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Reflections on the Australian Blogging Conference and Blogging in Education

As readers of this blog will know, I spent Friday at the Australian Blogging Conference at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane. It was a fabulous, stimulating and intellectually rich conference and a great end to Tama’s-month-o-conferencing. I was the facilitator for the ‘Blogging and Education’ session so thought, in the spirit of the conference, I’d better get my notes up here:

Blogs and Education

The session ran for two hours, with a good balance between K-12 educators and those of us from the Higher Ed sector. After a brief (well, brief for me) introduction, the session was loosely structured around three main questions…

Why blog in education?

The Pros

* Allowing students to connect with community, family and an intellectual arena beyond the boundaries of the classroom.
* While most educational institutions have some sort of Learning Management System (such as Blackboard), the architecture of these systems tends to be inward-focusing, getting students thinking that everything they need is inside the walls of the black box. Blogging, by contrast, is outwardly-focused and keeps students focused on the broader (potential) public or audience they may be writing for. Thus, if we’re teaching life-long skills, blogs are often better platforms, due to their openness, than other closed systems.
* Blogs can meaningfully extend the educational experience, giving students a space to engage, write and communicate beyond the tutorial room. The uptake of this opportunity will often be uneven, but it’s often the less confident students who flourish in blogged communication.
* in certain contexts, blogs can become ‘student property’ once a particular unit of course is over, thus allowing students to continue to build and use their blogs (this clearly differs depending on the context and aim of an educational blog, and on the age of the participants).
* Blogging as an ethos is about sharing knowledge, building ties and acknowledging the input of others – all key characteristics of good pedagogy!

The Cons

* Having purchased the (usually quite expensive) Learning Management System, the majority of schools and universities invest most of the training, support and infrastructure costs to maintain the hardware and use of this system. Blogging is thus often done using peripheral tools which educators must teach themselves to use rather than getting central support.
* Many institutions desire to contain and control everything that students are producing, both in terms of protecting student privacy and in terms of protecting institutional intellectual property or even just keeping work away from outside scrutiny. While this can be overcome, it’s often IT and central policies which have to be convinced and converted to make the use of blogs (and other web 2.0 tools) feasible.
* At times education in Australia is still focused on the idea of a digital divide – where the aim is to get every student access to a computer – whereas the meaningful discussion needs, really, to shift to the idea of the participation gap – where the focus needs to be on ensuring all students are familiar with network and digital literacies, thus being able the meaningfully utilise social software and other tools, which is a lot more than just having occasional access to the internet.
* The mythos of the digital natives tends to scare many educators because it suggests that many younger people (dubbed digital natives as they’ve never know a world without the internet) will always have more familiarity than their teachers (who are dubbed digital immigrants since the web appeared at some point during their lifetime) and thus teachers are worried about not being knowledgeable in these areas.

Examples and reflections?

K-12 Examples

* Year one ‘Little Gems’ blog – Amanda Rablin demonstrated this outstanding blog by year one students (!) which not only broadened their classroom experience, but also showed a level of reflexivity well beyond the primary school level!
* PodKids Australia – From a year 4/5 class in a WA country town who have used podcasting (and their blog) to communicate with their parents and the wider world in a sensible, thoughtful and safe manner.

Higher Ed Examples

* Self.Net Tutorial (Monday 2pm) blog – An example of a blog used to expand the engagement of students in the tutorial process, and extend their potential interaction beyond the confines of the classroom.
* iGeneration Honours Unit blogs – A full university unit where the entire curriculum is online (collaboratively constructed by the unit coordinator and the students) as well as all of the students work – which include critical evaluations of blogs and podcasts as the major assessment item – and the week-by-week tutorials in the course.
* Communication Studies 1101 link blog – the least exciting of all the examples, but nevertheless useful, this blog is simply a series of links to useful material for students in a first-year Communication Studies course at UWA.

(All three Higher Ed examples use Creative Commons licenses to make legally explicit the intention that students’ content can be build-upon by others, on the condition of citation. I was particularly pleased to see both Elliott Bledscoe and Jessica Coates from Creative Commons Australia in this session!)

Missing from these examples was the best use of blogging as per blogging as a participatory cultural form which is a course-length blog maintained across the three to five years of a degree. One good example I’ve found now that the session is over is Sarah Demicoli’s Looking Up? blog; notably Sarah is a student in Adrian Miles’ Labsome Honours cohort.

