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.

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PDF of the paper

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.

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.

No, the book isn't getting a re-release (yet). There's a lot of other activity going on around the fields of citizen journalism, news blogging, and online opinion writing, so Barry, Jason, and I thought it would be a good idea to set up a group blog dedicated to tracking these developments - and I'm pleased to announce that our new blog at Gatewatching.org is now open for business. This doesn't mean that I'll stop blogging here, of course - but my citizen journalism-related thoughts, and the outcomes of our collaboration on Youdecide2007 and beyond, are going to be collected there (as well as cross-posted here where appropriate). Come join us as we try to make sense of it all.

This launch also coincides neatly with the start of a series of posts we'll do for the ABC Online opinion section over the coming weeks (and throughout the Australian election campaign) - we've been asked to report from the political blogosphere in an effort to highlight the best ideas emerging from outside the mainstream media. It seems appropriate in this context that our first post to the ABC site is a rumination on the interrelationship (and increasing interweaving) between industrial and citizen journalism, touching on the 12 July meltdown at The Australian as well as the crategate story we managed to uncover through Youdecide2007.

I would have liked to mention this here some time ago, but with one thing and another (such as my trip to PerthDAC) I just didn't get around to it. Anyway, for those of you within two days' travel of Brisbane: Peter Black from QUT's Law Faculty is organising Australia's first blogging conference this coming Friday (28 September 2007), at the Creative Industries Precinct. True to the theme, the conference won't be a broadcast-style 'shut up and listen to my paper' affair, but a discussion-based unconference (similar perhaps to the Fibreculture conference I organised with Geert Lovink and Molly Hankwitz in 2003).

Unlike other conferences, I won't be blogging this one, though - both because of the paperless setup itself, and because I've been roped in to facilitate sessions throughout the day. In the morning, I'll co-chair the "Researching Blogging and Blogging Research" session with Jean Burgess and Mel Gregg (and I'll contribute a focus especially on crawling and mapping the blogosphere, an area which has been of increasing interest to me recently); in the afternoon I'm helping to run the citizen journalism session with Graham Young and Rachel Cobcroft (and no doubt we'll talk quite a bit about the 12 July incident, crategate, Youdecide2007, and other pre-election fun).

Perth.
The last day of PerthDAC has started now. Jill Walker Rettberg compares the developments around the Web with phenomena around the introduction of the printing press. We're now heading out of the parenthesis of the print age, and this requires the development of new network literacies (enabling users to create, share, and navigate social media) beyond the read and write literacies of the print age. Print and its literacies had introduced a private/public divide where the private self is distinct and separate from what takes place in the mediated public sphere; in the network age, private and public collapse into one another as the self is connected to the network. With the rise of print literacy, reading created a solitary and private relationship between the reader and their book, as Roger Chartier has put it; this is a privatisation of reading, and the library becomes a place from which the world can be seen but where the reader remains invisible. This is a unidirectional relationship, though - as Plato put it, if you ask a written text a question, it will not respond; and similarly, writing is a solipsistic engagement, as Walter Ong has said. But what about blogging, then - is it social or solitary? William Gibson described blogging as boiling water without a lid - a less focussed, dissipating activity -, but is this also true for those who are natives of the blogosphere?

So I joined Facebook this week - not because I had a deep and burning desire to do so, but because we've created a youdecide2007 Facebook group as part of the support network for our youdecide2007.org citizen journalism Website for the upcoming Australian federal election. Since joining, I've received a good dozen of friends requests from friends and colleagues; people have left messages on my wall; I've been invited to events - all of which are pretty regular occurrences on the site, I guess. (The same keeps happening with my LinkedIn account, which I haven't even logged on to for months - apologies for those who've sent me messages wanting to make contact on that site.)

The thing is, though - I still feel deeply ambivalent about Facebook. I need to be on there for research reasons, which means I need to create an account for myself, but at the same time, frankly, I'm just not that interested in actively using that account for my own professional and personal networking. I'm already embedded in what I think are pretty good online and offline social networks (online using a variety of other technologies from email to blogs), and I don't feel a particularly strong urge to recreate them in yet another sociotechnical environment. Other friends and colleagues may feel differently about this, and that's fine, of course; at the same time, this may easily lead to a fragmentation rather than strengthening of social ties in my circle of personal relationships, and I assume that's true more broadly, too.