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e-Lection.au

No Australian can have missed the news that we’ll be voting in a Federal Election on November 24. The advertising onslaught has begun and, unlike past campaigns, this one’s taking online campaigning seriously, with the current Liberal government apparently spending upward of $5 million on their web-based advertising. In the lead up to the official election campaign we’ve seen Labor make considerable inroads with both MySpace and Facebook. Indeed, Team Rudd have been so clever with Facebook that Kevin not only has his maximum-allowed 5000 friends, but there is also an “I want to be Kevin Rudd’s Facebook Friend, Too!” Facebook group which has over 10,000 members and uses Facebook’s structural limitation as a popularity mechanism! Given their knowledge of web campaigning, it’s hardly a surprise that the Kevin07 web campaign is so clearly modeled on the high-profile runners for the 2008 US elections.

Things have really kicked into overdrive for both main political parties – and the others – with Google’s 2007 Australian Federal Election page which has lots of usefully aggregated material as well as a dedicated YouTube channel for each of the political parties. While the potential social affordances of these tools aren’t necessarily being explored that well by the major parties, at least the web is being taken seriously as a battleground for the minds and hearts of the Australian public. In that direction, it’s great to see Australia’s national broadcaster – the ABC – getting in on the act with their Poll Vault, which collates reporting from their various sources.

Also important for this election – and really, this is the first Australian election in which it’s been a major player – is the influx of citizen journalism and participatory cultural portals centred on the election. For example the ambitious YouDecide07 attempts to bring citizen journalists across the country together tightly focusing on the election seat-by-seat. This project is run through QUT‘s Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation with Jason Wilson doing a lot of the hard yards in running the website itself, with the help of media-savvy folk like Barry Saunders. Also of note is the Election 07 Norg from the people who bring you PerthNorg. This user-voted website with at least partially user-generated content (and mainstream media reports ranked via a Digg-style voting system) is just getting started but looks quite promising. It’ll probably retain a WA flavour given it’s run here, but there’s nothing stopping sharing between this Norg and the many other mainstream and user-generated election 07 sources. Similarly the team at New Matilda have launched a focused groupblog called Polliegraph while the always political Lavartus Prodeo have kicked into election overdrive.

Of course, there are still many individual bloggers offering insightful – or sometimes just vicious – commentary but you’ve probably got your own favourites so I shan’t run through the major individual bloggers. I will, however, end by mention two newer folks well worth reading: Peter Black from Law at QUT is blogging at his dedicated sub-site Australian Politics 2.0 while Elliott Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia and Vibewire (who have their own youth-orientated political bloggers) , among other things, has upped his what it feels like for a boi into full election mode. And if you’re already over the campaign promises and just want the election-related comedy clips, Elliot’s also focused on building an Election on YouTube stream. In that spirit, as elections always bring out the most amusing video clips, I’ll finish with a satire from the self-anointed Axis of Awesome, called their Rudd Vs Howard rap

Blogging Burma


[Photo by Marxpix]

Like the Asian Tsunami (December 29, 2004),the The London Bombings (July 2005) and Hurricane Katrina’s Aftermath (September 2005), information about the current demonstrations and atrocities happening in Burma are flowing through user-generated channels as much (indeed, often more so than) through the traditional mainstream media. There is a great deal of activity both in blogs and throughout the broader sphere of citizen media, but some noteworthy places to look are:-

[X] The 2007 Burmese anti-government protests Wikipedia entry – Wikipedia is at its most useful during moments of crisis which have many sets of eyes watching. The collective intelligence of Wikipedia contributors continues to develop one of the best resources on the Burma protests.

[X] YouTube has a number of clips like this one which simply show the enormous scope of the protests [Via]. A very good source is the videostream from news6776 which collates a great deal of footage (both mainstream media-produced and from citizen journalists)

[X] The Support the Monks’ protest in Burma Facebook Group – To be honest, I’ve never really thought Facebook would provide a terribly useful platform for political activism as the ‘groups’ often seem a peripheral part of Facebook’s design. However, I happily stand corrected as the exponential growth of the Support the Monks’ protest in Burma Facebook Group has been amazing – over 170,000 members when I checked this morning – and the links, advice and descriptions of how members can actively support the Burmese demonstrations in that group seems quite robust to me, not just a tokenistic gesture. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say this Facebook group has probably done more to promote the ‘ Day of International Action for a Free Burma – Free Aung San Suu Kyi & Support the Monks in Burma’ on October 6th than any other single outlet online or offline.

