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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.

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.

In the Australian context, the debate about citizen journalism has been rekindled by a recent piece by James Farmer in The Age's 'blogs' section, provocatively titled "Citizen Journalism Sucks". Unfortunately, though, the piece regurgitates a number of the 'home truths' which industrial journalists have been trying to spread about their citizen cousins - yet at the same time, the sharply critical debate which took place in the commentaries attached to the article also demonstrated clearly how effective citizen journalism (properly understood as a discursive, dialogic form of journalism) can be. Here's my response to the article.

Well, that went well - I went a few minutes over time, but people seemed happy to stay on even though the final panel at ATOM2006 was about to start. I got to the panel a little late, and John Hartley is already in full flight - he looks to have begun by noting that literacy no longer means print literacy, nor even mainstream media literacy: indeed, most media education now takes place outside of schools, he suggests. Multimedia literacy has grown up to be totally beyond the control of the traditional education system. Unfortunately, partly because of this, schooling prefers control and order over change and innovation, and imagination and interpretation are reduced to skills and methods. This manifests itself in the prohibition of Google images and the Wikipedia, in the rise of 'critical literacy' (or ideology-watch) skills, or in 'multiliteracy' (or office software) skills, for example.