Should academics blog?

This question ended up being divided into two parts: should K-12 teachers blog, and should academics (and doctoral students) blog? The first question proved far more complicated in that there is an expectation that teachers in the K-12 environment will share less of their personal lives with the world. The accountability that comes with being a teacher – especially from parental expectations – means it’s something of a challenge to share too much of a teacher’s life publicly, less it be seen and critiqued by parents or students. Likewise, the important line between teachers and students was one of those areas where teachers need to be especially careful when using social networks like Facebook or MySpace because ‘friending’ students might inadvertently be read as entering into a social dynamic with students which is generally something of a taboo. Some folks felt this was particularly complicated since some teachers using social networks might be less familiar with the social norms of the platforms and accidentally cross a line – or be perceived to cross a line – by accident. Sadly, excessive accountability seems to be one of the major reasons that teachers would be hesitant to blog – or at least only blog on a narrow band of topics. That said, there was still a sense that teachers would blog if they found the right reason or topic, but that the boundaries as to what other personal information would find its way online would be a very solid boundary indeed!

On the ‘should academics blog?’ front, things were decidedly more optimistic. There was a strong sense that academic blogs were a rich source of information, insight and commentary and that these were often far more accessible than other forms of academic writing. I asked a particularly loaded question – should academics feel obliged to blog since in publicly funded institutions the onus is to share our thoughts, research and ideas with the public, not just a our peers via peer viewed gatekeeping – and a few people were enthused by this idea, although there were a few comments about the need to have peer review before academic ideas escape into the world. The confusion surrounding danah boyd’s MySpace/Facebook class paper, and her subsequent reflections on the process, proved a useful example. That said, the biggest boundary to academic blogging seemed to be the amount of time it might take, but most people in the session thought it was time well spent!

I should add that these notes are re-constituted from rather poorly recorded keywords during the session, so further reflections, comments and notes on this session are most definitely welcome!

The Rest of the Conference

I don’t have terribly detailed notes from the other sessions I attended (which might be a blessing since caught the red-eye from Perth the night before the conference was thus a little less than coherent in the morning sessions), but thankfully being a blogged event, there are plenty of posts about the conference worth reading. Reflections well worth reading include those from Senator Andrew Bartlett, Australia’s most web-savvy politician. Derek Barry has posted three detailed reports on the Morning Panel discussion, The Politics of Blogging session and the panel on Citizen Journalism. Mark Bahnisch, one of the Politics of Blogging facilitators, has also posted on the ‘state of political blogging’ specifically for that session. Robyn Rebollo has notes from the conference which include reflections on the Legal Issues and Blogs session. Nick Hodge was one of the facilitators for the Business Blogging session and has posted both his notes and powerpoint slides. Likewise, Joanne Jacobs has some useful notes from The Future of Blogging closing session, and Kate Davis’ notes from the parallel ‘Building a Better Blog’ session are useful, too. Conference notes and reports keep emerging, so watch the blogoz tag on Technorati for more.

I should say, as well, that I was fortunate enough to catch up with a whole bunch of folk I’ve known through blogging, social networks, shared research interests and so on, but never actually met in the flesh before. It was great chatting with Brian Fitzgerald, Jessica Coates and Rachel Cobcroft, as well as Elliot Bledscoe who I met a few weeks earlier, all of whom are part of the Creative Commons Australia team, which Brian leads. Given their enthusiasm and energy, I’m sure CC Australia has a lot going on in the future, and with any luck I’ll be involved with some of the CC and Education things as they emerge. I also chatted to Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns, all of whom are blogosphere friends who its nice to see annually (or thereabouts) at conferences. Quite unexpectedly, I ran into Sarah Xu who I’ve met through local fannish events, but I hadn’t realised she’d landed in sunny BrisVegas to write her doctorate, which is creatively exploring the important question: “how can cyberfeminist practice and Web 2.0 applications be used to recode gendered representations of women on the Internet?” Sounds like a thesis worth watching!

Finally, a huge congratulations to Peter Black who put the conference together and assembled a fascinating group of people to participate in some really meaningful exchanges! Time to start planning for next year …

Update: Peta Hopkins also has some notes from the Blogging in Education session, including a several things I’d forgotten we’d talked about (including ebublogs.org).

