Blog

I spent most of the day today at QUT's Carseldine campus, with the team of a large teaching and learning project involving staff from Creative Industries and Humanities & Human Services. As part of the project we're exploring the use of blogs and wikis in teaching, and we've now set up the first testbed systems to do so (not for public viewing yet, sorry...). I mentioned some of this work in my interview with Trebor Scholz recently. If anyone's interested, we're using Drupal and MediaWiki as the base technologies.

Bloody hell. My forthcoming book is showing up on Amazon now...

Hmm. I've been invited to contribute a piece to the April feature of Online Opinion, which will look at online and alternative media in Australia. So, I guess I'll have to make up my mind about what I think about this topic... Here's a first take:

News You Can Produse

Much of the debate around online, and even alternative online media in Australia continues to miss the point. So much of online publishers' thinking about their work is still couched in an outmoded language which upholds increasingly hollow and counterproductive approaches to publishing. Indeed the terms 'publishing' and 'media' may be part of the problem themselves. 'Media', after all, implies the existence of a mediator, an agency presumably in the middle between producers and consumers which 'publishes', that is, makes public what was previously unavailable.

I've just sent out the official announcement for the latest issue of M/C Journal, for which I'm General Editor. Kylie Cardell and Jason Emmett have put together a very nice collection of articles on the (unlikely?) theme of 'bad'. On the site I've also added the blurb for our upcoming issue 'copy' and confirmed the last issue for the year, 'affect'. We're still looking for an editor for 'scan', by the way - email me...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 24 March 2005

Ho boy. Well, my new spam filter for comments on this site seems to be doing its job - the site has been (and still is at the moment) flooded by comments advertising online gambling, but none of them (we're past the 150 comments mark here!) have actually made it through. Filtering by content is the only way to catch these postings - they're coming from a wide range of IP addresses, so there seem to be a fair few machines out on the Net that have been hacked to send comment spam.

Other than that, I've spent the day working on my application for promotion to lecturer level B at QUT. If I wasn't feeling a bit under the weather already anyway, just listing all the various projects I'm involved in is exhausting. QUT divides academic work into three main areas - here are the major items I've listed so far:

Heh. Our recently announced book project Uses of Blogs is starting to build some interest. I've seen a number of visitors come in from Furl blogs over the last couple of days, and it's interesting to see some of the comments from people who are using Furl to blog about the book. My favourite comment so far:

If I used Amazon, I'd put it on my wish list.

Check the Furl reference for the Uses of Blogs entry for more information.

With my colleague Jane Turner, I've put in a paper proposal for the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto in October. Let's hope they like it - for me it would also make a great combination with the AoIR conference in Chicago a few days later (maybe I could even swing by the Peter Lang offices in New York on the way?). Anyway, we'll see what they think.

Here's what we've proposed:

In 2002, Queensland University of Technology developed the world’s first Creative Industries Faculty and introduced the new Bachelor of Creative Industries degree, replacing its existing Bachelor of Arts offering. The degree is designed to be inherently interdisciplinary, and aims to provide students both with the creative skills to develop and realise innovative ideas for projects in the creative industries field, as well as with the theoretical and conceptual knowledge to understand and operate effectively within the emerging creative economy in Australia and other nations.

More tinkering with the Website today, and some work towards an ARC Linkage project which Liz Ferrier and I have developed over the past year or so. But the big news for today is that my colleague Jo Jacobs and I have received the go-ahead for a book on blogs and blogging that we've proposed to Peter Lang Publishing. I've added some more information on the book project on a separate page, and I'll update this as we move forward from here. The book is tentatively titled Uses of Blogs for now.  

Phew. More Drupal updates today, and I think I have most of it under control now. In the process I've added a Creative Commons licencing scheme, a blogroll, direct access to the content categories, and a few other goodies. Still no news on the monitored sites list (using Drupal's Weblinks module); I've manually added a list of sites to the right sidebar for the time being.

Other updates also continue. Today was the start of week three of semester, but I'm already having to update unit outlines for next semester (when I'm again teaching the Creative Industries unit at QUT, as well as New Media Technologies). NMT (in which students produce the M/Cyclopedia of New Media) still requires more development; I'm exploring ways to translate the wiki knowledge structure of the M/Cyclopedia into the unit content structure and delivery. How do you teach new media without falling into the trap of providing a simplified linear history of new media - how do you show the complex interconnected nature of new media concepts and issues instead (and enable students to explore them for themselves)?

OK, I've updated my Drupal installation to the 4.6 RC version. Looks like most things are working - still waiting for an updated weblink module to appear, so the links to the Robert Fripp and Sid Smith diaries are gone for the time being. On the upside, trackback should work again. I've also taken new action against a persistent online poker site which has kept spamming me both through their frequent accesses to this site (presumably to get themselves listed in the site logs, even though they're not public) and through a couple of bouts of trackback spam. Well, their IP is banned now, so we'll see what happens.