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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/

I'm finally getting around to clearing up a backlog of things. Amongst them are some of the photos from the launch of [weblink:158] 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.

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 …

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.

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.