boston Operations Director of Linden Lab, who run Second Life (John's SL avatar name is Pathfinder Linden). He notes the fact that each avatar in Second Life represents one human user as a key feature of this online world (which is different from some multi-player online games), and also points out again that Second Life is not a game, but a virtual world. As a result, too, Second Life is extremely dynamic in its content, and there's no way to cache or pre-load much of the world; the SL software in essence works much like a Web browser, as a generic interface to whatever exists at any one place in the virtual world.

Vancouver.
For the first paper session here at AoIR 2007 I thought I'd go to one of the sessions on blogging, which is opened by Mary-Helen Ward and Sandra West from the University of Sydney. Their paper is on blogging the PhD process, and mary begins by outlining the Australian PhD process itself (highlighting the thesis-based focus of Australian PhDs, the role of supervisors, and the as yet relatively unexamined pedagogy of the process). What has been suggested as pedagogical approaches are apprenticeship models, the idea of the autonomous scholar who needs to be 'discovered within' or at least discovered by the student, a more parental rite of passage model, a poststructural approach of students writing their selves into identity, as well as more recent peer learning or student/supervisor co-production models.

Vancouver.
I've arrived in town for the 2007 Association of Internet Researchers conference, and I've spent most of the first day here walking off my jetlag. Vancouver is an interesting town, and they're doing bridges very well here. Shame about the weather, though... At any rate, I've walked so much that my feet are very sore already - looking forward to the start of the conference!

I'm heading out to Canada tomorrow, to present three papers at two conferences, and I've uploaded those papers and presentation Powerpoints here now. As a counterpoint to my solo work on the produsage book, I've really enjoyed working in collaborative teams this year - in addition to the ARC Linkage projects for edgeX and Youdecide2007 (and the Gatewatching group blog and ABC series with Barry and Jason from Youdecide), I'm also working in cross-institutional teams on couple of Carrick Institute projects examining teaching and learning in social software environments and building a network of Australian creative writing programmes. So, it's perhaps no surprise that all three papers on this trip are co-authored works - two with my colleague Sal Humphreys from QUT, and one with Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai from the Universität St. Gallen in Switzerland.

What's worked out particularly well this month is the timing of the conferences - I'm headed first to the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Vancouver on 17-20 Oct., and from there it's just an overnight flight to the International Symposium on Wikis in Montréal on 21-23 Oct. Given how long it takes to get anywhere from Australia, being able to do a number of conferences on the one trip is always very useful - and I'm particularly looking forward again to AoIR, since due to my role as conference chair at last year's conference in Brisbane I missed most of the presentation sessions except for the keynotes and those sessions that I presented in myself. As always, I'm planning to blog everything I'm attending, and I'll try to record and slidecast my own papers. For now, here's a preview of what's to come:

Well, the next instalment of our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online has now been published. On the Gatewatching blog which Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders and I run, we've posted a slightly earlier, longer version of the piece, which asks quite simply what we know about the real impact of blogging on political debate in Australia, beyond the realm of those already addicted to the machinations of the political scene...

Blogging outside the Echo Chamber

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

In the current political climate, it's no surprise that a number of sessions at the recent Australian Blogging Conference at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane focussed on the potential for blogs and other citizen journalism sites to impact on political news and punditry. In a previous article, we've already noted the continuing skirmishes between psephologist bloggers and the political commentators, whose rather unscientific interpretation of opinion poll results that some bloggers have challenged fervently.

The second of our weekly series on pre-election blogging for ABC Online's Opinion section has just gone online, and we've also found a name for the series - Club Bloggery. I'm very pleased to say that it's also been crossposted to the ABC's Election Tracker site, and an extended version is now up on our group blog Gatewatching. The first instalment generated some interesting discussion (which I'll refer back to in the third piece I'm currently developing) - hope it will be the same for this one:

Club Bloggery Part 1: Consulting Bloggers as Citizens

By Barry Saunders, Jason Wilson and Axel Bruns

The 2007 federal election is shaping up as a chance for Australian political bloggers to show off their skills. From now until the votes are counted, Club Bloggery will wrap up the biggest news from the blogosphere.

Finally getting around to processing some of the recordings of the papers that I've given at conferences this year has coincided for me with exploring in a little more detail the Slideshare service for sharing Powerpoint presentations, and so predictably I've fallen in love with the audio synchronisation tool they're calling "Slidecasting". Very nice interface to a handy little tool, and I've now uploaded Slidecasts from the ICE3 conference at Loch Lomond in March, from the Creativity & Cognition conference in Washington, D.C., in June, and from PerthDAC just the other week. It's interesting - for me, anyway - to listen back over these recordings to see how much my conceptual models for analysing produsage have developed over the past few months, as I've researched and written the produsage book. Unfortunately I seem to have missed out on recording my presentation at the MiT5 conference in Boston this April - this has probably been my favourite paper of the year so far, perhaps because it's also been the most speculative one. Ah well.

Each of the conferences also enabled me to present my work on produsage to a very different group of scholars from those that I tend to see at my usual conferences, and I had some very positive feedback after each of the presentations (some of which made it onto the recordings as well). Unexpectedly, posting these presentations to Slideshare has also had an interesting side-effect: my presentation from PerthDAC was featured as "Slidecast of the Day" on the site, and had over 1000 views in less than a week as a result. Nice little bonus - the other two Slidecasts didn't fare quite as well, so I'm embedding the ICE3 here as I'm also quite fond of it. Full details on another page...