[university 2.0 approaches]

The future of the university is set to change, we all know that. But how rapidly and in what ways? Peer 2 Peer University is an example of how to "hack education" and upgrade teaching and learning especially for those who cannot afford the more traditional books, laptops and professor time. Note: the future is just beginning, there is a long way to go.

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses. Think of it as online book clubs for open educational resources. The P2PU helps you navigate the wealth of open education materials that are out there, creates small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and we are building pathways to formal credit as well.

For more information:

Introduction

• About P2PU
• Course list
• Team
• Advisory Group
• Frequently Asked Questions

Courses

• Behavioral Economics and Decision Making
• Copyright for Educators
• Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature
• Land Restoration and Afforestation
• Open Creative Nonfiction Writing
• Poker and strategic thinking

Unless otherwise noted, all content on the P2PU site is licensed under:

[blog survey: participation request]

I know very well what it's like as a ph.d researcher, trying to get first-hand responses. If you have time, consider helping out a ph.d student with his research:

My name is Ibrahim Yucel and I am a PhD candidate in the college of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. I am asking for participants in my study regarding reading internet blogs. This study is being conducted for research. Participation is completely voluntary, confidential, and there is no compensation.

Please follow the link below if you wish to participate. Thank you for your time. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=q8kT3okNwBP5VzFTKNTpVw_3d_3d

Ibrahim Yucel
PhD Candidate
College of Information Sciences and Technology
Penn State University
321D IST Building
University Park, PA 16802

[cfp: democracy and communication]

Call for Papers: Canadian Journal of Communication

Special Issue: Democratizing Communication Policy in the Americas: Why It Matters

Deadline for full papers December 15, 2009; publication date Fall 2010.

Communication policy is an often important but overlooked topic ­ a blind spot - in much social policy research and public discourse. Media and telecommunications systems have become so fundamental, ubiquitous and pervasive that we often take them for granted as enablers, and nothing more, of many other freedoms, rights, and capabilities. Many do not realize the extent to which policies concerning communication resources are quite vulnerable to fluctuating corporate and government interests.

This "knowledge gap" is what this special issue of the CJC seeks to address:

how do communication policies affect economic, social justice and human rights, and what are civil society organizations in the Americas doing about this? For example, how do the supposed decline of traditional news media such as newspapers, struggles over copyright, the emergence of new ways of communicating online, questions about who owns or controls the internet, or access to the information we need, relate to social policy concerns such as sustainable development, immigration, environmental degradation, labor rights, gender equity, and other concerns across the Americas? What do any of these struggles have in common related to media, communication, and internet policies?

With these ideas in mind, we seek two types of submissions from concerned experts working either in academic or non-academic settings in the Americas:

• Policy Contexts (i.e., Enabling/Disabling Legal and Regulatory Environments): Short syntheses of the current state of play re communication policy that includes attention to the full spectrum of convergent policy issues such as broadcasting, telecommunications, information (i.e., intellectual property rights and access to information laws), and internet governance policies in each of the following regions: North America (Canada and the U.S.); Mexico and Central America; the Caribbean; Spanish-speaking Latin America; and Brazil.
  

• Civil Society Responses: Research illuminating either failed (and why) or successful (and how) civil society engagement related any of the previously listed communication and social policy areas in terms of making policy making actors, processes or institutions more transparent, representative, and accountable to public vs. corporate interests. Simply put, we seek to know why and how communication policies matter to a variety of social policy concerns and how civil society actors are working to effect communication policy change in a variety of contexts.
  

For this special issue, and given our interest in linking media and communications with social policy more generally, we are also interested primarily in research that is informed by critical theory, social justice and/or human rights frameworks and that features praxis-oriented research capturing the various challenges and/or opportunities for public-interest oriented interventions in policy making processes across the Americas.

Full-length papers (7,000-9,000 words) in English or French should be submitted electronically following the guidelines laid out on the CJC submissions website (http://www.cjc-online.ca/submissions.php). Make sure to write in all caps "COMM POLICY" in the Comments to the Editor field, and also to include it on the cover page of your article as well. Please do
not include your name on the cover page.

Comments and queries can be sent to one or both of the special issue editors:

Dr. Leslie Regan Shade, Concordia University, leslieshade@gmail.com
Dr. Becky Lentz, McGill University, becky.lentz@mcgill.ca

[interdisciplinary papers]

The online conference on the Future of Scientific Publications resumes with an new paper by Roberto Casati "On Publishing", now available on http://www.interdisciplines.org/liquidpub. In his paper Roberto Casati discusses the social significance of publication in the life of a scientific knowledge object (SKO). The importance of publication is made evident by the complex issue of unpublication (the strong version of retraction whereby a SKO is completely destroyed). Unpublication is a tempting option in the electronic world. He argues against the viability of unpublication, both on practical and on principled grounds related to the cascading entitlements of published paper.

There is also a paper by Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder of the Oxford Internet Institute on "Sifting through the online web of knowledge" at: http://www.interdisciplines.org/liquidpub. Their essay examines how researchers gain access to knowledge at a time when scholarly communication and materials are increasingly moving online. This topic has so far mainly been discussed in terms of journal publication and readership. Here a broader view is taken, including a variety of areas where knowledge production and dissemination is broader than journal publications and includes data and tools. A second reason to take a broader view extends the horizon still further, since scientific communication and collaboration are not just undergoing change within the research community, but also depend on wider changes such as the use of search engines and how they affect what can be found online generally. New search behaviours are particularly evident among a new generation of scholars and potential scholars. Hence we will look at changes in research as well as in the realm of online knowledge more broadly.

Have a look at the papers: www.interdisciplines.org/liquidpub.




Via an e-mail from the interdisciplines.org list.

[cfp: workshop on academia 2.0]

Academia 2.0 and Beyond – How Social Software Changes Research and Education in Academia

(at the European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2009)

Workshop will take place on the 8th of September in Vienna, Austria

Organizers:

• Michael Koch, Bundeswehr University Munich, http://www.kooperationssysteme.de/
• Isa Jahnke, Technische Universität Dortmund, http://www.isa-jahnke.de/

Abstract

The Web 2.0 and Social Software is often attributed with a high potential for addressing today’s challenges in knowledge management and distributed collaboration. This development has already reached industry. Using the term Enterprise 2.0, different possibilities to use Social Software in enterprises are researched. But also in academia, cooperation to generate new knowledge, and to add it to the scientific discourse may radically change under open Web 2.0 conditions. In addition, teaching and learning scenarios might be moved towards technology enhanced lifelong learning communities. The aim of this workshop is to discuss the application of Social Software in academia (research as well as teaching and learning) – and how these new kinds of software might change the whole setting – make new ways of doing research or teaching and learning possible or at least easier to do.

Motivation/Theme

New buzzwords have become part of our daily lexicon: Web 2.0, Social Software and Social Web are often used as synonyms. These concepts focus on new or existing software systems, which are influenced by human communication and collaboration (Jahnke & Koch 2009). Thus, Web 2.0 is heavily reliant on social interaction, and so, social web-based applications generate and require a human-centered design approach. Furthermore, this kind of new media influences the people. A new generation of the “digital natives” are arriving (Prensky, 2001). The number of users of Web 2.0 applications in private settings (e.g., leisure) is very high. However, in organizations and enterprises Web 2.0 concepts or such combined applications are still at an early stage (Koch & Richter 2008). The same is true for universities. Franklin & van Harmelen (2007) show some examples of institutional practices. A potential of Web 2.0 for academia show also Rollet et al. (2007). To conclude, there are some Web 2.0 tools in universities, in particular wikis and blogs (e.g., Hookway, 2008) but the usage of these tools and other Web 2.0 scenarios for supporting teaching, learning or research is not yet fully developed. So, the question how the Web 2.0 can support community-based learning (e.g. Barr & Tagg, 1995) or research processes in academia is not yet satisfactorily answered.

Research questions

The main research question of the workshop is: Are there any innovative research and/or teaching designs or arrangements (e.g., Alexander, 2006; Downes, 2005) using social software and what can we learn from these scenarios? Some derived research questions which we will discuss in our workshop:

• a) What Web 2.0 applications exist in universities, in research or in learning? Do Web 2.0 applications in academia make a difference to existing Internet applications like email, content management systems or newsgroups?
• b) Do you have success stories or success criteria of Web 2.0 usage in academic fields? What changes are observable or essential when introducing Web 2.0 concepts in teaching (e.g. new design/balance of teaching and learning) or research settings?
• c) How can we introduce Web 2.0 applications in the academic world, and support the change management process? How can we successfully distribute the concepts into a university?

Aim

Our aim is to collect proposals for academic practice with Web 2.0, to specify research questions dealing with Web 2.0 in academia (e.g., new forms of interactions, changing research practice, new learning scenarios, organizational change by using new media) or to discuss new research methods (e.g., e-ethnography) and their challenges in this topic. In our workshop, we want to share practical experience or research results about using Web 2.0 in teaching and research, for example, e-learning goes Web 2.0, scientific communities goes Web 2.0, research publications goes Web 2.0 or university goes Web 2.0. Therefore, we strongly invite researchers and practitioners who have ideas or experience of using Web 2.0 applications in academia.

