Snurb's blog

I got caught in the massive hail storm that hit Brisbane last night. Things looked pretty dark on the way from work, and as I reached the Toowong area all hell broke loose and evening traffic was simply swamped with hail. From all I can tell I was probably lucky as I was on my way south from Toowong before the worst of the storm hit - the ABC studios there were damaged, and even this morning all the way up through to Milton and up to Kelvin Grove there were still melting piles of hail stones in the gutters and on the footpaths. The storm meant that I did miss the guest lecture by ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel at the University of Queensland, though. By the way, the award for best photo from the storm so far clearly goes to Michelle & Heather for their utterly Australian response to an abundance of water ice.

Every once in a while you find something in your inbox that sounds interesting overall but doesn't really say much on what it's actually all about. The invite for the launch of Eidos, a new Queensland-based network of educational institutions, researchers, social policy planners, and industry was such a message - so, on Wednesday I spent the day at the Queensland Art Gallery forecourt to work out what's happening here. (And I'm back-dating this post to Wednesday - didn't get around to posting it immediately because of the promotion application which had taken over the rest of my life...)

Phew. I've spent the best part of the weekend, and half of today, working on my application for promotion to the level of Lecturer at QUT. While pretty much everyone I talk to tells me that I shouldn't have any problem getting there, that's not necessarily very helpful - I can't afford any complacency in preparing the application documents. And at any rate, the work required to complete the application itself (4 pages of a succinct case for promotion, 20 pages of a detailed case, and 20 pages of evidence in support of the application) is still the same.

I'm not necessarily opposed to talking about myself, but spending this much space listing my achievements does get pretty exhausting. Sure, it's kinda nice taking stock of what I've achieved these past few years, but I could well do without needing to prove their impact... I think I have everything under control now, though, and I've secured the support of a great group of referees - John Hartley, Jude Smith, and Paul Makeham from QUT, and my good friend Donna Lee Brien who is now at the University of New England in Armidale. I've worked closely with all of them and I'm sure they'll help me jump through this hoop.

Some time ago I submitted a proposal that Jane Turner and I put together for the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto later this year. The conference is a pretty high-profile event which amongst others includes Charles Landry, author of the key text The Creative City, as a member of its 'brains trust'. Today I received the good news that based on this proposal, which dealt with the fictional Creative Town environment which we have developed for my KKB018 Creative Industries unit (see Creative Places + Spaces), I've been invited to attend the conference - but in a slightly different, and perhaps more significant, role than originally proposed.

Must admit I'm pretty pissed off today - there's an ugly and ill-considered attack on the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT in The Australian today, written no less by colleagues of mine who really should know better. I hesitate even to link to the article, as it's so full of half-truths and dirty laundry that it makes for very unpleasant reading.

Perhaps there's a small positive in this at least - seems to me that any unbiased reader can't help but see this as a hyperbolic gripe piece. Nonetheless, it's very frustrating that it has the potential to set back at least temporarily some of the great work that my colleagues and I have achieved these past four years, and to diminish our collective and individual professional standing by dragging the Faculty through the mud.

Yesterday my colleagues Peter Duffy, Sal Humphreys and I put in a paper proposal for the Online Teaching conference here at QUT in September. This builds on the work Sal and I have been doing for the International Wiki Symposium in San Diego, but with a focus more on teaching and pedagogy aspects rather than the underlying teaching technologies. Here's the abstract:

Delivery in the Beyond - Possibilities for the Use of Blogs and Wikis in Education

In a knowledge economy it is no longer sufficient to use online learning and teaching technologies simply for the delivery of content to students. In the new environment, graduate capabilities increasingly and crucially identify the ability to effectively use new media technologies for collaborative and (co)creative purposes as well as for the critical assessment and evaluation of existing information. Higher education therefore must refocus its efforts, from a mere interest in developing information literacies to an emphasis on developing advanced creative, collaborative, and critical ICT literacies in students.

Following the interview I did with Steve Meacham last week, I'm quoted at length in today's Sydney Morning Herald, in an article titled "Editing Our Future" (page 18). Ostensibly this is about the content preservation efforts by the National Library of Australia and the International Internet Preservation Consortium, but in also covering some of the key reasons for why contemporary Internet content must be preserved for posterity t also goes into blogging and various other key forms of content production and publishing on the Web. Steve's done a great job with the article; it's also online here (at least according to Google News - I can't be bothered dealing with the SMH's silly user registration system).

More work today on my article with Danny Butt for the Media & Arts Law Review, on Digital Rights Management (DRM). It's looking OK now, but I find it hard to come up with clear recommendations in this field, just because DRM has been so thoroughly misused and misdirected for so long. The mainstream music industry's belligerence just isn't going to work, no matter how many people it sues - for better or for worse, the heavy-handed police state approach to combatting copyright infringements isn't going to be more successful here than it has been in the case of prohibition of alcohol or soft drugs, civil liberties, or, hell, (continuing with the papal theme of the last month) Christianity.