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Australian Blogging Conference: Tomorrow!

The Australian Blogging Conference is tomorrow (Friday) in Brisbane.  I’m flying out tonight and will be in the thick of it all tomorrow.  I’ll definitely be at the Blogging in Education session, as I’ll be the facilitator for that session, and I’m looking forward to all the other blogging conversations, both scheduled and otherwise.  If you can get there, check out the schedule for details

Okay, off to the airport …

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perthDAC – The 2007 DAC – Wrap-up Post

perthDAC 2007 - The Future of Digital Media

The DAC (Digital Arts and Culture) conference was in Perth last week and I was lucky enough to be able to attend perthDAC in all its glory. It was the first time DAC has been held in Perth, and only the second time it’s been in Australia; and at the outset, a huge congratulations must go to conference organiser Andrew Hutchinson who ran a very well-oiled event and brought some an amazing intellectual and social extravaganza to our little city. There were so many engaging and exciting ideas and papers floating around that I’ll never do justice to them in one post, but I thought I’d mention a few things and papers that really stood out for me. That said, if you’re after a robust blogging of perthDAC, check out Axel Bruns’ posts which capture the vast majority of the conference. (I’m starting to think Axel should be up for some sort of prize; he’s without a doubt the world’s most thorough conference blogger, conscientiously acting as a collective scribe whose records prove extremely valuable for giving overviews of conferences and keeping in focus some of those details which when not recorded in the instant tend to get lost in the ebb and flow of conferencedom.)

[X] Christy Dena, “The Future of Digital Media is all in Your Head: An Argument for the Age of Integration” – While perhaps less an argument than a snapshot of the present and the trends being laid bare for the future of media, Christy’s paper illustrated the incredibly rich media world we’re all currently living in. More to the point, in looking at Cross-Media, Transmedia and many other points where media is literally crossing medium boundaries (as the plurality of the term has always implied), Christy ended with the salient point that, in assessing the future of digital media, one core point is that it certainly won’t be just digital! Indeed, the future of all media really stands at points of intersection and potential integration of all media in various complex ways. (This point, incidentally, was powerfully reinforced by Stewart Woods whose paper – “Last Man Standing: Elimination and Risk in Social Game Play” – argued that games studies really still needs to keep looking at the social complexities of physical and board-game play which really haven’t been fully explored in the algorithmically bound play of digital videogames.)

[X] Mark McGuire, “Virtual Communities and Podcasting: the emergence and transformation of public electronic space” – Mark used the work of Jurgen Habermas on the public sphere and combined it with a solid overview of internet communities (like the WELL) and community-practices (such as those encouraged and facilitated by Amazon.com) to interrogate the relatively new history of podcasting. The shift from the utopian ideals of Dave Winer (and to a lesser extend Adam Curry) to the commercialisation of podcasting – in terms of accessibility and distribution, if not creation – is seen as another instance where community-led ideals and interaction are undermined by a lack of public ownership and public institutions (exemplified by Apple’s commercial iTunes Store becoming the default podcasting directory, and thus major podcasting portal).

[X] Axel Bruns, “The Future is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage” – Axel has been sharing his work on ‘produsers’ (producer/users) for some time now, but each time I hear or read his work, I’m impressed by how carefully situated it is. While produsers are clearly part of the same realm as participatory culture and citizen journalism, Axel takes great care in showing that a change in the modes of production and consumption in the era of networked communication and distribution (the core of the produser) has great social and democratic potential, but is sure to acknowledge that produsage still needs political drivers in order to avoid being co-opted (Amazon.com is a great example of produsage, but the social networks and user-generated content on their website is clearly working in financial terms primarily for Amazon). One slide Axel showed which I thought summarised his take well was a fairly complex dynamic which showed culture in the double sense of both our world and of a scientific Petri Dish in which something is refined and grown before it becomes fully realised and useful for the real world:

Produsage

You can read Axel’s full paper and get the full set of PowerPoint slides over at his blog; I can’t wait for the book! (On another note, I didn’t manage to convince Axel of Twitter’s value – not for lack of trying – but we did chat about the Mashedlc project which I’m very interested in and think it could be of very real value for educators using web2.0 tools in their teaching.)