Participation Requirements

Workshop participants are requested to submit a position paper covering practice with Web 2.0 in academia, research focus or research questions, proposals for academic practice with Web 2.0, proposals for new research methods with regard to Web 2.0 in academia or specific case studies (if applicable) and findings to date. Using practical examples the participants should demonstrate how the concepts and developments behind the Web 2.0 and Social Software movement are used in academia, what Web 2.0 characteristics could make a good basis for academia.

Deadline for position papers: June 29, 2009 (new deadline)

There is no size limit or formatting requirement for position papers.

Please send position papers as PDF or document files to the two organizers:

• michael.koch@unibw.de
• isa.jahnke@tu-dortmund.de

Position papers will be presented and discussed during the workshop.

Read more here and here.

[employment: phd in digital literacy practises of immigrant youth]

The digital literacy practices of immigrant youth for the formation of identity and learning networks (0.9 fte)

This project is focused on the analysis of the everyday digital literacy practices of Moroccan immigrant youth.While the past several years have seen an increasing amount of research on the digital literacy practices of youth, within and well beyond theNetherlands, relatively little of this work to date has focused on immigrant youth and their productions and interpretations of social media (e.g. weblogs, Hyves, YouTube, texting, Twitter, gaming). This project will provide a unique contribution to the field by developing ethnographic studies of youth as they use social media and integrate it into their everyday lives in the Netherlands.

We are particularly interested in how digital literacy practices are used to produce identities and learning networks. What are the shapes and scales of new media networks for Moroccan immigrant youth? How are these new networks changing, and how are they related to social networks with longer histories (e.g., extended family, community)? How do networks formed through practices with social media support the development of local, national, and transnational identities? How do such networks also structure new social spaces for learning?

These questions are addressed in this project through ethnographic research that will be augmented with other research methods, including social network analysis and survey data.

For more information see: www.uu.nl/wireduphttp://www.academictransfer.nl/organisaties/?adm_pin=00351&fuseaction=detail&Vacature_ID=B3KTUQY9

[academic blogging: why I do]

I'm working on a couple of presentations I'll be doing on Saturday as part of Dr Astrid Ensslin's AHRC-funded Ph.d training sessions. This will be the third session of six. I'll be giving a talk on academic blogging and then on digital literacy and creativity (I'll be showing a bit of Sue Thomas' talk on transliteracy too).

I'm often asked why I blog and aren't I worried about giving away too much of my research. Good questions but simply, no. I'm not worried. Blogging here is like my online business card. It always makes me wonder when people (especially academics) don't appear on google...why not? It's also about participating. A great example for me is a year ago I blogged about new media literacy and my feeling that the terminology "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" wasn't quite right...resulted in some greatconversations almost exactly a year later.

It's also about getting help. Just look at how Christy Dena shared with me some excellent transdisciplinary resources. And my post garnered a comment from Basarab Nicolescu. And then I met him and attended some interesting seminars in Paris...in French. And soon Nicolsecu will be coming to the IOCT...pretty neat cycle.


Something else to read and participate in, the HASTAC Forum on Blogging and Tweeting in Academia.

[digital citizenship: the internet, society & participation]

Today I attended a presentation given by Karen Mossberger (Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago) on Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society and Participation. Overall the presentation was interesting however I don't think the data told us anything really new...but it certainly backs up what we already surmise. Poor people and African-Americans and Latinas/Latinos has less access to computers and the internet and this filters through to less participation in public life (voting was one of the examples). The definition of citizenship put forth was that by T. H. Marshall, basically you need to participate to be a full member of a community. Citizenship is also a "developing institution" according to Marshall. So how to develop citizenship through digital means...well, Mossberger didn't really talk much about this. She concentrated on providing statistics which empirically show the digital divide. It was pretty apalling. In this day and age (here I am, using a computer, on the 'net, blogging) there are people who are too poor, or without sufficient education which in the States seems to mean you're not white...the statistics were incredible. Of course there are poor white people but apparently they are not on the 'net because they're not interested in it. From Mossberger's research, African-Americans connected internet/computer literacy with better jobs etc....and the statistics back this up. The issue of broadband access also came up. Sure people can use computers (for a bit) at a local library etc...but interestingly enough there are certain neighbourhoods where there is no DSL access (i.e. no affordable access) to the internet...only cable. That's another deterrent. I would have been interested to know what the statistics *really* meant in terms of "going online." Was it for checking bus times? What about banking online and using SNS? Mossberger at the end suggested it was more for *entertainment* purposes....but I guess what we're looking at here is not just issues of access (of course) but issues of literacy. *How* to properly navigate that content/information. Mossberger's latest project, results to be publishes as we speak, looks at Chicago neighbourhoods and notes the use of internet. I wonder what that will show. Two things aside from the presentation that I would like to share here.

1. There were 18 people at the presentation today. 16 in the audience (then the speaker and the introducer). Out of the 18 people 7 were women. All were white.
2. Mossberger made this comment at the end re: twitter: "I don't care what movie you saw lastnight. I don't have time for this." Actually, I think twitter (like mobile 'phones, especially if we're talking about financial cost) has it's uses. Just look at how the knowledge of swine flu is spreading/trending via twitter....

Of interest to those working with participation policies, internet access, excluded groups or web 2.0 in general, check out Mez's great article at Futherfield: The Sound of Reality Lag: Versionals are the New Black. See also Mark Pesce's post on Digital Citizenship (scroll down for a comment by Mez).

[how to reference web content]

The following useful post explains how to find the *original* date something was posted to a web site. Very useful for those referencing online content:

"There are basically three different dates associated with any "public" web page that’s available on the Internet:

1. The publication date - this is the date when a web page or a website is first uploaded on to a public web server so that human beings and search spiders can find and read that page.

2. The discovery date - this is the date when search engine spiders first discover a web page on the Internet. Given the fact that Google has become so good at crawling fresh content, the date of first-crawl can be the same as the actual publication date (#1).

3. The cache date - this is the date when a web page was last crawled by the search bot. While webmasters can use XML sitemaps to hint search engines that a page on the site has changed, search bots are free to ignore that advice and therefore the cache date may or may not be the same as the last modified date.

To give you an example, the publication date of this article is February 25, 2008 (it’s mentioned on the web-page), the discovery date (when Google first crawled that page) is also Feb 25, 2008 but the cache date, or the day when Googlebot last crawled that page, is April 20, 3009.

Know The Publishing Date of Web Pages

Now in the above case, the author has himself indicated the publishing date of the web page but in situations where the date is not specified (or you think the mentioned date in incorrect), here’s a simple hack to help you know when a web page or web domain was last published on the Internet.

Step 1. Go to google.com and copy-paste the full URL of the web page in the search box along with the inurl: operator (e.g. inurl:www.example.com). Hit enter.

google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.labnol.org/websites

Step 2. Now go to browser address bar (Ctrl+L in Firefox or Alt+D in Internet Explorer) and copy-paste "&as_qdr=y15" at the end of the Google search URL. Hint enter again.

google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.labnol.org/websites&as_qdr=y15

Step 3. Google will load the results again and this time, you’ll see the actual publication date of the web page next to the title in Google search results as in this screenshot.

Video Screencast: Know when a web page was published

Using the same trick, Google tells us that the MySpace.com domain appeared in Google around 31 March 2002, Orkut on 12 Jan 2004 while Barack Obama created his Twitter account on 05 March 2007. The first publication date for Yahoo.com, Whitehouse.gov, CNN.com, Microsoft and other very old domains is mentioned as 31 Jan 2001 which is incorrect but that probably is a bug because Google’s crawler database does include pages prior to that date like this one.

These site publication dates may not be 100% accurate in all cases but they should be very close especially for new web pages and domains.

See some more tools to know everything about a website."

This article is from the Digital Inspiration site run by Amit Agarwal.

[2 employment opportunities: professor of new media and digital culture and research assistant in new media and education

Here are two exciting opportunities for new media and digital culture academics. One is an assistant prof. position at the University of the Netherlands, the other is a research assistant role on an exciting project to create an educational website (with the British Library).

Association of Universities in The Netherlands - VSNU

Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture

University of Amsterdam

Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture
(Noord-Holland), 30 hours per week
University of Amsterdam

Job description
The ideal candidate would have familiarity with the study of digital media in the humanities, and have made acquaintance with such areas as cyberculture, digital humanities, information aesthetics and visualization, Internet studies, media arts, media history, media theory and/or virtual ethnography. Internet skills are essential, as is up-to-date knowledge of Internet culture. Practical experience in working with Web-based applications (e.g., blogs and wikis) is desirable.

The new media and digital culture team is part of the Media Studies department and concerns itself with research strategies for the critical study of Internet culture. The Assistant Professor is expected to teach on both the bachelor's and master's degree levels, in courses concerned with such topics as digital journalism, digital aesthetics, Internet research methods and techniques, media archaeology as well as the politics of code.

Candidates also should have a new media research agenda.

