On the day before AoIR2006, I presented at the Online Learning and Teaching conference at QUT. I'm happy to report that the two conference papers for OLT2006 that I was involved in have now been published on the conference Website - here are the references:

Rachel Cobcroft, Stephen Towers, Judith Smith, and Axel Bruns. "Mobile Learning in Review: Opportunities and Challenges for Learners, Teachers, and Institutions." In Proceedings of the Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology.

As I arrived back in Brisbane, there was good news relating to my research work waiting for me here. Some time ago, we'd put in a proposal for a Linkage grant project to the Australian Research Council - and after a considerable waiting period, Linkage outcomes were finally announced a couple of weeks ago. So, I'm happy to report that our participatory news project has finally received the go-ahead (and the $380,000 of funding over four years attached to it) from the ARC. This is a project for which I'll be a co-Chief Investigator with my QUT colleagues Terry Flew and Stuart Cunningham - and our industry partners are SBS, National Forum, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. I'm particularly looking forward to working with SBS on this, who (in addition to being the Australian home of football) are also one of the most innovative and responsible broadcast organisations in Australia.

The focus of my research is mainly in Internet studies. In particular, I investigate collaborative and user-led environments for content production and social networking across a variety of domains and contexts, as well as examining related areas - such as the intellectual property framework especially for distributed, user-led, digital environments, and the impact of mobile and wireless technologies on these fields. Key research areas include:

Produsers and Produsage

My research into user-led content production, or produsage, investigates the changed content production value chain model in collaborative online environments: in these environments, a strict producer/consumer dichotomy no longer applies - instead, users are almost always also able to be producers of content, and often necessarily so in the very act of using it.