[X] The SmartMobs blog notes that cameraphones and other mobile devices are one of the main tools allowing information and media to get out of Burma, but the government has moved from shutting down Internet Cafes to blocking the entire internet in order to try and stop knowledge about the situation in Burma being available internationally. Taking the massive step of blocking the entire internet speaks volumes to how widely the impact of citizen reportage is from inside Burma is disseminating to international viewers and readers.

[X] For a traditional media rundown of the impact of citizen media, see ‘Bloggers in Burma keep world informed during military crackdown’ in the San Francisco Chronicle and Dan Gillmor’s response at the Centre for Citizen Media where he points out, quite rightly, that there’s a lot more than just blogging going on!

[X] Finally, you should visit Free Burma (dot Org) which is a portal for international information on how to support the protestors and get involved in their struggle.


[Photo by Hugo*’s from protestors supporting the Burmese democratic protests, in front of the Myanmar embassy in Paris, with a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi.]

Australian Blogging Conference: 28 September 2007

BlogOz180

The big news of the day is that The Australian Blogging Conference, a fabulous-looking free one-day event exploring everything about blogging in Australia (including education and Creative Commons!) now has a date: Friday, 28 September 2007 in sunny Brisbane! All of the details are here. I’d write more, but I’m now running around to see if I can get myself from Perth to Brisbane for the day of the conference!

 Update: I’ve successfully organised flights and my benevolent university has agreed to part with me for the day (yes, the day, so I’ll be on red-eye flight at midnight Thursday flight!) so Aussie BloggerCon here I come! 🙂

Academic Ethics, Privacy and Transparency … all coming soon to YouTube!

Australia’s QUT has been in the grip of a very public controversy recently which dovetails between issues of freedom of speech, academic ethics and the transparency of university processes.  The controversy came to light and media attention on 11 April this year when two QUT academics, John Hookham and Gary MacLennan, published an article in The Australian entitled ‘Philistines of relativism at the gates’.  In it, Hookham and MacLennan very publicly took issue with the ethics of work being done by PhD candidate, Michael Noonan:

A time comes when you have to say: “Enough!”, when you can no longer put up with the misanthropic and amoral trash produced under the rubric of postmodernist, post-structuralist thought. The last straw, the defining moment, came for us when we attended a recent PhD confirmation at the Queensland University of Technology, where we teach. Candidate Michael Noonan’s thesis title was Laughing at the Disabled: Creating comedy that Confronts, Offends and Entertains. The thesis abstract explained that “Laughing at the Disabled is an exploration of authorship and exploitation in disability comedy, the culmination of which will be the creation and production (for sale) of a six-part comedy series featuring two intellectually disabled personalities. “The show, entitled (Craig and William): Downunder Mystery Tour, will be aimed squarely at the mainstream masses; its aim to confront, offend and entertain.” (Editor’s note: the subjects’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.) Noonan went on to affirm that his thesis was guided by post-structuralist theory, which in our view entails moral relativism. He then showed video clips in which he had set up scenarios placing the intellectually disabled subjects in situations they did not devise and in which they could appear only as inept. Thus, the disabled Craig and William were sent to a pub out west to ask the locals about the mystery of the min-min lights. […]

At the seminar we were told there was a thin line between laughing at and laughing with. There is no such thin line. There is an absolute difference that anyone who has been laughed at knows. We must admit with great reluctance that at the seminar we were alone in our criticism of the project. For us, it was a moment of great shame and a burning testimony to the power of post-structuralist thought to corrupt. It is not our intention here to demolish the work of Noonan, an aspiring young academic and filmmaker. After all, ultimate responsibility for this research rests with the candidate’s supervisory team, which included associate professor Alan McKee, the faculty ethics committee, which apparently gave his project total approval, and the expert panel, which confirmed his candidacy. […]

What we have instead is the reality that cultural studies is in the grip of a powerful movement that we call the radical philistine push. It is this same movement that has seen the collapse of English studies and the consequent production of graduates who have only the scantiest acquaintance with our literary heritage. It is also undermining the moral fabric of the university.