Tasks:

• Teaching and developing teaching activities both as part of and outside the Media and Culture programme
• (Co-)supervising Bachelor's and Master's theses
• Independently conducting research in the area mentioned, resulting in contributions to leading international publications
• Co-supervising PhD candidates
• Making a contribution to raising contract and indirect funding

Requirements
Required education/skills:

• Relevant PhD degree
• Experience in research and excellent research skills, evidenced by publications in renowned international professional journals / book form
• Teaching experience at the university level and demonstrable didactic abilities and / or training, evidence by an educational portfolio
• Experience with digital and audio-visual equipment; affinity with ICT in academic education
• Team spirit and capable of functioning at all levels of more than one study programme
• Willingness to develop in a multidisciplinary capacity in order to be able to participate in multiple areas of the Faculty's curriculum
• Organisational experience and skills
• Thorough knowledge of Dutch and English; non-native Dutch speakers must achieve fluency in Dutch within two years

Read more about this opportunity here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/XF244/Assistant_Professor_of_New_Media_and_Digital_Culture/

Closing Date: Sunday, 19th April 2009

British Library

Research Assistant

Children's Play in the New Media Age

St Pancras, London
18-month post, starting October 2009
£30,768
Ref: S&C00166

This is an opportunity to explore the theme of children's play and develop an interactive resource that will be used by audiences worldwide.

The British Library, in collaboration with the Institute of Education, the University of Sheffield and the University of East London, is embarking on a innovative project entitled ‘Children's Play in the New Media Age', inspired by the Opie Collection of Children's Games and Songs.

As part of a team of researchers you'll deliver an educational website aimed at a variety of audiences, learners and researchers. Specifically, you'll be involved in selecting, editing and digitising audio recordings, enhancing existing catalogue records and writing descriptive and interpretative content.

Excellent research and organisational skills are essential. It's likely you will have a post-graduate or equivalent qualification in an area such as Childhood Studies, Primary Education, Folklore/Cultural Tradition, Sociology or Social Studies - and you will certainly be familiar with the research output of Peter and Iona Opie.

Basic technical skills and experience of creating educational resources and/or web content are also important. However, training will be provided where required.

To apply for this unique opportunity, visit http://gs10.globalsuccessor.com/fe/tpl_britishlibrary01.asp?newms=jj&id=65150&----JOB-PREVIEW-MODE----

Closing date: 29 April 2009

Read more about this position here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/GH546/

[o'reilly on open access publishing]

Working on a report for the IOCT which suggests our next steps in terms of our transdisciplinary journal and future publishing efforts, I've been researching ideas of open access and new models/methods of publishing. Looking beyond academic (which seems to be moving slowly...) to business and there are loads of innovative ideas and changes in publishing practise.

Our "fundamental mission" as O'Reilly says, it to pass on information...so "why would we want to lock it up?" Good question.



Tim O'Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.

Read Danah Boyd's interesting post on boycotting locked-down journals.

[scholarly publishing 2.0: mit goes open access]

MIT is asking its staff to contribute their articles to DSpace (a digital repository managed by MIT and HP) which will make them freely available. However, the choice remains with each staff member to grant open access to their contribution. So not sure really how well this will take off in light of several studies which suggest tenured professors prefer to publish in subscription-based publications. Also, DSpace does not contain "all MIT's research and is limited to digital research products."

From the Wall Street Journal:

"With academic journals charging libraries increasingly high subscription rates, Massachusetts Institute of Technology passed a resolution to make it easier for faculty authors to share and distribute their work for free.

MIT said faculty members will grant open access to all journal articles through DSpace, an open-source digital repository created by MIT and Hewlett Packard.

Professors usually strike up agreements to publish their works with individual journals, but once the copyright for a scholarly work belongs to that publisher, it can be difficult or impossible to reuse it for another publication or even as course material. University libraries are having a tough time keeping up with rising subscription costs.

“Scholarly publishing has so far been based purely on contracts between publishers and individual faculty authors,” says Hal Abelson, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and chair of MIT’s committee on open-access publishing. “In that system, faculty members and their institutions are powerless. This resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals.”

Read more here.

[cognitive leadership for transdisciplinary research]

Reading "Enhancing Transdisciplinary Research Through Collaborative Leadership" by Barbara Grey.


Some interesting points:

• Groupthink refers to the suppression of differences within a team and its inability to bridge power differences
• the absence of process skills (e.g., decision making, problem solving, conflict resolution, information exchange, coordination, and boundary management) has also been noted as a crucial detriment to collaboration
• Viewing the leadership of transdisciplinary initiatives as a cognitive task means that leadership involves the management of meaning
• Transformational leaders high on charisma,
  for example, are seen as powerful shapers of their followers’ aspirations which positively affects team performance
• In transdisciplinary research, the cognitive tasks of leadership largely consist of visioning and framing
• Transdisciplinary leaders need to be able to envision how various disciplines may overlap in constructive ways that could generate scientific breakthroughs and new understanding
  in a specific problem area
• Structural-leadership tasks address the team’s need for coordination and information exchange— both within the team and between the team and external actors
• Research on brokers (who occupy key positions between others) in transdisciplinary networks reveals they are high on the Big Five Personality factor of openness, displayed an ability to imagine and propose potential collaborations among researchers, and engaged in active transdisciplinary mentoring of junior faculty
• Among the boundary-spanning tasks identified as key for transdisciplinary teams are
  gaining and maintaining sound institutional commitment and support,17 acquiring funds to manage emerging areas of research and training, devoting adequate attention to and securing funds for infrastructure, and building bridges to other centers and new disciplines
• Attending to the process dynamics of a transdisciplinary team demands an especially important set of interpersonal skills that are critical to successful team collaboration

[employment: ioct digital research fellow]

An amazing position just advertised now. Work for the IOCT and Phoenix Square.

This post is designed to initiate, supervise and promote IOCT-related digital work and research in Leicester's Phoenix Square. The postholder will advise on an annual programme of activities in the ‘cube’ and elsewhere in Phoenix Square that allows for a wide range of user experiences and reflects the best in digital work in the IOCT as well as in a national and international context. The postholder will have knowledge of venue programming and exhibiting digital art in the public realm, and will show an awareness of the latest developments and significant work in the field of digital media. He/she will undertake original transdisciplinary research in this area and will show an appreciation of the wider objectives of the development of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter.





For more info have a look here.

[texting = mental "brownout"]

My initial reaction when reading claims such as "Life's issues are not always settled in sound bites" and "if a teenager is reading Shakespeare when a text message comes, 'Hamlet's going to fade in and out in a ghostly fog'" is...but seriously? Though, the ghostly fog might well signify Hamlet's own state of mind and his visions... (and yes, I have talked about this before). The first quote is from a "worried parent" the second from a psychology prof. at an American University. Follow these quotes with the suggestion that "addiction to the Internet and text messaging be included in the diagnostic manual for mental illnesses."

Reading the American Journal of Psychiatry article which suggests that too much texting is appears as a compulsive-impulsive spectrum disorder, I wonder if these kinds of reactions (seemingly research-backed or not) are similar to those which emerged alongside other technologies such as the book (remember Socrates' worry that writing destroys memory and weakens the mind) , tv, computer games or rap music - the latter now seen as actually "a forum that addresses the political and economic disfranchisement." It seems that these kind of (visceral) reactions to young (because it's usually the teenagers isn't it?) people's use of new modes of technology reduce hci (human computer interaction) from a complicated interaction with (surely) many different levels at work to something *flat.*

There are some "experts" who suggest that sms-ing is synonymous with "declines in spelling, word choice and writing complexity. Some indicate that too much texting is linked to an inability to focus." But, there are also studies which show that students learn when actively involved. Having students txt answers to the teacher would be just one example of how sms-ing can be used in the classroom to promote reflection and synthesis. I've used twitter as a (free) way of checking student progress during lectures and as a way of encouraging reflection and interaction.



I see these kinds of technologies as having positive uses, as Carla Meskill notes, they can be a "spring-board and catalyst for active hands-on...learning."


If we sway too much in the direction of worry and anxiety, we'll lose our chance of harnessing the positive, pedagogical and empowering opportunities that come with technological developments. Especially when other research points to increases in learning, language aquisition, maths and other development. Additionally, studies have shown gender differences in txt messaging including one that shows "Females are more skillful in writing complex, long and lexically dense messages than males."

Here are some gender examples from a Norwegian study:

"Where men offer comments such as:

I think that there is something with SMS [= text messaging] . . . I can’t really do it. It is such short things (Bjørn, aged 40)

Buy a hard disk (Male, aged 23) kjøp en hardisk

The pub doesn’t open today (Male, aged 32) Pubben åpner ikke idag

[Women write:]

super! Now we have landed at Steilende and the hot dogs are on the grill. The first landing from our own boat. M&MandT greetings. We are looking forward to saturday. :) (Female, aged 29) supert! Nå ha vi lagt til på og pølsene ligger på grillen. Første ilandstigning fra egen båt. M&MogT hilser. Gleder oss til lørdag. :)

Hi! Are we still going to meet today? I don’t have more $ on my mobile after this msg. Just say when and where we should meet! (Female 19 years) Hey! Skal vi fortsatt møtes i dag? Har ik mer $ på mob etr denne mld! Bare si fra når og hvor når u vil møtes!"

