So, I’m a bit behind on announcing my new position, but for those who don’t already know, I’ve accepted a lectureship in the Internet Studies department at Curtin University of Technology. The move was motivated by a couple of things, but one the main factors, to be honest, was job security; with an almost-four-month old at home, escaping from rolling one-year contracts suddenly seemed very important!  That said, Internet Studies has a lot to offer: I’m working with some fantastic colleagues, am teaching in areas closer to my own research interests than ever before, and this year Curtin is in the midst of reworking its curriculum for a new course structure in 2010 which means I’ll get lots of opportunities to redesign existing offerings and plan out a new stream around the notion of digital presence! I’m pleased that my broader interests in digital culture, as are often evident in this blog, will be at the fore of my teaching now rather than a just a fragment as has been the case in past years.

Leaving UWA has been an odd experience, almost like leaving home, in a way.  I started out there as a very unsure undergraduate in 1995 majoring in History; along the way my interest shifted to popular culture and media studies and, after a fairly abrupt track change, I ended up with my BA(Hons) in English, Communication and Cultural Studies.  Not content with five years tertiary study, I continued straight into a doctoral programme which eventually led to a PhD looking at what I termed Artificial Culture.  Along the way I tutored, guest lectured and had the privilege of writing and running several units in English and Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies and the newly independent Communication Studies.  In 2006, with PhD in hand, I accepted a position at UWA as a Higher Education developer in 2006 and 2007 and while I enjoyed teaching postgraduates and new academic staff about tertiary teaching, I was definitely happiest last year when I returned to Communication Studies and had the pleasure of teaching an outstanding cohort of undergraduates from first-years to honours students.  From the Student News Projects and Digital Media Projects in Comm2203, to the Remix Video Projects by the students in my iGeneration honours unit, I was consistently impressed by what tomorrow’s media creators were achieving as students today!  My colleagues in Communication Studies were all fantastic, too, and I’m looking forward to knowing them primarily as friends in the coming years.

This coming semester I’m looking forward getting to know my new colleagues in Internet Studies better, and to being impressed by my Curtin students.  It’ll be a different style of teaching, as Internet Studies offers on-campus, external and Open University versions of most units, so there will be a lot more online teaching which will hold new challenges, but no doubt new exciting opportunities, too.  In the coming months I’m teaching one unit on Virtual Communities and another called Network Culture and the Virtual Society, so I should be right at home there.  Learning a new university, new systems, new rules and new procedures will take a while, especially when the UWA systems really are like second nature to me by now, but it’s a new beginning for me and I’m looking forward to making the most of Internet Studies both in teaching terms and to kick-start a few of the more web-based research projects I’ve been planning.  More details on those as they start to reach a more robust form …

(Oh, and the reason blogging has slowed isn’t just due to the move to a new university; my home computer has been running slower and slower under Windows Vista for the past few months until it became unmanageable about a week ago … I’m now in the process of transferring to a new OS, but it’s a gradual process so I’m using an older laptop at home which, being generous, is good for email and word processing at most.  Blogging shall resume in full in the coming weeks!)