Snurb's blog

Leeds.
Well, the place I'm staying at here in Leeds might be a student house (and therefore, by implication, something of a dump), but once my housemates have gone to bed, boy is it quiet. So quiet, in fact, that I can hear the blood circulating in my ears - an experience which I can last remember having during a trip to Greece in the 1980s - late in the afternoon, just before dusk, we visited a hilltop temple to Zeus on the Western Peloponnesian, some time after the last tourist group had left. Whether out of a sense of the sanctity of the location, or for other reasons, no birds were present anywhere in the surrounds, and I could hear my friends breathing quietly from metres away.

Leeds.
Well, I'm here... I've been very warmly received at the University of Leeds by my host Stephen Coleman and the staff of the Institute of Communications Studies, and I've now taken up residency as a visiting scholar. I think I'm going to get some work done here - and I've already launched myself into tackling a couple of papers which need to be finished soon.

Heathrow.
Well, the last couple of months have been pretty much write-offs as far as blogging was concerned - let's see if we can't change this. All going well, there will be a few things to report over the course of 2007, too - in addition to the house Ann and I have just bought and moved into, there are also any number of research and teaching projects lined up for the coming months.

Right now, I find myself sitting in a departure lounge somewhere in the bowels of London Heathrow airport, having just spent the past 28 hours on flights from Brisbane via Singapore. I'm waiting to begin the last leg of my journey to Leeds, where I'll spend the next couple of months with Professor Stephen Coleman at the Institute of Communications Studies. Stephen is an expert in the area of e-democracy, and I'm interested to connect his work with those aspects of my research into produsage which play into citizen engagement and democratic participation.

Technorati : brisbane, house
Del.icio.us : brisbane, house

We've just published issue 9.6 of M/C Journal (December 2006)... This means that in 2007, M/C enters its tenth volume - wow. I don't think any one of us would have foreseen such longevity when we founded the journal. Anyway, here it is - and a great selection of interesting topics lined up for 2007 as well!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 4 January 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
is proud to present issue six in volume nine of

M/C Journal http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

My colleague Stephen Barrass from the University of Canberra sends on a link to Todd Richmond's models for producer/consumer and teacher/student relations in analog, digital, and transitional environments (via Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs blog) - including images like the following:

I'm finally getting around to clearing up a backlog of things. Amongst them are some of the photos from the launch of Uses of Blogs at AoIR 2006, taken by Ali Kerr from our friends at ACID. We were lucky enough to have a good number of the contributors to the book at the conference, and Online Opinion's Graham Young was kind enough to launch the book. He did a great job - and the book sold out at the conference and has been selling very well on Amazon since... Not pictured here are Alex Halavais, Brian Fitzgerald, Damien O'Brien, and Adrian Miles, who were also at the conference.

Over the past few years, I've created a few neologisms - terms such as 'gatewatching', 'newssharing', and of course 'produser' and 'produsage'. While some might frown on this (hi, Jean), in my view it's absolutely necessary for researchers to abandon traditional terminology when it becomes overly limiting, and obscures important new features of their objects of study. So, for example, the traditional journalistic process of gatekeeping is giving way to a new mode of gatewatching in news production; for journalists and other news commentators this is "a shift from the watchdog to the 'guidedog'" role, as Jo Bardoel and Mark Deuze have put it.

I've been meaning to post this for a while - a call for papers for the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy that's related to the Association of Internet Researchers conference I organised in September. For those who weren't able to make it to AoIR 2006, there's still some time to submit additional articles...

The International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and the Association of Internet Researchers is pleased to announce a call for further papers for a special issue on Internet regulation linked to the IR7 Conference ('Internet Convergences'). The selection committee - composed of the editorial board of the IJCLP and Matthew Allen (Curtin University of Technology), Fay Sudweeks (Murdoch University) and Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology) - will review and consider all submissions for publication. We have already received several papers from the conference, which are in the process of being reviewed, and would now encourage experts from all disciplines and nationalities to submit further papers for publication by 1 December 2006. Acceptance will be notified by the end of the year for publication in 2007 following strict double-blind peer review.

As I've mentioned here before, over the last couple of years I've been one of the directors of a large teaching and learning grant project at QUT, aimed at introducing blogs, wikis, and other more advanced online tools into the teaching environment. Our fundamental assumption in this project is that in a social software, Web 2.0 world, students crucially need to build the critical, creative, collaborative, and communicative capacities (or C4C, for short) to operate effectively, whether in their working or private lives, or in their wider role as citizens. Advanced social software tools in learning environments can help build such capacities, or (where they exist already, as is increasingly the case) further enhance them by providing a more systematic approach to their development.