The conclusions noted from this study seem to parallel those reached in studies of written and CMC and gender:

"Young adult women seem to be to the chattiest. Females under the age of 34 have the highest median number of words per text message. Women over age 35 use about 10 fewer letters per message than their younger counterparts. By contrast, males of all ages – aside from those over age 55 – are relatively stable at about 15 – 20 letters per message."

There are also case studies which illustrate how "group-based text messaging enables continuous social awareness, group coordination and smart convergence on social events." In fact, mobile 'phones, rather than encourage disassociation or lack of "presentness, " can engender "intimacy and a feeling of being permanently tethered." There are lots of levels/areas to take into account.

Sure, doing something "too" much might have negative implications but there just isn't enough research to justify sweeping claims. We could also ask questions about why certain teenagers might put more energy into texting rather than, say, family game night (because there might not be family or game night etc...). It's a complicated matter and I vote for focusing on the potential.





Top image is a cartoon by Chris Madden, the bottom image is by scion_cho on flickr.

[ioct now accepting master's applications for next academic year]

The IOCT is now accepting applications for master's in Creative Technologies (both MA and MSc) for the upcoming academic year, 2009-2010.



Are you:

• a technologist with a creative dimension?
• an artist working with technologies?
• a designer with programming skills?

or someone with other cross/transdisciplinary interests?

The IOCT Masters in Creative Technologies is unique, groundbreaking and innovative. Delivered by the Institute of Creative Technologies, the course is run in partnership with the Faculties of Art & Design, Humanities and Technology.

The programme crosses traditional disciplines and boundaries and is designed to support students in developing and strengthening their individual creative technologies research and practice, enable them to work at the convergence of the e-sciences, arts and humanities subjects.

Students taking the MA/MSc Creative Technologies will be from a wide range of backgrounds and interested in developing multidisciplinary knowledge and skills in the production of digital media and products.

See the programme site for further details: www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/masters.html

[socio-technical summer residency: US scholars only]

Such a shame that this amazing opportunity is only open to PhD students, post-docs and pre-tenure scholars at US institutions... If you're one of them, you'll definitely be interested in this call for participation:

2009 Summer Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems: 11-15 June, 2009
At Syracuse University's Minnowbrook Conference Center, Blue Mountain Lake, NY

Application screening begins 2 March, 2009

Eligibility: Doctoral students, Post-doctoral scholars and pre-tenure faculty at US-based institutions.

Notification: Late March, 2009 Cost: Most will be covered for accepted participants

Background
---------------
A science of socio-technical systems is emerging from research in the fields of HCI, social computing, social informatics, CSCW, sociology of computing, and other domains. The Consortium for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems (CSST) is a new organization devoted to advancing research on socio-technical systems. Building on the success of the 2008 Summer Research Institute, the CSST will, again, be hosting a summer research institute for advanced doctoral students and pre-tenure faculty in summer, 2009. A primary goal of the institute is to build a new cohort of faculty and graduate students who are interested in research on the design and interplay of technology and humans at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and larger communities.

Examples of this kind of work include research on:
* new forms of organizing (e.g., virtual organizations, massive online activities)
* social computing (e.g., online communities, social network sites);
* distributed work (e.g., collaboratories, virtual teams and organizations);
* new technologies (e.g., recommender systems, prediction markets, ubiquitous computing);
* novel forms of production (e.g., open source software, Wikipedia);
* new forms of expression and entertainment (e.g., blogs, wikis, massive multiplayer online role-playing games);
* information and communication technologies for developing regions (e.g., cell phone-based applications to assist economic development, infrastructure development for local economic action).

Institute faculty
-------------------
With funding from the NSF, the institute will bring together a faculty of distinguished scholars in the domain of socio-technical systems with up to 30 campers, drawn from among advanced doctoral students, post-doctoral fellows, and pre-tenure faculty conducting research on socio-technical systems.

Steve Sawyer, Syracuse University, Director Tom Finholt, University of Michigan, Co-Director Mark Ackerman, University of Michigan Bill Dutton, Oxford University Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Corporation C. Suzanne Iacono, National Science Foundation Wendy Kellogg, IBM Wayne Lutters, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Tony Salvador, Intel Corporation Suzanne Weisband, University of Arizona

Institute goals
-----------------
The goals of the institute are to:
* Expand on and strengthen connections among the cohort of researchers in this area, and build on the network of relations formed through the 2008 Summer Research Institute.
* Guide the work of the new researchers by having experts in socio-technical systems research give advice.
* Provide encouragement and support for the selection of socio-technical systems research topics.
* Illustrate the interrelationship and diversity of the field of socio-technical systems research.

How to apply
----------------
The application process requires two parts:

1. A 300 word response to this question:
*How does your research advance our scientific understanding of socio-technical systems?
* A few references, particularly if they are not to your own work, may be helpful but are not required.

2. Your current curriculum vitae (as PDF or in a Word or WordPerfect format).
Please send this response as an attachment in a common word processor format or as PDF of an email with the email subject being CSST'09 application to csst2009@syr.edu.


For further information please visit si.umich.edu/csstinstitute.

[phd position: social media]

PhD Position in Sociality and Social Media

University of Amsterdam

(Noord-Holland), hours per week

Job description
We are seeking an individual who is excited about engaging in multidisciplinary approaches to studying information, communication and related technologies in a social context. The appointee will be expected to conduct research on sociality and social media; the research should lead to international journal publications and a PhD thesis. The research can combine multiple methods of investigation, qualitative as well as quantitative. The candidate will be supervised by Prof. Rik Maes and Dr Ard Huizing, who have extensive experience in guiding doctorate students' research, and can provide guidance in a wide range of research methods as well as access to a large set of local and multinational organizations.

Human relationships are increasingly mediated by social media such as social networking sites, micro-blogging services and social recommendation sites. Such new media are said to host new forms of group interaction and togetherness. Appealing to the human tendency to bind oneself with others and thus to form and join groups to engage in interdependent relationships, they afford sociality. In turn, the design and usage of social media are continually re-created and reshaped by participants or members translating, enacting and modifying these technologies to suit their various contexts. This project will explore the co-constitutive interplay between sociality and social media, and the implications of this interplay for design and design theory. Theoretical lenses are provided by those who theorize such notions as ‘object-centred sociality' or ‘the materialization of the subject', which are mainly being developed in social theory, social studies of technology and, increasingly, organization theory. The particular research questions will be framed in line with the interests of the PhD candidate.

Requirements
Required education/skills:

• Master's degree in one of the social sciences (e.g. Information or Communication Science, Management or Business Studies, Sociology or Anthropology)
• Interest (and preferably experience) in field research
  Demonstrated mastery of both written and spoken English
• Determination to complete a PhD degree within four years

Job type: Research / Advising
Workfield(s):
- Research trainees, non-tenured lecturers, researchers(Scientific discipline: Economics)

Organization
University of Amsterdam
The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is a university with an internationally acclaimed profile, located at the heart of the Dutch capital. As well as a world center for business and research, Amsterdam is a hub of cultural and media activities. The University of Amsterdam is a member of the League of European Research Universities.

The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) at the University of Amsterdam conducts international research and provides academic courses in information management/systems, accounting, finance, management, organization behaviour, strategy and marketing, economics, and econometrics. The Amsterdam Business School and the Amsterdam School of Economics form part of the FEB.

The Amsterdam Business School's Information Management section is seeking an outstanding individual to fill a PhD student position in the area of sociality and social media.

Conditions of employment
Employment basis: Temporary for specified period
Duration of the contract: see below
Additional conditions of employment:
The appointment will initially be for 1.5 year, to be extended to a total of 4 years upon excellent performance (an evaluation will be held after 8 and 14 months). The salary will be in accordance with the university's regulations for academic personnel, and will range from €2042 (first year) up to a maximum of €2612 (final year) gross per month. The collective employment agreement of the Dutch universities will be applicable. The PhD thesis should be finalized within four years. In this period, the candidate will be expected to do some teaching (20% of the time).

Additional Information
Additional information about the vacancy can be obtained from:

Dr Huizing
Telephone number: 31-20-525-4356
E-mail address: im-phd@uva.nl

Or additional information can be obtained through one of the following links:

• About the organization (http://www.uva.nl/start.cfm/la=en/th=main)
• About the function (http://www.uva.nl/vacatures/vacatures.cfm/0F65D8D6-1321-B0BE-A48F280DF33B0D21)
• Amsterdam Business School (http://www.abs.uva.nl/abshome/home.cfm)
• Information Management section (http://primavera.fee.uva.nl/)

Application
You can apply for this job before 06-04-2009 (dd-mm-yyyy) by sending your application to:

Roetersstraat 11
1018 WB Amsterdam

E-mail: applications-feb@uva.nl

When applying for this job always mention the vacancynumber AT 09-5006.

[employment: multidisciplinary post doc]

Oxford Internet Institute

University of Oxford

RESEARCH STAFF GRADE 8 (£36,532 to £43,622 p.a.)

We are seeking a Research Fellow to complement our multidisciplinary team undertaking research into the societal implications of the Internet and related information and communications technologies. This Fellowship offers post doctoral researchers of outstanding promise or distinction an opportunity to pursue advanced research within this field.

