Teaching with Technology

I've just had word that my paper for the Association of Internet Researchers Conference 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.

Following on from his recent interview series, Trebor Scholz at the Institute for Distributed Creativity is now hosting a one-day conference. The title is drawn from the interview he did with me, which is kinda nice - wish I could be there! (Incidentally, the conference is being podcast as well...)

Share, Share Widely
A Conference on New-Media Art Education

Friday, May 6th, 11am - 8pm

A good meeting with Jo Jacobs and our research assistant Ian Rogers today, to move forward on the Uses of Blogs book. We've signed the book contract now and it's on its way back to Peter Lang in New York. We'll be sending out an update to our contributors shortly, to work out the deadlines leading up to delivery of the manuscript in early November. The more we work on this, the more this is shaping up to be a great collection. The enthusiasm displayed by our contributors (as well as by Jo and Ian) is great, and we do seem to have managed to collect a stellar cast of bloggers and blog researchers. It's a pleasure to work with such a supportive publisher as well!

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.