So, what starts with ethical questions about a particular thesis, quickly becomes a much more generic complaint about the corruption of education by poststructuralist and postmodern theory and approaches.  I know nothing of the people writing or mentioned in this article, but have to say after reading the piece I wasn’t swayed; my sympathies were more with Michael Noonan than anyone else, because as a PhD candidate I know I would have been almost destroyed by such public denouncing of my work.  This, I should add, is not a comment on the quality on the work being or proposed – I know nothing beyond the article above and the surrounding debate, and haven’t seen any of the footage mentioned – but rather a comment on the process and the reasonable expectation that any criticism of a candidate’s work be handled within the university as long as possible.  I’m not saying there is never a case for ‘going public’ with dismay about certain research, but from what I’ve read I believe Hookham and MacLennan took that step far too early.  More to the point, combining criticism of a specific project with a very generic attack on a particular body of theory and its influence on teaching seems a less than generous way of dealing with the work of a PhD candidate.

The issues raised here also beg serious questions about transparency and universities.  There is a lot of talk about the need to transparency of research outcomes since (most) Australian universities are at least partially publicly-funded.  I quite agree with that notion.  However, I think the idea of the processes of a university being taken public under the rubric of transparency tend to skew what makes it into the public arena.  Selectively releasing aspects of a process (such as an ethics review process and confirmation of candidature) around research which clearly relies on careful contextualisation is bound to produce a one-sided picture.  Tellingly, when Hookham and MacLennan’s article was republished in Online Opinion, the were comments from a student – using the handle WWSBD – who’d had Noonan (the candidate) as a lecturer, praising his efforts to educate student about people with disability.  Moreover, this is the only place I’ve seen Noonan himself comment publicly:

I am at the student at the centre of Hookham and MacLennan’s attacks.
I thank WWSBD for understanding and appreciating my work in its context. I appreciate the words of Anecdote, who understands that a work must be seen and placed in context before it should be attacked. And I am disappointed for bedwin, who has lost all respect for me on the basis of an uninformed and incorrect article.
Much has been assumed about my project, my integrity and my intentions. Very little of it is based on truth. The simple facts are these: the excerpts I showed at my PhD confirmation seminar were presented in the context of exploring and discussing issues of authorship and representation in disability. My project seeks to empower the disabled, to give them a voice through comedy. Each clip was prefaced with my own thoughts about whether or not this had been achieved.
As a sessional staff member at QUT, I can think of nothing more deplorable than attacking a student’s incomplete research in a public forum. Hookham and MacLennan have made no effort to read my PhD confirmation document (it was offered) and they rejected my attempts to meet and discuss their concerns.
To date I have not sought to respond to their attacks in print. But I refuse to be further bullied and vilified before the public, my peers and my students.

However, the story doesn’t end there.  Earlier this month The Australian report that Hookham and MacLennan are now facing a disciplinary hearing at QUT for their public comments, with the university arguing that the two unfairly attacked the candidate and his supervisory team.  Now, whatever their views, Hookham and MacLennan seem to have a reputation as inspirational teachers themselves, and the news of their censure galvanized some of the QUT student body to defend their actions on the basis of free speech.  The student campaign is visible through it’s “Save Our Lecturers” MySpace page.  Moreover, over at Martin Hirst’s blog, he has posted ‘Freedom of Speech disabled at QUT’ which points to this documentary which is now available at YouTube:

(Hirst is a friend of Hookham and MacLennan’s, and his post also contains the full text from Hookham and MacLennan’s original article in The Australian, as well as some additional commentary from The Australian and subsequent letters to editor.)

The YouTube documentary clip, by QUT student Adrian Strong, is very compelling; Hookham and MacLennan both come across as intelligent, compassionate teachers and academics who have good cause for concern.  My point here is not to judge the debate being documented in this clip – although I imagine it would be extremely compelling for many people.  Rather, in the era of participatory culture and digital media, this clip is indicative of a very profound change which can see debates and arguments that once would have remained closed suddenly being open to public viewing and public debate.  In such an era, digital literacy is extremely important – the ability to create, edit and share such a clip is a key part of the ability to make a case in the public eye.  It’s no surprise that QUT, which has Australia’s most renowned Creative Industries faculty, should be the source of the first such debate in Australia (to my knowledge, at least).

Illustrating my point, I just noticed another posted by the same YouTube user who posted the clip above (and thus, I presume, also be Adrian Strong) which talks in even stronger terms about a perceived campaign of censorship at QUT:

(Again, let me reinforce, I don’t know enough about the other things going on to really judge this debate, but I do know that the perception of censorship certainly doesn’t add to the reputation of any university.  However, like the first clip, without any further rebuttal, this clip is likely to be very persuasive to viewers.)