Our preference is for candidates with a strong theoretical and/or methodological background in computer science, law or one of the following social science disciplines: communication, information, media studies, economics, political science, social psychology or sociology; and with an interest in research which will complement one of the OII's current research areas.

These concern the role of the Internet and ICTs in: everyday life and work; government and democracy; research and learning; shaping the Internet; and issues of theory and policy that cut across these settings. Applications from those with a track record of multi-disciplinary research on the societal implications of the Internet and/or related policy issues who have doctorates in other relevant disciplines will also be welcomed.

Based in the heart of Oxford, this post is available from October 2009 for two years in the first instance with the possibility of renewal thereafter.

How to apply

Grade 8 Fellow Application Pack (pdf, 100kb)

Further information, including details of how to apply, may be obtained from Nicola McVay, Administrative Officer, Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1865 212330; email: recruit@oii.ox.ac.uk

Applications must reach the Institute by 12:00 noon on Wednesday 25 February 2009. It is expected that interviews will be held on Tuesday 10 March 2009.

Research Fellow (Grade 7)

RESEARCH STAFF GRADE 7 (£28,839 to £35,469 p.a.)

We are seeking a Research Fellow to complement our multidisciplinary team undertaking research into the societal implications of the Internet and related information and communications technologies. This Fellowship offers post doctoral researchers of outstanding promise an opportunity to pursue advanced research within this field.

Our preference is for candidates with a strong theoretical and/or methodological background in computer science, law or one of the social sciences, including communication, information, media studies, economics, political science, social psychology or sociology; and with an interest in research which will complement one of the OII's current research areas.

These concern the role of the Internet and ICTs in: everyday life and work; government and democracy; research and learning; shaping the Internet; and issues of theory and policy that cut across these settings. Applications from those with a track record of multi-disciplinary research on the societal implications of the Internet and/or related policy issues who have doctorates in other relevant disciplines will also be welcomed.

Based in the heart of Oxford, this post is available from October 2009 for two years in the first instance with the possibility of renewal thereafter.

How to apply

Grade 7 Fellow Application Pack (pdf, 100kb)

Further information, including details of how to apply, may be obtained from Nicola McVay, Administrative Officer, Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1865 212330; email: recruit@oii.ox.ac.uk

Applications must reach the Institute by 12:00 noon on Wednesday 25 February 2009. It is expected that interviews will be held on Tuesday 10 March 2009.

[social networks and adult usage - stats]

From the Pew Internet Report by Amanda Lenhart

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey.

While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks.

Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.

Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.

When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.

Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60% of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58% of adult social network users restrict access to certain content within their profile.

View PDF of Report

Other Online Activities & Pursuits Resources

Memo | Adults and Video Games

Memo | Search Engine Use

Report | The Internet and Consumer Choice

Report | Online Shopping

Memo | Increased Use of Video-sharing Sites

Related Topic Areas

Technology & Media Use

[ether pad]

According to the creators, EtherPad is "the perfect way to collaborate on a text document and keep everyone literally on the same page."

So I had a little play around with it and my first question was "how is etherpad different from google docs?" After a bit more research and reading of the faqs it seems a few other beta users have wondered this very question and the creators are quick to point out that "No." EtherPad is different from googledocs:

"Google Docs is a suite of products that do many things, from word processing to spreadsheets to document management. One thing that Google Docs does not do is real-time collaborative text editing. We think this is an important use case, so we built EtherPad with real-time collaboration as the focus.

For example, with Google Docs it takes about 5 to 15 seconds for a change to make its way from your keyboard to other people's screens. Imagine if whiteboards or telephones had this kind of delay! In contrast, the EtherPad infrastructure is built to carry your every keystroke at the speed of light, limited only by the time it takes electrons to travel over a wire (such as an "ethernet" cable)."

The aspect of real-time updates is something I've noticed first-hand when working with people on google docs (hi Sue! hi Kate!) and EtherPad lets you see changes/revisions/additions as they happen. This has interesting possibilities for classroom use too.
Thanks to my brother for the tip.

[social media in education - cfp]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Electronic Journal of Communication (EJC)

Special Issue:

Communication Pedagogy in the Age of Social Media

Over the course of the last few years, social media technologies such as blogs, microblogs, digital videos, podcasts, wikis, and social networks, have seen a dramatic increase in adoption rates. To date, Internet users have uploaded roughly 80 million videos to YouTube and launched approximately 133 million blogs worldwide. Because of their ability to connect people and to facilitate the exchange of information and web content, social media technologies not only provide a powerful new way to interact with one another, but they also present exciting new pedagogical opportunities.

Earlier this year, the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative released the 2008 Horizon Report, which seeks to identify new technologies capable of affecting the way we teach and learn. Among the critical challenges outlined by this year’s report is the need for universities to equip students with new media literacy skills and to develop curricula that “address not only traditional capabilities like developing an argument over the course of a long paper”, but also “how to create meaningful content with today’s tools.” (The New Media Consortium, 2008, p. 6).

Considering that these tools center around the ideas of collaboration, participation, and conversation, they should hold special interest to communication researchers and educators alike. As a result, this special issue seeks to examine the pedagogical applications of social media technologies, especially with regard to the communication classroom. Examples of best practices in social media adoption in all areas of communication education are welcome, as are case studies or empirical research analyzing the effectiveness and/or effects of incorporating social media technologies into the communication classroom. Research examining the role these technologies play in the social construction of a collective knowledge pool would also fit within the scope of this special issue.

The special issue is scheduled for publication in the first half of 2010. Deadline for completed manuscripts is April 1, 2009. Submissions should be electronic (.doc or .rtf format) and must conform to the specifications of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th ed. Place author’s contact information in an email to the editor only, not on the title page of the submission.

Issue Editors:
Corinne Weisgerber, Ph.D. and Shannan H. Butler, Ph.D.
St. Edward’s University

Send inquiries and submissions to: corinnew AT stedwards DOT edu


via: Social Media for PR Class.

[digital literacy, learning and kids]

Youth "can be 'always on,' in constant contact with their friends through private communications like instant messaging or mobile phones, as well as in public ways through social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook."

"Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures" is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives."

Project Objectives
The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software.

Research Summary
Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher Mizuko Ito and her team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use.

They found that social network and video-sharing sites, online games, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research shows that today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games. The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important. The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression. These activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence."

Go here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Go here to download the summary white paper.

Go here to access the full report.

Go here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

Photo from Old Shoe Woman on Flickr.

[employment - lecturer in internet studies]

This sounds like a great post for all you internet researchers:

Lecturer, Internet Studies
REF: 4511
Closing: Monday, 24 November, 2008

Documents: Position Description Application Advice (Before applying for this position, please view the Application Advice document mentioned above) Apply Now
Location
School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Faculty of Humanities
Bentley
Position Details
Academic, Full Time
Salary: $70,846 - $84,132, Level ALB
Conditions of Employment: "Employment at Curtin is governed by either an Individual Transitional Employment Agreement (ITEA) or a Certified Agreement. The University reserves the right to offer a position under an Individual Transitional Employment Agreement only"
Description Summary
(Full-Time, Fixed term – 3 years) This position will involve teaching, research and research supervision in the broad field of Internet Studies. It has a particular emphasis on the use of the Internet for communications and the relationship of the Internet with other media. The successful applicant will require a PhD in a field of research relevant to Internet Studies, be an active researcher while focusing on the Internet and being an experienced university educator. Benefits and Remuneration The salary ranges presented are those which are contained within the University’s Certified Agreements. An individual may negotiate an alternative salary arrangement under an Individual Transitional Employment Agreement (ITEA). Employee benefits include up to 17 percent employer superannuation contribution, study assistance, a comprehensive salary packaging program, and flexible and family friendly work practices in a cosmopolitan community at a convenient location. Eligibility Applicants must meet all essential criteria to be considered for the position. Successful applicants must be eligible to work in Australia for the duration of the appointment. Contact Further information about the position can be obtained by contacting Associate Professor Matthew Allen (Head of Department, Internet Studies), on telephone +61 8 9266 3511 or via e-mail at m.allen@curtin.edu.au. To submit an application, please click on the Apply Now button. Alternatively, post your application to: Ms Angela Glazbrook Deputy School Administrator School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts Faculty of Humanities Curtin University of Technology A.Glazbrook@curtin.edu.au +61 8 9266 2509 Valuing Diversity and Affirmative Action Applications are invited from women and men who share the University’s values, ethics, international outlook, value diversity and have an informed respect for indigenous people. Curtin University reserves the right at its sole discretion to withdraw from the recruitment process, not to make an appointment, or to appoint by invitation, at anytime. Closing Date: 5pm on Monday 24 November, 2008

[technology and improving literacy]

A topic I'm always interested in and am examining during my research fellowship at the IOCT and through pedagogical work on multimodal story Inanimate Alice. With this in mind, the recent article by James Paul Gee and Michael H. Levine on "Innovation Strategies for Learning in a Global Age" seems particularly relevant.

As Katie Ash notes, the article by Gee and Levine "using new, innovative technology can help students who are struggling with language to increase their vocabulary and form associations between what they're learning with the real world." Also, being au fait with 21st century technology means that the digital divide is closing and students won't be left out of the "global economy."