[X] Jill Walker Rettberg, “Blogs, Literacies and the Collapse of Public and Private” – In a nutshell, Jill argued that while traditional (print) literacies was part of the reification of a divide between public and private, newer digital (network) literacies are leading to the blurring, or even collapse, of that neat binary division. Of course, many cultural commentators and others have vested interests in the public/private divide, and the blogging ethos or every reader potentially being a writer has produced something of a backlash (albeit as much due to skepticism of the shift rather than a deeper engagement with it). Jill and Axel’s papers had a lovely symmetry, both arguing for new ways of conceptualising fair traditional things on the back of the shifts toward a more meaningful participatory culture. Jill’s paper is also part of an upcoming work, her Blogging book due from Polity Press next year. I think that, too, is well worth watching for.

While I shan’t go into any depth, DAC also had quite a few papers on games (both digital and otherwise) which I really enjoyed and, for a game studies novice like myself, game a very accessible overview to current trends. The two stand-out papers for me were Torill Mortensen’s, which looked to synthesize the current multiple directions of games research into a menaingful single framework, and a paper by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost (delivered by Fox Harrell) which looked at the idea of Platform Studies which explores the way actual game platforms influenced the design, agenda and possibility for game play and game design. Another exciting area were papers from Lisbeth Klastrup and Larrisa Hjorth (the later of which was presented by Christy Dena) both looked in depth at mobile phone culture in relation to community-building and story-telling respectively (although obviously with large points of intersection).

Outside of the formal academic papers, two things about DAC really stood out: it’s as much a community as a conference, and it’s heavily invested in maintain connections with art and pratice beyond the formally academic. Case in point: this year’s DAC was perfectly integrated with the larger BEAP and as part of DAC we visited I took a deep breath…, Impermanence (PDF), Still, Living (PDF) and other exhibitions, complete with artist and curator talks. This, mixed with DAC’s informal performance night, meant that broader discussions art, digital media and interaction, were focused through shared experiences and provocative installations. On the social side, DAC folk combine intellectually exciting and socially engaging in impressive proportions! In that spirit, I took a few photos which are in a perthDAC Flickr set and Lisbeth Klastrup has posted a DAC 2007 photo set, too. Of course, the thing that everyone really wants to know is who’s the best DAC dancer, and, somewhat surprisingly, thanks for Scott Rettberg (part of the GTA team), we now know:

Fox Harrell is an excellent dancer, and Mary Flanagan does some amazing hyperkinetic lawnmower-and-grocery-shopping-moves. Lisbeth Klastrup was clearly the most agile of the Scandinavians, though Jaakko was nearly as fluid and he won the prize for the coolest T-Shirt — the “conference moderator” shirt with the built-in-clock. I was shuffling at about an equivalent level to Raine Koskimaa, average Finnish dancer.

Follow Scott’s post back for a cameraphone video capturing the DAC dance action (and, no, I’m not there on the dance floor you’ll be relived to hear).

Finally, here’s a picture of Mary Flanagan from Lisbeth’s set, reminding us all to be there for DAC 2009 …

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State of the Art: Science Fiction Histories (Perth, Western Australia, 22 & 23 March 2008)

Swancon 2008 - State of the Art_1190359291886 CALL FOR PAPERS – STATE OF THE ART: SCIENCE FICTION HISTORIES
Perth, Western Australia, 22nd-23rd March 2008

In his recent history of the genre, Roger Luckhurst argues that the marginalisation of Science Fiction (SF) from the literary establishment helped readers and writers to identify its conventions. Fandom blossomed from this liminal space, its culture providing a unique history of the relations between texts and their readers. While fans were the first historians of SF, other communities have since established their own versions of the genre. The rise of national SF in countries such as Brazil and the old Soviet Union, China and Japan de-centre its Anglo-American bias. Feminist and queer writers work to unravel its phallocentrism and heterosexism. Histories of black and Aboriginalist fiction point out the political uses of the form. The genre has itself been shaped by its reception by these communities. In Anglo-American SF, the genre’s intimacy with fandom has transformed the way its fiction (and history) has been written. It is with a view to thinking through such developments that this symposium seeks work on what SF has been to different audiences at different times, on rewriting generic history to arrive at a better understanding of the state of the art today.

