Produsers and Produsage

Montréal.
It's a day of keynotes today, but for the last one we're back in the smaller WikiSym 2007 setting, for a talk by the inventor of the wiki, Ward Cunningham. He is also a pioneer in software design patterns research (the field for whose uses he invented the wiki, of course), and in what's called agile software development, however. He begins by noting that wikis are ultimately an exercise in simplicity - focussing on some very simple processes upon which large structures such as Wikipedia can be built.

Montréal.
There are about eight powerpoints in this auditorium, and this time I've come in early enough to plug into one - towards the end of the previous keynote here at OOPSLA I had to switch to taking notes on my PDA as my laptop ran out of steam. The second shared keynote between OOPSLA and WikiSym 2007 today is by Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner (or, Babbage Linden and Zero Linden), and we're going to hear about Second Life as a programming environment. Of course we also heard a lot about Second Life at AoIR last week, and I'm quite enjoying these presentations - if nothing else, they certainly have great visuals.

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.

Vancouver.
We're coming towards the end of the last day here at AoIR 2007, and Kirsten Foot is the first speaker in the post-lunch session, presenting a co-authored paper on link structures and engagement practices in U.S. and U.K. fair trade networks. Fair trade movements aim to develop more equitable practices in international commerce in a variety of commodities (not just coffee), and Kirsten and her colleagues examined fair trade movements' historical roots (since the end of World War II) in a previous study; in the U.K., contrary to the U.S., there are also important relationships with government bodies (and there are a number of official 'fair trade towns' in the U.K., but only one in the U.S.). U.K. movements are now having some impact even on European Union policy, in fact. In the U.S., targets of such movements are usually corporations, by comparison.

Vancouver.
The second keynote at the AoIR 2007 conference is by MIT's Henry Jenkins, speaking on the moral economy of Web 2.0 (in a presentation coauthored with Josh Green and emerging from the work of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT). The central principle of Web 2.0 is to embrace the power of collective intelligence, as Kevin O'Reilly has said; another take on this is that users make all the content, but corporations keep all the revenue (according to Bash.org). There's a proliferation of pronouns (you, we, us), which opens an interesting tension of individual versus collective action (is 'you' singular or plural here?). Indeed, YouTube is a meeting place of so many different communities that talking about it in general misses most of the specificities of individual uses.

Vancouver.
In the post-lunch session at AoIR 2007, I'm in a session on Second Life, which starts off with Slava Kozlov and Nicole Reinhold from Philips Design (the design division of Dutch electronics giant Philips) in the Netherlands. The begin with an introduction to the many spaces of Web 2.0, and note that many users have existences, identities, experiences in a number of these spaces, engaging with them in a playful manner which includes experimentation and exploration, role-playing, active and imaginary work, and a focus on experience and process rather than efficiency and results. How playful, in this context, is Second Life?

Vancouver.
The next session at AoIR 2007 begins with a paper by Ralph Schroeder and Mattijs den Besten on the section in the Pynchon wiki which has sprung up to collaboratively annotate Thomas Pynchon's much-anticipated novel Against the Day. There are some interesting statistics on how user participation shifted from the Pynchon mailing-list before the release of the book to the wiki once it was released; today, the wiki works as a reference source, as a tool highlighting connections to other Pynchon novels, and interpreting the content of the book. By July 2007, it had 200 contributors, 5000 entries, and contained some 400,000 words.

Vancouver.
This Friday morning at AoIR 2007 I find myself in a pedagogy session, and Gary Natriello and Anthony Cocciolo have made a start. Their interest is in the effect of Web 2.0 learning environments on student learning. PocketKnowledge is one project which they've designed, in which users maintain a high level of control of their information, a high level of community trust, and a non-authoritative organisation of information, which ideally generates a playful attitude. Users create 'pockets' of information, and get to determine organisation, access and copyrights for this material, but user-to-user comments are also possible.

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, it's perhaps no surprise that all three papers on this trip are co-authored works - two with my colleague Sal Humphreys from QUT, and one with Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai from the Universität St. Gallen in Switzerland.

What's worked out particularly well this month is the timing of the conferences - I'm headed first to the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Vancouver on 17-20 Oct., and from there it's just an overnight flight to the International Symposium on Wikis in Montréal on 21-23 Oct. Given how long it takes to get anywhere from Australia, being able to do a number of conferences on the one trip is always very useful - and I'm particularly looking forward again to AoIR, since due to my role as conference chair at last year's conference in Brisbane I missed most of the presentation sessions except for the keynotes and those sessions that I presented in myself. As always, I'm planning to blog everything I'm attending, and I'll try to record and slidecast my own papers. For now, here's a preview of what's to come:

Finally getting around to processing some of the recordings of the papers that I've given at conferences this year has coincided for me with exploring in a little more detail the Slideshare service for sharing Powerpoint presentations, and so predictably I've fallen in love with the audio synchronisation tool they're calling "Slidecasting". Very nice interface to a handy little tool, and I've now uploaded Slidecasts from the ICE3 conference at Loch Lomond in March, from the Creativity & Cognition conference in Washington, D.C., in June, and from PerthDAC just the other week. It's interesting - for me, anyway - to listen back over these recordings to see how much my conceptual models for analysing produsage have developed over the past few months, as I've researched and written the produsage book. Unfortunately I seem to have missed out on recording my presentation at the MiT5 conference in Boston this April - this has probably been my favourite paper of the year so far, perhaps because it's also been the most speculative one. Ah well.

Each of the conferences also enabled me to present my work on produsage to a very different group of scholars from those that I tend to see at my usual conferences, and I had some very positive feedback after each of the presentations (some of which made it onto the recordings as well). Unexpectedly, posting these presentations to Slideshare has also had an interesting side-effect: my presentation from PerthDAC was featured as "Slidecast of the Day" on the site, and had over 1000 views in less than a week as a result. Nice little bonus - the other two Slidecasts didn't fare quite as well, so I'm embedding the ICE3 here as I'm also quite fond of it. Full details on another page...