Some key points:

• According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, most low-income children in this country [U.S.A.] are below grade level in reading by 4th grade [known as the fourth-grade slump]
• What gives students a good head start toward comprehension is a wide-ranging, sturdy vocabulary of complex words in the early years, before the age of 5
• Video games, simulations, modeling tools, hand-held devices, and media production tools can allow students to see how complex language and other symbol systems attach to the world
• Mastery of digital media for the production of knowledge constitutes a new family of “digital literacies,” since such media, like print before them, are tools for the production of meaning
• Digital media offer other advantages. They naturally elicit problem-solving behavior and attitudes in students, and have the potential to create different modes of assessment
• [Digital media] can also be used to track how learners learn, moment by moment, allowing constant feedback based on our knowledge of various trajectories of learning.

Read the entire article here.

[postdoctoral research fellowships at the ioct]

Two fantastic opportunities to work at the IOCT:

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (two posts)

Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT)

Three years fixed term

£29,138 - £31, 840 pa

You will work on ‘DMU Creative', a project which aims to provide a commercial showcase for the best creative work in the East Midlands by establishing a quality threshold and an advanced content management system. This project is funded by the HEIF (Higher Education Innovation Fund), which is an HEFCE funding stream designed to encourage and facilitate knowledge transfer, collaboration and outreach, in support of the development of innovative goods, services and policies. The undertaking or possession of a PhD is essential.

The two Research Fellows will work closely together to ensure a co-ordinated project. Responsibilities will include literature research, experimental work, software development, field trials, project documentation, seminar/workshop, technical/academic papers and laboratory support. The work will involve travelling within the UK.

Post 1 (ref. 5062): You will, in the first instance, establish a record label and associated internet radio station to connect with a large number of SMEs and micro-businesses working in music production across the region. This will be followed by similar endeavours in other fields of creative production. You will be based in the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, which is a partner of the IOCT.

Post 2 (ref. 5063): You will undertake the creation of an advanced content management system that utilises broadband to bring the creative resources of the region together, to create a portal which promotes the regional creative works nationally and internationally, to establish by making them commercially available over a variety of connected devices, including TVs. You will be based in the Mechatronics Research Centre, which is also a partner of the IOCT.

Please quote relevant reference number.

Closing date: 7 October 2008.

Application forms and further details are available from our website: www.jobs-dmu.co.uk.

Alternatively telephone 0116 250 6433 (24 hour answerphone).

Or write to:
The Human Resources Team, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH.

[transdisciplinarity and communication]

A little while ago I tweeted that I was working on a transdisciplinarity check list (things to read, watch and listen to) as a way of mapping the field and setting the scene for a conference I'm going to run and a journal I'm going to start (no prob!). Christy Dena, transmodiologist extraordinaire, saw my tweet for help, tweeted back and wrote a blog entry with loads of links and information on transdisciplinarity. Interestingly:

"there are (at least) two very different implementations of transdisciplinarity in the methodological realm: one that argues it should be about collaboration between academia & non-academia to address world-scale problems, and another that argues it is a conceptual approach that can be applied to anything, by an individual or group."

I prefer the idea that connections can be made between any kind of group rather than making an initial separation between "academic" and "non-academic." I'll be following the Nicolescu and Dena school of thought.

Have a look at Christy's post here.

[employment opportunity - lecturer art & design]

Senior Lecturer in Games Art & Design

This post is available as either:
One full time post of 35 hours per week, 52 weeks per year
OR
Two posts of 17.5 hours per week (0.5FTE), 52 weeks per year

£31,136 - £41,410 p.a. (pro-rata)
(Job evaluation pending)

As a key member of the Games Art & Design Course team you will contribute to the academic development delivery of the FdA/BA (Hons) Games Art & Design awards.

The successful candidate will be expected to have a broad understanding of contemporary context for Games development and design and will contribute to the learning, teaching and assessment within the FdA/BA (Hons) programmes.

As a practising professional, you will be active in research and knowledge transfer, using these skills to inform the quality of teaching excellence.

Reporting to the Course Leader, Games Art & Design, you will need to demonstrate experience of teaching at HE level, appropriate technical skills and knowledge and an awareness of the creative and cultural industries.

Closing date: 5th September 2008

Interviews to be held: 1st October 2008

For an application pack please email jobs@nuca.ac.uk or contact Human Resources on 01603 756243.

[employment - research positions]

Localisation is the adaptation of digital content to culture, locale and linguistic environment. The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is a large Academia-Industry partnership, funded by Science Foundation Ireland and Industry Partners, with over 100 researchers developing novel technologies addressing the key localisation challenges of volume, access and personalisation. The major research strands within the CNGL are Integrated Language Technologies (ILT), Digital Content Management (DCM), Localisation Technologies and Processes (LOC) and Systems Framework (SF).
We are currently recruiting: Post-Doctoral Research Positions:
3 Post-Doctoral Positions in ILT (MT, NLP)
1 Post-Doctoral Position in DCM (Ontology Induction)
3 Post-Doctoral Positions in LOC (Workflow, Translation, Multilingual Content)
Post-Doctoral positions are fixed term contracts.

Salary: €38,623-45,401 per annum (depending on experience).

Starting dates: now – November 2008.

PhD Studentship Research Positions:
5 PhD Studentships in ILT (MT, NLP) 5 PhD Studentships in DCM (IR/IE, QA, Ontology Induction)
8 PhD Studentships in LOC (Workflow, Translation, Multilingual Content)
PhD positions are typically for 4 years.
Stipend: €16,000 (tax free) plus payment of registration fees.
Starting dates: now – November 2008. CNGL provides state-of-the-art research facilities and supports travel to present at conferences.

Please visit http://www.cngl.ie/vacancies.html for more detailed information on each position. The successful candidates will join well established research groups at Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and University of Limerick, Ireland.

Deadline for applications: 31st August 2008 To apply send CV and contact details of 2 referees to info@cngl.ie quoting the appropriate reference (see http://www.cngl.ie/vacancies.html). Please also use for informal inquiries.

[job opportunity - creative industries research fellow]

Creative Industries Research Fellow

Policy & Research

Contract:
Three days a week (or equivalent), Six month initial contract with possibility to extend for further six months

Salary:
£40,000-£50,000 (pro-rata), plus benefits

Closing date:
5pm, 13 August 2008

Location:
London

Core Purpose of Role:
This role will involve researching and writing analytical pieces on the creative industries and helping Hasan Bakhshi, who leads NESTA's policy development and research on the creative industries, to manage NESTA's ambitious programme of research on the Arts & Innovation.

The position will suit an analyst who wants to combine a NESTA research fellowship with their academic research or freelance work on the creative industries, or someone who is seeking a secondment, as we can be flexible on the exact pattern of working hours in the week.

To apply:
To apply, please email or post your CV and covering letter to recruitment@nesta.org.uk, or Tanya Holland, NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London EC4A 1DE.

For further information and to review the Candidate Brief and Role Profile please visit our website at
http://www.nesta.org.uk/creative-industries-research-fellow/.

NB. Interviews will take place on Wednesday 20 August.

[my phd graduation day - july 16 2008]

It feels like grad actually arrived quite quickly. I submitted the thesis the first day back after Christmas hols in Jan.'08, had the viva in Feb. and then the graduation ceromony the same year! I was the last graduand to be awarded a degree during the ceremony and had time to admire the surroundings. De Montfort Hall was filled with smiling graduates, the organ player who leant an air of tradition to the proceedings and numerous proud and loud friends and family. I can't believe it's all happened and now I can look back and it's already the past and I got to wear that bonnet!

I had an amazing supervisor - a great teacher and supporter (check out the lovely post she wrote) - Prof. Sue Thomas who was there at grad. dressed up in her finery. Thanks Sue! My thesis advisor, Prof. Andrew Hugill also helped me immensely though sadly I missed him at my grad. ceremony (I think he was busy with honourary PhD recipient Howard Rheingold who received his own degree that same Wednesday afternoon!). Thanks too to my external examiner Dr. Ruth Page who helped me be the first ever IOCT phd graduate!

[job opportunity - multimodal learning]

Research Fellow in Educational Design and Evaluation (0.5fte), London Knowledge Lab, Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy Salary in the range £28,290 – £30,013 per annum, pro rata

plus pro rata of £2,323 London Allowance

Fixed term for three years.

The London Knowledge Lab invites applications for a Research Fellow to work on the design and evaluation of a technology enhanced multimodal learning environment designed to scaffold children’s social interaction and communication skills.

The TLRP TEL funded project “ECHOES II: Improving Children’s Social Interaction through Exploratory Learning in a Multimodal Environment” involves partners from the University of Edinburgh, Sussex University, University of Strathclyde, University of Birmingham, Dundee University, and University of Wales Institute Cardiff, and the position will involve collaboration with all project partners and associated research fellows.

You will collaborate in the design of the ECHOES II environment with other researchers, focusing particularly on the design and testing of the learning activities and the evaluation of the educational impact of the environment.