Papers are invited on the following or related topics:

[X] Histories of the SF community
[X] Intersections and interactions between fan and popular cultures, and between fandom and the general public.
[X] Political histories in SF, such as Marxist, anarcho-capitalist, etc
[X] Intersection of SF with feminist & queer theories
[X] Postcolonial approaches to SF
[X] National histories of SF
[X] Non-Anglo-American traditions of SF
[X] History of race in SF
[X] The collapse of genre: slipstream, new weird, etc

Sponsored by Curtin University of Technology, the symposium will be held as part of State of the Art: Swancon 2008, the National Australian convention of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

SPEAKERS
Swancon 33 guests of honour are:

[X] Ken McLeod (Scotland)
[X] Paul Cornell (UK)
[X] Glenda Larke
[X] Zara Baxter

Confirmed Speakers for the Symposium are:

[X] Mark Bould (The University of the West of England)
[X] Andrew Milner (Monash University)
[X] Sylvia Kelso (James Cook University)
[X] Stephen Dedman (University of W.A.)

SUBMISSIONS
Submissions are sought for both individual papers and panel presentations.
Papers –submit 300-500 word abstract
Panels – submit 300 word description of the panel theme and short abstracts / details of panel participants

PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
Selected papers from the symposium will be published in a special journal issue. To be considered for publication, draft papers must be submitted before the symposium.

DEADLINES
Abstracts due: December 7. 2007
Draft papers (for publication) due: March 14, 2008

CONTACTS
Sonia Marcon, Swancon Academic Stream
Darren Jorgensen, Media, Society & Culture, Curtin University of Technology
Helen Merrick, Media, Society & Culture, Curtin University of Technology

Email: sciencefictionhistories@gmail.com
Website: http://www.swancon.com/

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Learning Futures: Day Two Insights

Insight #3: If ePortfolios and other forms of electronic presence are going to be (or are) a core part of the way graduates ‘sell’ themselves to employers, then identity management needs to be taught at all levels of education.  Identity management includes those aspects of identity which we intend employers to see, and those we don’t want seen.  If a basic search online for someone’s full name reveals drunken party pictures on Flickr or YouTube clips of bullying antics in their youth, then that is just as likely to be viewed by employers as the intended ePortfolios or other material.  Identity management clearly is something of a challenge, especially as many educators aren’t fully aware of how much students can put online (or how to temper that), but the Internet never forgets and we need students to be able to understand that for all sorts of reasons, and future employability is clearly one of them.

Insight #4:The unconference model only works when all the participants have a strong sense of what they are intending to pull apart or critique in advance.  If half of a conference is populated by people trying to get a basic understanding of something – in this case Web 2.0 – then the unconference model of primarily relying on informed participants leading all the conference sessions themselves, directed by their conversations and thinking, to the exclusion of traditional papers or presentations, is doomed to disappoint a lot of people attending that form of conference.  (This, incidentally, is not a personal gripe, but a clearly articulated sense from a number of my fellow conference delegates).

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Learning Futures: Day One Insights

I’m at the Learning Futures Symposium today and tomorrow.  I’m not blogging summaries of sessions because, to be fair, that’s often quite dull.  However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to take the conference discussions to springboard some observations or thoughts that occurred during these interactions…

Insight #1: There is a reasonable amount of critical distance in terms of the ‘digital natives/digital immigrants’ rhetoric, but the same critical perspective doesn’t stretch to critiquing the idea of ‘web 2.0’.  Whereas ideas which supposedly encompass an entire generation are easy enough to pull apart, many educators seem wary of software and claims made about software as they acutely feel that this is one of the few areas in which students know more about this area than they do.  I suspect that if the same educators were dipping their toes in a little more they’d realise something commonsensical which seems to have entirely escaped these kind of conversations: that while there are many types of web 2.0 software, there are generic skills to be found in using these tools and platforms.  The reason that people can move from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook so easily, for example, is that at a basic level there is a lot of similarity between the way these platforms operate and the skills needed to use them.  Sure, the rate of new names of software can be overwhelming, but if we remember that a large section of the skills learnt using one social software platform are viable for the next, super-duper, upcoming must-have web 2.0 tool are transferable, that makes taking the time to learn and teach them a whole lot more important and palatable.  And social software platforms are just one example; skills in blogging, using wikis and many other forms of ‘web 2.0’ tools are similarly transferable and, at some level, generic.  Perhaps we should be focusing more on what those skills are.

Insight #2: Often the people in the driving position for educational policy aren’t confident to make decisions about ICT – nor should they be!

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