Creative Industries

Brisbane.
The next session I'm attending at the CCi conference is also (broadly) on citizen journalism. Andrew Kenyon from the University of Melbourne is the first speaker, and his focus is especially on the legal perspective on journalism as public speech, building on interviews with editors, journalists, and other media workers. Legal frameworks enable in particular the search for truth, the maintenance of democracy, and (especially in the US) a critique of government, but public speech is often positioned as fulfilling a more generic function (such as consensus formation). Public speech often critiques, and limited protections for public speech is often seen as having a chilling effect on the diversity of public speech that is possible.

Brisbane.
The CCi conference is about to start, with the opening keynote address by the wonderfully titled Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield. She begins by highlighting the role of creativity as a key commodity of the 21st century, and (as a neuroscientist) points especially to the question of what happens physically in the creative brain. The brain determines our perspective on the world, yet it is impossible to convey to others exactly what that perspective is (we resort to various forms of communication as a means for doing so); some views say that the abilities of the brain are themself determined by DNA.

I'll be spending the rest of this week at the inaugural conference of the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) here in Brisbane, and I'll try to live-blog as much as possible from the conference. This should be a great event - keynote speakers include Baroness Susan Greenfield, MIT's Henry Jenkins, Mark Deuze (the author of Media Work), and a number of other luminaries in the field. Henry will also be launching a number of books (including my own Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage) on Wednesday evening.

There's …

This should be of interest to a few readers of this blog: the submission deadline for papers for "Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons", the conference of the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation which takes place on 25-28 June, has been extended to 21 April. Both proposals and full papers can be submitted at this point.

Should be an exciting conference - the keynote presenters include Henry Jenkins, Mark Deuze, Margaret Simons, Pete Clifton, Norman Jackson, and Susan Greenfield, and that line-up alone should be worth the price of admission. The broad conference themes are:

Montréal.
We're now starting the post-lunch session on the first day here at WikiSym 2007, and the first paper is by Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman, who examine the use of wikis as a toolkit for collaborative learning. Andrea begins by noting tha there is a significant deficit in media literacy amongst high school students - they don't necessarily have sufficient skills to evaluate the information they're confronted with. She suggests constructionism as a pedagogic framework for building such literacies.

Constructionism has been articulated by Seymour Papert - he suggests that people learn particularly well when engaged in the construction of public artefacts: when others see what you know and have done, when you can take pride in the work, and when the work is persistent into the future. This connects very well with working with wikis, of course, but also goes beyond them - it builds on students working on personally meaningful goals, and harnesses learners as capable, curious, and tenacious active practitioners. Online, especially, there are constantly new opportunities to employ constructionist learning.

I'm heading out to Canada tomorrow, to present three papers at two conferences, and I've uploaded those papers and presentation Powerpoints here now. As a counterpoint to my solo work on the produsage book, I've really enjoyed working in collaborative teams this year - in addition to the ARC Linkage projects for edgeX and Youdecide2007 (and the Gatewatching group blog and ABC series with Barry and Jason from Youdecide), I'm also working in cross-institutional teams on couple of Carrick Institute projects examining teaching and learning in social software environments and building a network of Australian creative writing programmes. So …