Update: In ‘Dissenting dons out in the cold’, Andrew Fraser reports in The Australian that the saga ended with Hookham and MacLennan both being suspended without pay for 6 months from QUT.

The Virginia Tech Shootings and Unintentional Citizen Journalism

I woke this morning to the news that 33 people were dead at Virginia Tech university in the US due to a gunman’s “shooting rampage” . Apart from the tragedy itself one line which struck me as odd in initial report I was reading from the BBC (and I struck, literally, hundreds more when I started working through the posts in the eight hours since I last looked at the aggregated news in Google Reader) was this:

Eyewitnesses said some students jumped from classroom windows to escape the gunfire, which triggered panic on campus.

Some of those locked down inside the university buildings were using the internet to try to glean information about what was happening and many e-mailed the BBC News website. [Emphasis added.]

Why would Virginia Tech students turn to the BBC for information on a real-time event happening around them in the United States? While the BBC was certainly a focal point in the aftermath of the 2005 London Bombings, this line struck me as just odd (and uncharacteristically self-important for the usually quite staid BBC). Looking a little further around the BBC website, I found this story from Virginia Tech student Nikolas Macko which describes the experience of staying inside one of the classrooms while gunshots could be heard nearby. The BBC was certainly quick off the mark with this story, so I guess if students didn’t find anything on the BBC, perhaps they sent their stories in by email or the other means the BBC has set up to highlight reports from everyday folk.

Reading further, Dan Gillmor of Citizen Media points out that most of the news stories on US television feature a cameraphone video taken by a VT student in which gunshots can be clearly heard, but not seen (the video is, of course, now available on YouTube, found via NewTeeVee).

A number of mainstream media outlets have also turned to blogs to find eyewitness and VT student testimonials. One blogger, ntcoolfool aka Bryce Carter, had mainstream media producers requesting help finding cameraphone videos after he posted a videoclip of police cars heading to the scene of the massacre. There was also a request from someone at the Boston Herald for Carter’s thoughts on social software, given that the paper was “wondering if online communication is the best way to stay in touch during a crisis“.

One of the things that stood out to me when reading some of the blog posts from Virginia Tech students, including Carter’s, was how people reacted when their blogged personal thoughts suddenly became mainstream media soundbites. For example, Carter later posted this:

As this blog has received international attention, I find myself wondering what the world has come to. The media watch dogs, no offense, have jumped on this story and on me for, as one anonymous user said, ‘exploit my emotions’. At this time I do not believe this is so, because to put it simply: I’m willing to share my experience. This is nothing special. I don’t deserve any credit. I went to class as any other student would. I just happened to be on the other side of campus when the shots were fired later in the day. But isn’t that just it? What is remarkable about this story is that this is the story of an average student at this great school. Stories of horror, bloodshed, and death are soon to come from the victims of this horrible catastrophe and the limelight will shine onwards, for that is what the public thirsts for.

For those that are interested, I will write a more complete narrative of my experiences of today later, once the media frenzy has died down and I have a minute to better reflect. As of the time I am writing this I have done a radio interview with BBC and talked with a reporter from the LA Times. CBC Newsworld, the Boston Herald, Current TV, and MTV have asked for interviews and further information. As I said I intend to share my experiences with everyone, but I want to reinstate that I am just an average student and I don’t want to be made into something I am not.

Furthermore, upon looking at a few of the posts made on this blog, I want to declare that I am OFFENDED that people are allowing this to become a political debate. People are dead. My friends could be dead. Forget bickering about trivia. Now is not the time or the place. It is the media’s job to report to the public these stories. Take it as you wish. I’m not the media. I’m just me.

A few minutes ago I walked in the hallway of the dorm frustrated with the constant contacts of media coming in every minute. In my arrogance and limited perspective I walked into a friends room while in discussion and yelled out “I hate livejournal!”, which, concerning the current emotions of campus, was not the best thing to do. Understandably, they kicked me out. [Link Via Washington Post Blog Roundup]

Carter, I have to say, seems to be handling his edge of the media spotlight rather well. His comments really emphasise that despite the ideals of citizen journalism, many forms of social software tend to allow ordinary folks to become more like eyewitnesses who are harassed into sharing their perspectives with the mainstream press, far more so than being intentional ‘reporters’ in their own right. That said, Carter’s commentary on the process itself will, I guess, have much more prominence in the aftermath of these tragic shootings. I suspect I might end up talking about Carter’s livejournal experience in a lecture in the near future, when trying to get students to ponder the difference between the initial and intended use of social software and online presence, versus what these textual (another other) online artifacts might, at some point, be used for.

