Vancouver.
The first keynote at AoIR 2007 is by John Lester, the Boston Operations Director of Linden Lab, who run Second Life (John's SL avatar name is Pathfinder Linden). He notes the fact that each avatar in Second Life represents one human user as a key feature of this online world (which is different from some multi-player online games), and also points out again that Second Life is not a game, but a virtual world. As a result, too, Second Life is extremely dynamic in its content, and there's no way to cache or pre-load much of the world; the SL software in essence works much like a Web browser, as a generic interface to whatever exists at any one place in the virtual world.

Vancouver.
For the first paper session here at AoIR 2007 I thought I'd go to one of the sessions on blogging, which is opened by Mary-Helen Ward and Sandra West from the University of Sydney. Their paper is on blogging the PhD process, and mary begins by outlining the Australian PhD process itself (highlighting the thesis-based focus of Australian PhDs, the role of supervisors, and the as yet relatively unexamined pedagogy of the process). What has been suggested as pedagogical approaches are apprenticeship models, the idea of the autonomous scholar who needs to be 'discovered within' or at least discovered by the student, a more parental rite of passage model, a poststructural approach of students writing their selves into identity, as well as more recent peer learning or student/supervisor co-production models.

Vancouver.
I've arrived in town for the 2007 Association of Internet Researchers conference, and I've spent most of the first day here walking off my jetlag. Vancouver is an interesting town, and they're doing bridges very well here. Shame about the weather, though... At any rate, I've walked so much that my feet are very sore already - looking forward to the start of the conference!

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: