Just shy of five years after beginning (and, admittedly, over a year of full-time work in the middle), I have finally submitted my doctoral thesis for examination. When you hand in at UWA, you get a mug …
Ourmedia.org, “the global home for grassroots media”, have kicked off 2006 with a strong focus on developing and building their Learning Centre, which is described as:
Welcome to the Digital Media Learning Center. In the coming months we’ll be building out a rich, up-to-date educational resource for everything you wanted to know about grassroots media. See below for some preliminary topics. Please volunteer to help the project become richer. Experts, educators, amateurs and others have agreed to contribute to this democratic knowledge database. All contributions will be shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, and we hope that other sites will republish bits and pieces of this project. We encourage video and audio submissions as well as text. Here is an initial list of topics we’ll be tackling. Let us know if you’d like to contribute to an entry, or if you’d like to become a topic editor.
This is a really exciting development and potentially a wonderful hub for grassroots media and digital learning to come together. The Learning Centre is currently being planned, discussed and built in the Learning Centre Wiki and I’m in the process of getting involved in building this new resource. If you’re interested, why not visit the wiki and get involved? 
[Reposted from my personal blog Ponderance and here only for it's value as a participatory cultural phenomenon worth documenting for educational purposes. (I'd never use this blog to suggest any activity that's of even dubious legality. Never. Really.)]
Tracklist
1. American Jesus (8:40)
2. Dr. Who On Holiday (4:57)
3. Boulevard Of Broken Songs (4:42)
4. The Bad Homecoming (Waiting) (3:265)
5. St. Jimmy The Prankster (2:22)
6. Novocaine Rhapsody (4:18)
7. Impossible Rebel (2:05)
8. Ashanti’s Letterbomb (4:32)
9. Green Day Massacre (3:43)
10. Whatsername (Susanna Hoffs) (3:28)
11. Boulevard Of Broken Songs (Dance Mix 2005) (6:17)
Released: Friday, November 18, 2005
Banned: Monday, November 28, 2005
“Gray” Tuesday: December 13, 2005
Sound familiar? It should. And it still matters. More here.
Fight the insanity of corporate media owners who don’t recognise the future when it asks them to dance.
[Tags: deangray | deangraytuesday | mashup | politics | citizenmedia | participatoryculture | darknet | december13 | thefuture | greytuesday]
The Call for Papers for AoIR 7.0 …
IR 7.0: INTERNET CONVERGENCES
International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers
Brisbane, Australia 28-30 September 2006
Pre-Conference Workshops: 27 September 2006INTERNET CONVERGENCES
The Internet works as an arena of convergence. Physically dispersed and marginalized people (re)find themselves online for the sake of sustaining and extending community. International and interdisciplinary teams now collaborate in new ways. Diverse cultures engage one another via CMC. These technologies relocate and refocus capital, labor and immigration, and they open up new possibilities for political, potentially democratizing, forms of discourse. Moreover, these technologies themselves converge in multiple ways, e.g. in Internet-enabled mobile phones, in Internet-based telephony, and in computers themselves as “digital appliances” that conjoin communication and multiple media forms. These technologies also facilitate fragmentations with greater disparities between the information-haves and have-nots, between winners and losers in the shifting labor and capital markets, and between individuals and communities. Additionally these technologies facilitate information filtering that reinforces, rather than dialogically challenges, narrow and extreme views.CALL FOR PAPERS
Our conference theme invites papers and presentations based on empirical research, theoretical analysis and everything in between that explore the multiple ways the Internet acts in both converging and fragmenting ways - physical, cultural, technological, political, social - on local, regional, and global scales. Without limiting possible proposals, topics of interest include:
- Theoretical and practical models of the Internet
- Internet convergence, divergence and fragmentation
- Networked flows of information, capital, labor, etc.
- Migrations and diasporas online
- Identity, community and global communication
- Regulation and control (national and global)
- Internet-based development and other economic issues
- Digital art and aesthetics
- Games and gaming on the Internet
- The Net generation
- E-Sectors, e.g. e-health, e-education, e-business
We call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community that address the theme of Internet Convergence. We particularly call for innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on and interrogations of the conference theme. However, we always welcome submissions on any topics that address social, cultural, political, economic, and/or aesthetic aspects of the Internet and related Internet technologies. We are equally interested in interdisciplinary proposals as well as proposals from within specific disciplines.SUBMISSIONS
We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference papers, but we also encourage proposals for creative or aesthetic presentations that are distinct from a traditional written ‘paper’. We welcome proposals for roundtable sessions that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, and we also welcome organized panel proposals that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme. This year AoIR will also be using an alternative presentation format in which a dozen or so participants who wish to present a short overview of their work to stimulate debate will gather together in a plenary session involving short presentations (no more than 5 minutes) and extended discussion. All papers and presentations in this session will be reviewed in the normal manner. Further information will be available via the conference submission website.
- PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- SHORT PRESENTATIONS - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- CREATIVE OR AESTHETIC PRESENTATIONS - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- PANELS - submit a 250-500 word description of the panel theme (and abstracts of the distinct papers or presentations)
- ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a 250-500 word statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction. Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each person is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. People may also propose a panel of papers or presentations, of which their personal paper or presentation must be a part. You may submit an additional paper/presentation of which you are the co-author as long as you are not presenting twice. You may submit a roundtable proposal as well. Detailed information about submission and review is available at the conference submission website http://conferences.aoir.org. All proposals must be submitted electronically through this site.PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
All papers presented at the conference are eligible for publication in the Internet Research Annual, on the basis of competitive selection and review of full papers. Additionally, several publishing opportunities are expected to be available through journals, again based on peer-review of full papers. Details on the website.GRADUATE STUDENTS
Graduate students are strongly encouraged to submit proposals. Any student paper is eligible for consideration for the AoIR graduate student award. Students wishing to be a candidate for the Student Award must also send a final paper by 31 July 2006.PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
Prior to the conference, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquires regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to the Conference Chair and no later than 31 March 2006.DEADLINES
Submission site available: 1 December 2005
Final date for proposal submission: 7 February 2006
Presenter notification: 21 March 2006
Final workshop submission deadline: 31 March 2006
Submission of paper for publication/student award: 31 July 2006
Submission of paper for conference archive: 30 September 2006CONTACT INFORMATION
Program Chair: Dr Fay Sudweeks, Murdoch University, Australia, sudweeks@murdoch.edu.au
Conference Chair: Dr Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, a.bruns@qut.edu.au
President of AoIR: Dr Matthew Allen, Curtin University of Technology, Australia m.allen@curtin.edu.au
Association Website: http://www.aoir.org
Conference Website: http://conferences.aoir.org (from 1 December)
Is anyone interested in joining me on a panel about participatory culture tools/platforms (blogs, podcasts, wikis) and their role in higher education? Sort of an Edu 2.0 panel, but I’m sure we can come up with a better name. If you’re interested, either leave a comment or email me.
I just discovered the wonderful Warning Label Generator. While there are occasionally excusable reasons, I’d love to post this as the first slide in my powerpoint presentations … 
It might be a bit cruel, humour is the best way to make a point sometimes, so I suspect the generator could come in very handy for making some quite poignant images!
The Annual Western Austrlian Teaching & Learning Forum is being held at UWA this year on February 1st and 2nd. I’ll be there and, subject to approval, this is the abstract for my presentation …
iTeach, iLearn: Student Podcasting
Keywords: podcasting, assessment, active learning
The term podcasting is a combination of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’ and describes type of syndicated digital audio that results in automatically downloadable files which are playable in portable media devices, such as (but not limited to) the iPod. Australian universities have been making lectures available as streaming audio for some years now, but with learners anchored to a computer in order to listen. Podcasting has allowed students to take lectures and other audio wherever they go, but this model still relies on the top-down structure of lectures as academic content for student’s to consume. However, in the University of Western Australia’s Communication Studies honours course ‘iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture’ the tables have been turned somewhat and now students are making podcasts, too. For their major assignments, students were asked to create an innovative audio podcast which engaged with the notion of participatory culture and the results ranged from a ‘pod play’ in the style 1930s RKO radio theatre to an alternative commentary for a Simpsons episode focusing on consumer culture and intertextuality. These podcasts are also cultural output themselves – they will remain downloadable indefinitely, allowing students to use them in future online portfolios and also providing a resource (or entertainment) for others. Moreover, the same system which supports lectures in streaming and podcast form, the iLecture system, also facilitates the students’ podcasts, in effect allowing them to take a turn at using the digital podium. With students podcasting, teaching and learning is clearly a two-way street. In this paper, I will outline the way in which podcasting was used in the iGeneration course; the setup in terms of technology and philosophy driving it; the podcasts themselves; students’ responses to podcasting (both informally and from a short survey); and the initial lessons learnt from student podcasting at a tertiary level.
I’ve been trying out tama.wordpress.com, but after their server failure over the weekend I got a bit worried (even though after a day, the data was recovered). Anyway, I felt that edublogs was probably a better home for an eLearning blog anyway, so here I am testing away…
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