A Masters or a PhD in Educational Evaluation, Educational or Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Science, or a related discipline or equivalent experience is essential, as are knowledge of empirical design methods, ability to organise and run studies involving children, parents and professionals and ability to analyse and report the results of the studies up to international research standards.Enquiries should be addressed to Dr. Kaska Porayska-Pomsta (K.Porayska-Pomsta@ioe.ac.uk).

This appointment will be subject to an enhanced CRB Disclosure.

Reference: 7AC-CPLKL-4664

Closing date:22^nd August 2008

To apply online please visit http://jobs.ioe.ac.uk or tel 020 7612 6159

Further Details

Click here for Employer Profile

[phd studentships - virtual worlds and pedagogy]

The Socio-Political Impact of Virtual World Learning on Higher Education

Applications are invited for three three-year, fulltime PhD research studentships for a study funded by The Leverhulme Trust. The study seeks to explore ‘The socio political impact of virtual world learning on higher education' . This study will use participatory action research to examine staff and students from a wide range of disciplines in Higher Education Institutions across the UK. It will investigate their conceptions of and decisions about the way in which they teach and learn at the socio-political boundaries of reality. This study will focus on the exploration of three main themes and a studentship will be attached to each theme

1. Students' experiences of learning in immersive worlds.
2. Pedagogical design.
3. Learner identity.

For more info see here: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/SL655/Three_fulltime_PhD_research_studentships/

[synesthesia]

I've been reading Cretien Van Campen's The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science. In it Van Campen wonders how it might feel like to "hear music in colour, or to see someone's name in colour." Me too though sometimes when speaking to listening to people speak (not singing though) I imagine words or letters...not sure if that counts. According to Van Campen, synesthetes "perceive the colours of words and letters only when they read themin written or printed form." Brain scans of synesthetes show that even when blindfolded and listening to spoken words, the areas of the brain responsible for hearing AND colour vision light up simultaneously. This is unlike nonsynesthetes where brain activity is generated "only in the areas known to be responsible for hearing."



For those of you who are not synesthetic you might be interested to try the "synesthesia on demand" application at hypertextopia. My attempt as a synesthete resulted in this:



(text from Van Campen p. 58)

[rae & metrics 2.0]

The other day I posted about Stevan Harnad's "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise" and today I've seen the "New-Media Scholars' Place in 'the Pool' Could Lead to Tenure" artile in the Chronical of Higher Ed. In the article Andrea Foster tells us about "Re:Poste, a Web application that encourages academics to pick apart online articles from the mass media." To those in the know Re:Poste is "the Pool," and might well help new media scholars and practitioners "measure" their imput levels. Gerry McKiernan at Scholarship 2.0 says "No college is yet using the site as a way to evaluate professors" but "once open to the public, could be a good barometer of a scholar's influence."

A bit about Pool:

"Titles of new-media projects are plotted on a two-dimensional graph. People log in and post the reviews of projects, rating their appearance, function, and concept on a scale from 1 to 10. As works garner more reviews, they move from left to right on the graph. If reviews become more positive, the works move toward the top.

Accordingly, the most highly regarded and widely reviewed works migrate to the upper right corner of the graph.

The program calculates the ratings and takes into account the credibility of the reviewers. If a reviewer receives a low appearance rating for his own projects, then his assessment of how others' projects look will not be given much weight.

The Pool also allows visitors to bore deep into a project via hyperlinks, in many cases viewing its evolution from conception to finish. They can see its creator or creators and read how others rated the project. They can see the works that inspired it and the works it inspired. Basic information about a project is posted by the developers."

There's more at the Chronicle on how tagging works in Pool and check out Scholarship 2.0 for an idea of future instantiations including maps of how articles fit into the larger landscape.

[rae, metrics & open source]

Maintaining an academic career means paying close attention to your publishing record and its effect on the RAE. I'm not up on the metrics and specific weighting of kinds of publications and how that might differ across disciplines but I've just come across this interesting paper: "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise" by Stevan Harnad. In this article Harnad gives us an idea of how metrics and open source might work as an alternative to the usual "academic bean-counting of publications for performance evaluation and funding."


"Open Access. Until now, the reference metadata and cited references of the top 25% of the c. 24,000 peerreviewed journals published worldwide, across disciplines and languages, have been systematically fed (by the journal publishers) to the Institutite for Scientific Information (ISI), to be extracted and stored. But soon this is will change. It has been discovered (belatedly) that the Web makes it possible to make the full-text (not just the reference metadata and cited reference) of every single one of the 2.5 million articles published annually in those 24,000 journals (not just the top 25%) freely accessible online to all users (not just those that can afford
paid access to the journals and the ISI dtabase).

[...]

Lawrence (one of the co-inventors of Citeseer) published a study in Nature
in 2001, showing that articles that were made freely available on the Web were cited more than twice as much as those that were not ; yet most researchers still did not rush to self-archive. The finding of an OA citation impact advantage was soon extended beyond computer science, first to physics (Harnad & Brody 2004), and then also to all 10 of the biological, social science, and humanities disciplines so far tested (Hajjem et al 2005) ; yet the worldwide spontaneous self-archiving rate continued to hover around 15%.
If researchers themselves were not very heedful of the benefits of OA, however, their institutions and research funders – co-beneficiaries of their research impact – were: To my knowledge, the department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at University of Southampton was the first to mandate self-archiving for all departmental research articles published: These had to be deposited in the department’s own Institutional Repository (IR) (upgraded using the first free, open source software for creating OA IRs, likewise created at
Southampton and now widely used worldwide)."

Interesting...

As Harnad says, the RAE is "a very cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive undertaking, for the researchers as well as the assessors" so we should really be looking into other possibilities.

"The data-mining potential of an OA corpus is enormous, not just for research evaluation by performance assessors, but for search and navigation by reseacher-users, students, and even the general public."

I wonder how this kind of OS metrics might fit in with the new RAE:

• 2008 will mark the final appearance of traditional peer review systems for the UK research assessment exercise (RAE)
• The UK government has announced plans to use a metrics system to assess research quality and guide funding
• A metrics system could fit well to chemistry but some worry that an element of peer review will need to be retained for areas such as theoretical chemistry
  

[phd studentships: information networks]

ISTR - Institute for Social and Technical Research> University of Essex> Subjects: Computing and Computer Science Geography - Human > Information Sciences Information Technology Media and > Communications Sociology Telecommunications>>

We invite applications for two BT/EPSRC CASE Studentships:

1. “The life-course of networked public and private media assets” (Supervisors: Dr Ben Anderson & Dr Rebecca Ellis) – based in the Technology and Social Change Research Centre - http://chimeraweb.essex.ac.uk/tasc/
2. “Capturing concerns in information networks” (Supervisors: Dr Michael Gardner & Prof. Vic Callaghan) – based in the Digital Lifestyles Centre - http://www.essex.ac.uk/dces/research/groups/digital/info.htm

The studentships, jointly sponsored by the EPSRC and British Telecommunications plc (BT) will provide an opportunity to carry out research and training in a three-year programme leading to a PhD.

For more info and how to apply see http://www.postgraduatestudentships.co.uk/studyfunding/3017

[digital humanities postdoc position]

Two amazing postdoc. positions have opened up at Umeå University's HUMLab:

The postdoctoral fellowships are one-year positions, with a possible extension of one year. For the postdoc positions, applicants will be expected to have a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline (from a non-Swedish university) and a specialty in any of the following five research areas: participatory media, digital cultural heritage, digital art/architecture, electronic literature, and
critical perspectives.

Read more at http://blog.humlab.umu.se/postdocs and make sure to apply if you are qualified and interested in becoming a part of HUMlab and Umeå University! We are committed to taking very good care of visiting fellows. Fellows will normally have a double affiliation to the lab and
to a suitable department/school and discipline.

Deadline for applications: June 12, 2008.

[lord judd & creative technologies]

(image from Sue Thomas)


Yesterday a few of the researchers involved with the IOCT were invited to a meeting with Lord Judd. Our brief: to give him an overview of our research and our findings.


Sascha Westendorf and Keno Buss kicked things off with an overview of their DMU Creativity Assistant:

"a tool designed to help develop creative ideas in a transdisciplinary multimedia context, based upon the thesis that "creativity is an emergent property". The intention is to first understand the stages that creative people move through in their journeys of exploration, discovery, innovation, and composition. The well-established path from preparation to incubation to illumination and verification is a good starting point, but more elaborate models are needed to guide software design for individual and social creativity support, and to deal with the controversial question of how such creativity support tools can be evaluated."

Next came Heather Conboy, E-Learning Co-ordinator for Faculty of Humanties at DMU she's also researching her phd on the impact of online environments on creative writers (a bit about a previous talk here). Heather showed us some interesting statistics including this one: 95% of UK higher education institutions have VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments). I wondered what that meant for the other 5%? Are they ahead of the game and using non-institution based systems like open source platforms or do they have class blogs and teach in Second Life? Heather did explain that these stats are from 2006...I wonder what the deal is now?

Also along the lines of creative writers, Anietie Isong shared with us his research on African Writers. Anietie is specifically looking at:

• How the internet is influencing writing from Africa
• The writers' attitudes towards their writing
• Burgeoning styles employed in their writing

Lord Judd asked if all the African fiction was...well, fiction...Anietie says that though it is mainly fictional there are deep political and relgious themes.