Xeni Jardin’s post about the shootings at Boing Boing has lots of relevant links to citizen-produced commentary (much intentionally so), links and blogs and is a solid starting point if you’re looking to see how reportage about the VT Shootings — both mainstream and otherwise — has grown across the world wide web.

Finally, though, I wanted to share a screenshot posted to the Flickr Virginia Tech Shooting pool. This image is far from graphic, but really hit home because it’s the sort of notice which looks so banal, but says so much. The screenshot is from the Virginia Tech website and reads “Campus Advisory: Gunman on Campus; Classes Canceled“:

This left me wondering, if such a tragic event happened at my university, how would we react? I guess, at some level, that’s the thought that runs through most people’s minds and what makes these shootings feel so visceral to so many people – sympathy, of course, but empathy, too.

Tim O’Reilly’s Blogging Code of Conduct Makes Me Nervous

As everyone from the New York Times onward has noted, in the wake of the threats against Kathy Sierra Tim O’Reilly proposed a Blogging Code of Conduct and has now written the first (draft) version of this code. While I’m heartened that so much well-intentioned conversation has surged through the blogosphere, I fear that a trying to write rules of all blogs and bloggers is a fairly silly and self-defeating thing to do. One of the models being mentioned all over the place is the BlogHer Community Guidelines; I think that these are great guidelines for a particular online community and suggest that, really, it’s not just the model but the width of applicability that matters; communities should always be able to assert their own guidelines, but the blogosphere, despite the collective noun, is at best an awful lot of communities and individuals, often with vastly different aims and intentions.

In educational contexts, for example, the process of discussing guidelines in classes from K-12 through to university is a useful one both for the issues raised, and the shared guidelines which emerge. Similarly, most communities or vague collectives have rules of some sort, but these rules differ. Some bloggers have a notice about conduct on their blog (by commenters); I think this level of transparency is great. (It’s also something I’ve always meant to do for this blog, but I fear I might not get around to until I actually have to deal with deleting someone’s comments and I’ve not had to do that to anyone other than Mr Spam as yet.)

I think Jeff Jarvis sums up a lot of the angst I’m feeling at reading about O’Reilly’s Code:

So O’Reilly only set us up to be called nasty, unmannered, and thus uncivilized hooligans. Except for Tim, of course. He’s the nice one. Me, I feel like the goth kid with premature tattoos skulking down the hall.

But the problems are far more fundamental and dangerous than that. And just gratingly twinkie, too.

This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone — they’ll do us the favor — can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But as Doc Searls has taught me, it’s not. It’s a place. And when I moved into the place that is my town, I didn’t put up a badge on my fence saying that I’d be a good neighbor (and thus anyone without that badge is, de facto, a bad neighbor). I didn’t have to pledge to act civilized. I just do. And if I don’t, you can judge me accordingly. Are there rules and laws? Yes, the same ones that exist in worlds physical or virtual: If I libel or defame you on the streetcorner or in a paper or on a screen, the recourse is the same. But I don’t put up another badge on my fence saying I won’t libel you. I just don’t. That’s how the world works. Why should this new world work any differently? Why should it operate with more controls and more controllers?

Also, Tristan Louis has a thoughtful “Blogger’s Code of Conduct: a Dissection” which makes a very strong case against O’Reilly’s Code, pointing out many of the semantic, interpretive and legal difficulties such a code throws up for bloggers (and commenters) everywhere (Via SmartMobs).

It’s no shock that Dave Winer has blasted O’Reilly’s Code, but it is telling to have Robert Scoble stating he wouldn’t be able to follow the proposed Code despite the fact that his wife was also one of the people targeted by the same pillocks who threatened Sierra.

I’m all for thinking about how communities work (online and, indeed, offline) and for individuals and individual communities to be able to – within reason – set rules for their own digital turf. I just think the turf of the blogosphere en masse is so different and so wide that no single set of rules will let the grass grow properly or productively everywhere.

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