Blog

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.

This just in from Peter Lang: my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production is now quite literally 'in print'. From what they tell me (and they're probably giving conservative estimates) it will now be around 14 weeks until the book is printed and shipped, so expect it to become available by early to mid August (perhaps roundabout my birthday on 10 August?). Definitely early enough for a launch during the AoIR conference...

Spending yesterday and today at home, working. This week and the next are strangely teaching-free weeks for me as the two Monday public holidays mean that my Creative Industries unit doesn't run again until Monday week. So, instead I'm getting some other important work done. Yesterday I made further inroads into two papers - the one co-authored with Sal Humphreys about our wiki efforts in KCB336 New Media Technologies (which will go out to the International Wiki Symposium organisers later today), and one with Danny Butt on digital rights management in the music industry, for a special issue of Media and Arts Law Review (which Sal also has a hand in).

I did my interview for ttn, the Network Ten kids' news show, this afternoon, speaking about the future of the media. Mainly I talked about the significant changes to the traditional production/consumption dichotomy which have been driven by the emergence of electronic media and especially the rise of the Internet and the Web. We touched on the blogs, digital storytelling and other forms of grassroots digital media production - and yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of doing this on an 'old' medium such as television. Hope what I said made sense - the whole thing seemed to be over so quickly, but I suppose that's the nature of TV...

Just spent half an hour on the Intimate Transactions installation / interactive new media piece by the Transmute collective which involves my colleague Keith Armstrong. In this installation you lean back against what's called a body shelf - a slightly angled surface with pressure sensors that sense the motion of your body. You also stand on a movable foot board, and both of these are used to control your avatar on a video screen. At the moment, the installation here on the Creative Industries Precinct is networked with a duplicate of the system down at ACMI in Melbourne, and both 'players' are interacting with one another and the 'game' as they're controlling their avatars.

Spent most of the ANZAC day public holiday on Monday working on a paper for the 2005 Wiki Symposium in San Diego. My colleague, the soon-to-be Dr Sal Humphreys has done much of the legwork for this paper which we'll be submitting before Friday; it details the use of wikis in my New Media Technologies unit at QUT and discusses the overall frameworks for using wikis in teaching. I'll post it here once it's done.

Following on from my recent email conversation with King Crimson biographer Sid Smith, he's asked me to help pass on this alert to fans:

Inside King Crimson DVD and CD

A statement from Robert Fripp and DGM

The Inside The Music series is a "pot of gold" for Bob Carruthers & classic rock productions. It addresses a valuable & useful area of popular music studies; but in a cheap, nasty & cynical fashion that exploits everyone & scams the artists, the music & the fans.