Heathrow. Well, the last couple of months have been pretty much write-offs as far as blogging was concerned - let's see if we can't change this. All going well, there will be a few things to report over the course of 2007, too - in addition to the house Ann and I have just bought and moved into, there are also any number of research and teaching projects lined up for the coming months.
Right now, I find myself sitting in a departure lounge somewhere in the bowels of London Heathrow airport, having just spent the past 28 hours on flights from Brisbane via Singapore. I'm waiting to begin the last leg of my journey to Leeds, where I'll spend the next couple of months with Professor Stephen Coleman at the Institute of Communications Studies. Stephen is an expert in the area of e-democracy, and I'm interested to connect his work with those aspects of my research into produsage which play into citizen engagement and democratic participation.
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:
On 22 September, I'm going to be on a panel at a journalism conference to mark the 85th anniversary of journalism at the University of Queensland. The conference has undergone a number of changes over the past few month, and has now become a one-day symposium at the Brisbane Marriott Hotel, but I hope that the panel session will be useful, interesting, and well-attended nonetheless.
For those in the Brisbane area: I'll be on a panel at the Straight Out of Brisbane festival (SOOB) this Saturday afternoon, discussing "Media Futures". Below is the blurb for the event - see more details on the SOOB Website. My session also follows directly from the launch of radio station 4ZZZ's Convergent Community Newsroom, which involves my colleague Barry Saunders. Should be interesting!
Media Futures Sat 19 Aug 1:00pm - 2:30pm :: SOOB Festival Club, 610 Ann St, Valley Free
I've just had word that my paper for the Association of Internet ResearchersConference this year has been accepted - so I guess I'll be going to Chicago in October... The paper is titled "Wikinews: The Next Generation of Alternative Online News?" and deals with a form of open news which arrived too late to be fully considered in my book, so it's a kind of addendum to the book itself. As this is the peak association in my line of research, I'm also hoping to have a bit of a launch for the book at the conference.
OK, after the end of AoIR 2004 I'm back in Brighton now. I couldn't get access with my laptop at the University of Sussex at all for the last few days, so I'm now about to post my backlog of blog entries (my backblog?) from the last few days.
The next (and last for this conference) session is about to begin, titled simply 'resistance?' Still a good turnout for the session even though people are now starting to leave the University of Sussex to catch their various planes. Andrew Ó Baoill starts this session with a study of MoveOn.org, a political group which started in 1998 around the Clinton impeachment campaign and enables participation in political action by members of the public.
