Dr Axel Bruns is a Senior Lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and the editor of Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (2006; all released by Peter Lang, New York). His book Gatewatching was nominated for the 2006 Communications Policy Research Award at Fordham University's Donald McGannon Communication Research Center, and he contributes to the Gatewatching.org group blog with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders.

Bruns has coined the term produsage to better describe the current paradigm shift towards user-led forms of collaborative content creation which are proving to have an increasing impact on media, economy, law, social practices, and democracy itself. Produsage provides a new approach to conceptualising these phenomena by avoiding the traditional assumptions associated with industrial-age production models. His study of these environments builds on his work in the area of participatory or citizen journalism and blogging. In 2007, Bruns was a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he further investigated the impact of produsage on democracy, citizenship, and the media. For more information about the produsage concept, see Produsage.org.

Bruns teaches in a variety of units across the Creative Industries Faculty. From 2002 to 2006, he developed and taught the world's first mainstream undergraduate unit on creative industries: Creative Industries (KKB018). In 2005/6, he co-directed a large teaching and learning project at QUT which introduced blogs and wikis into general teaching practice; in 2006/7, he was a participant in two projects of the Carrick national teaching and learning institute which further investigate the potential and actual uses of social media by learners and teachers.

In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the premier online academic publisher M/C - Media and Culture, which publishes M/C Journal, M/C Reviews, M/C Dialogue, and the M/Cyclopedia of New Media, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. In 2000, he also co-founded dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing with Donna Lee Brien and Philip Neilsen from QUT's Creative Writing and Cultural Studies discipline. Bruns was the Web developer responsible for QUT's streaming media station EMIT, which began Webcasting in 2002.

Bruns's research interests are in produsage (or collaborative user-led content development), blogging, citizen journalism, online publishing, virtual communities, creative industries, creative hypertext writing, and popular music studies. He has published a variety of articles in these fields, many of which can be found on this Website, and at Gatewatching.org and Produsage.org.

Personal Information

Originally from Hannover, Germany, I have lived and worked in Brisbane, Australia, since 1994. Outside of my academic work, I'm a passionate advocate of Progressive Rock; I'm also an incorrigible news junkie, a keen explorer of new Internet technologies and part-time Web developer, an all-too-infrequent creative writer, and a very amateur electronic musician.

Feel free to email me, or leave a comment on the blog!

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