Snurb's blog

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The second day here at ICE 3 starts with a keynote by Gunther Kress. He begins by noting the brackets in his talk title, which for him symbolise the distinctions between some of the core and continuing aspects of learning, and the particular affordances of the learning environments in use at any one point. What stays the same, what changes, and why, then? Of course, we are embedded in cultures, and these do shift and change.

Ross Priory, Scotland (apparently this is also where Rob Roy was written).
The last ICE 3 speaker for today is John Cook. He describes the cultural emergence of 'Generation CX' (rather than Gens C or X, presumably), but notes that even Generation X hasn't been particularly well (or uniformly) defined as yet. The term emerged first in 1964, and was famously revived by Douglas Coupland in the 1990s, now referring to those born between 1960 and 1965 and feeling no connection to the cultural icons of the baby boom generation. A yet later, grunge Generation X was defined by songs such as Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit".

Ross Priory, Scotland (no sign of ghosts as yet).
Hamish McLeod and Jen Ross are the next presenters (full paper here). They explore metaphors for being an online tutor, and begin with a brief quote from Wikipedia on online tutoring, which presents a very matter-of-fact take on the issue that may not quite plumb the full depths of the question. The potential move of teachers from 'sage on the stage' to 'guide on the side' has been much highlighted, of course, but also doesn't quite cover this issue; traditional positions of the teacher are now much criticised, but exactly what role might come to replace them (if such replacement does take place) isn't very clear at this point.

Ross Priory, Scotland (and we're just being told that the place is cursed, apparently...).
The next presentation here at ICE 3 is by Colleen McKenna and Claire McAvinia, who present thoughts on work they've done in getting students to create hypertext assignments. To what extent does some work challenge traditional essay writing, and does it make more visible the features of conventional linear argumentation? Does this work liberate the thinking of these student writers?

There's already a good deal of interest in exploring hypertext writing for non-academic text (fiction, poetry, reflective writing, etc.); however, less has been written about presenting academic non-fiction writing in a hypertext format and assessing student writing of this form. Hypertext might offer a different type of meaning-making which privileges exploration over conclusion, as David Kolb suggests. Such writing claims a factual territory rather than pointing to any one source of truth. Gunther Kress similarly distinguishes between the temporal logic of traditional academic argument and the spatial logic of the image, which predominates in screen-based hypertextual media.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
I'm spending the rest of this week at the ICE 3 conference (Ideas, Cyberspace, Education) in Scotland, having spent much of Tuesday driving up here from my temporary base at Leeds. Really looking forward to this - a small but well-credentialled conference in a very beautiful (if cold) place. We're now about to make a start to the conference proper, having already been welcomed at the lunch session.

The first paper is by Peter Goodyear and Siân Bayne. Siân begins by noting that universities are still deriving much of their status from a base in the printed book (and university crests are a simple indication of this); however, today, it is possible to see the Internet both as culture and as cultural artefact (and Siân focusses here especially on Internet as a separate culture in itself) - the Net changes existing practices and opens up new possibilities for practice which universities may explore. (This doesn't necessarily happen, though - witness the underlying structures of WebCT, for example, which remain based in traditional learning activities, and separate activities into very distinct categories that may no longer be useful. Such learning tools blind us to the other available possibilities in online spaces.)

Leeds.
I'm really quite happy with the way that my first real attempts to use the IssueCrawler tool to map the Australian blogosphere have turned out. As I've mentioned here previously, I'm currently exploring this tool as a means of tracing how particularly topics are discussed across the distributed and ad hoc networks of blog-based conversation, and I used the case of Australian-born Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks as a case study - with renewed calls for the Australian federal government to urge the Bush administration to finally bring Hicks to trial or release him (he was captured in December 2001, but has not been charged yet), there was increased discussion about Hicks's fate over the last couple of months, and I've been interested to see how this has played out in the blogosphere.

So, my work on this was meant both as an exploration of the methodology for and proof of concept of using IssueCrawler in this context. Overall, I think this has worked pretty well, and I've begun drafting a paper to discuss my approach in detail (most of this was written while waiting around airport lounges during my rather circuitous trip to Ibiza and back last week, incidentally). This first research project is part of my wider work with the Citizen Journalism ARC Linkage project at QUT (for which Terry Flew, Stuart Cunningham, and I are chief investigators), and will also feed into a chapter which QUT PhD student Debra Adams and I have just successfully proposed for the upcoming collection Accented Blogging. I'm not going to post all of my current thoughts on this research work right now, but here's a first overview of what I've found, with a few graphs of the resultant networks:

There's a nice piece by Rosemary Sorensen in the Media section of today's Weekend Australian newspaper, called "Time You Turned On the Tube", discussing the implications of the recent rise to prominence of YouTube and other user-led content sites. Rosemary spoke to me at length for this article, and I'm very happy with the way it's turned out - sometimes such articles end up being little more than mainstream media hacks' attempts to denigrate what they don't understand, but this article balances an enthusiasm for the changes being brought about by such sites with the legitimate questions of intellectual property rights, quality, and economic sustainability which can be asked of them.

...the first thing that pops into your your head when you see this picture is 'hey, a smiley!' (Seen during my visit to Ibiza last week.)

And I guess you're a geek if you're aware of, or even celebrating, the fact that today, 14 March, is international π day (that is, if for the moment we adopt the utterly counterintuitive American month/date/year system of writing the date). Yes, on 3/14 at 1.59:26 there'll be (or there were, depending on your time zone) a lot of mathematicians quietly celebrating that mysterious little number, and perhaps even tucking into one while doing so. Bless 'em. And by means of marking this momentous date, here are the first four million or so digits of π for your entertainment. The last one is zero.

Jean has posted a YouTube video of a recent interview with philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and also links to my recent comments on Habermas's continued refusal to engage meaningfully with the Internet and other networked, decentralised, public many-to-many media and with what they may mean for the future of the public sphere. There's also the start of a little further discussion about how to situate such media within Habermas's theories. I meant to reply directly there, but my response turned out a little lengthy for a blog comment, so I'm posting it here instead.