I was really interested in Anietie's research and wonder how concepts like "postcolonial" literature will appear (or not?) in African new media writing? What is the play between the marginalised and the privledged - especially when thinking about access to computers, internet, IT learning? I also wonder how the role of "native" might change as Anietie explained that some African writers are writing from the West (UK and USA were some examples).

See some of Anietie's own poetry here and a short story here.


I concluded the presentation segment with an overview of my ph.d research:

After my presentation we opened up into a more general discussion. Lord Judd (I just cannot say "Frank"!) raised some anxieties and concerns with which we agreed. I think this surprised him. In general I'd say that we all agreed that balance is the key to using new media. Though how MPs are to negotiate all the communication they receive and then have to respond to...I don't know. When I suggested just checking e-mail/letters etc...in the morning I was told that is near impossible; something really important might require feedback and can't just be left until the next morning. Sue suggested we have filters like already junk messages go into spam folders...but maybe we need intelligent agents (like PAs!) to sift through messages first? I didn't realise that MPs received so much communication? That's when the discussion turned to literacies...the literacy of navigating all the information available but also the literacy on the side of the people who write to MPs...do they realise (are they literate?) that they need not write for every small thing and are they sure they are writing to the right person?


Quotes of the Day:
When I introduced myself to him as Jess, he responded with: "I'm Frank." (not "Lord Judd")
When told of my recent phd award he said: "So you're a *real* doctor" (!!!)
When beginning the discussion he exclaimed: "I am not a Luddite. I am NOT a Luddite."

********************************************

Thanks to Sue Thomas for organising the interesting tête - à - tête and thanks to Lord Judd for sharing his time.

NB If you'd like to keep up with Lord Judd's speaking arrangements, you can sign up to an e-mail alert here or subscribe to the rss feed here (who said MPs aren't digitally literate?!)

Sue has blogged about the day over at PART.

[ur brain on compUtrs]

In the Sunday Times Magazine this weekend there was a feature by John Cornwell: "It's a No Brainer." The article gave an overview of Professor Susan Greenfield's latest research findings detailing the effects of extended computer use on young people's brains.

According to Cornwell, Greenfield is predicting a "nobody scenario" in which teens of tomorrow won't have a secure/stable sense of personal identity (which means lack of morality and inability to think about effect of actions).

"By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen...the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alterations. It's as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Organge, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences."

Greenfield draws parallels between the degeneration of an Alzheimer's brain and "the implications of these newer threats." For Greenfield (via Cornwell) too much IT (from 6-9 hours a day...ah! sounds like me!) means brains develop differently: "The brain has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences."

Thanks to the "substitution of virtual experience for real encounters, the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry, a decline in linguistic and visual imagination, and atrophy of creativity, ccontracted, brutalised text-messagine, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complext thinking" ..."the more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other." the result: "a failure to build highly personalise individual conceptual freamworks..."

I'm not sure about the seemingly sweeping negativity. Sure computers have changed/added to the ways we communicate but young people especially are still in school all day - there *must* be at least some real-life contact during those hours. A decline in linguistic imagination? I think text messaging is all about imagination rather than a "brutalised" form of language, this is a craft - a different kind of language for a specific purpose (only 140 characters to say what you mean). Sounds like the creation of a kind of code. But more research needs to be conducted before anyone can say exactly what changes are occuring and how parents/educators/society should (or should not) accommodate them. (See Charles Leadbeater: "But the reality is that most young people seem to see it as a way to participate and collaborate, socialise and express themselves.")

Interestingly, the print version of the Times' article has various brain photos but the accompanying online version does not. The images included in the print article are from the Science Photo Library which also has these amazing views of the brain speaking, hearing words and reading words:





As an aside to the article content (science, brain research, teens) the writing style of Cornwell suggests his own kind of ludditism...an inappropriate gendered kind. Baroness Susan Greenfield (Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Fullerian Professor of Physiology, Senior Research Fellow Lincoln College, Honorary Fellow, St. Hilda's College) is described as "the motormouth publicist of science" whose "lower lip pouts as if to blow a raspberry." She is also a "glamourpuss" (though at least an "academic" one). We are told about her "bust up with her Oxford-don husband" and then treated to Cornwell's interpretation of her accoutrements: "she, in laboratory mode, is dressed down in a beautifully cut Russian-red jacket; a sleeveless, artificial-fur-lined silvery waistcoat; charcoal Armani trousers; a fetching beret (hint of Rasta-chic); and patent platform lace-up ankle boots." Further in the article, Cornwell describes Greenfield's "tight-fitting grey-blue trouser suit" she wears to a Birmingham lecture. Just one question: had the scientist been male, would Cornwell similarly draw focus to his "pouting" lips, eyes and clothes?

[social media: metrics and analysis]

As we gear up for the upcoming (June) NLab conference on Social Networks and Business I'm more than ever on the prowl for interesting posts/tweets/rss updates that tackle these issues. (nb: find NLab on facebook and upcoming) I've just come across Ryan MacMillan's (a digital marketing consultancy) "Contagious Report" on social media, methods and metrics.

Some interesting parts:

"The four qualities of Social Capital The similarity to economic capital only goes so far. SC has the following four qualities:
Utility through Accumulation: Like economic capital, the more SC an individual accumulates, the more easily that individual is able to affect their environment.
Inequality of Distribution: Like economic capital, SC is differently available. Some individuals have a lot,others less.
Expiration through Under-Use: Unlike economic capital, which expires through over-use, SC expires through under-use. 'Use it or lose it'.
Based Upon Trust: Regular capital is merely the exchange of agreed values as
guaranteed by a central authority. SC, however, is a stockpile of trust, which is
guaranteed only by the exercise of reciprocal actions between
diffuse individuals within a social network."

"Measuring Social Capital Any planned social media activity by a brand within an OSN must be measurable by the way in which it increases or depletes the brand's SC. Measuring a brand's SC, particularly in reference to their online SC, can be
achieved through analysis of online sentiment and influence.This in effect is a measure of the 'tone of voice' that online conversations about a brand have. Sentiment metrics describe the level of the 'stockpile' of trust which constitutes SC: how trustworthy is the brand understood to be, and how useful or desirable is its
content or activity?

Influence metrics describe the efficacy with which a brand is able to make use of that trust in order to (positively) affect their environment: how easily is a brand able to share its knowledge around its social networks?"

Read the whole report here.

[a million penguins: change and order in a wiki novel]

This afternoon Dr. Bruce Mason shared with us some of his indepth research on the joint Penguin/DMU creation (some call it a wikinovel) A Million Penguins...there are some notes I jotted down by pen (imagine...a pen and paper...)


guiding research questions:

1. what was the role of the discussion around the wiki?
2. what patterns of social behaviour occured among the contributors?

There is loads of commentary (on and offline) about A Million Penguins and most of it is negative...I wonder if most of this has to do with the way A Million Penguins was described...a mean, equating it with a "novel" is bound to cause reactionary behaviour. A collaboratively created multiple wiki cannot be a novel...perhaps it can have narrative aspects but a novel...maybe if it was initially described as a wiki experiment rather than a novelistic one the initial feedback/response would have been more positive?

Bruce mentions in wiki lore there is the garden metaphor however Penguins isn't really about order/organisation.

In 5 weeks of the wiki-story:
1500 registered users
over 11000 edits
75000 visitors
280000 page views (!!! good marketing!)

since it was closed down (no more edits/additions allowed) there have been a further half a million page views.

Different types of users:
Performer
Vandal
Gardener

• the performer made 1780 edits in 4 weeks (he didn't register in the first week)
• focused on adding content and linking together - bringing himself to the front
• edits frequently viewed pages (so others can always see him)

• the vandal was about destruction through changing text - a type of performer who also foregrounds him (or her) self
• the edits were all about her/him
• 166 edits so one of the least frequent however the most frequently talked about and instigated the most contributions and began patterns of behaviour (inspired similar kinds of vandalisation)

• the gardener focuses on organizing
• made 1144 edits, the 2nd most frequent
• made person-to-person edits (more private)

More stats:

650 pages with significant content

366 don't contain any links 9dead ends)

150 pages don't have any incoming links (orphans)

Thus - a lack of "wikification" because pages are not linked, walled gardens which only link to themselves (like a high-school clique?)

Bruce suggests that the kind of negative behaviour (vandalism etc...) might be explained if we think of the wiki as a Bakhtinian "carnival":

"gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies,it buries and revives"

there is a kind of social sanctioning for bad behaviour and two normes are reversed:

the reversal of normal rules of wiki
the reversal of normal rules of wiring/publishing

see the wikipedia entry

See Bruce's report for more indepth information and (sometimes hilarious!) examples coming tomorrow here.

[exploring a million penguins - order and chaos in a wiki novel]

@ the IOCT on 23 April 2008

presenter: Bruce Mason

In February 2007, DMU and Penguin Publishing collaborated to host the world’s first wiki novel - “A Million Penguins” - using the same software that runs Wikipedia. Over a five week period nearly 1,500 people signed up to edit the novel, over 11,000 edits were made and it was viewed over 500,000 times leading the CEO over Penguin Publishing to muse that it was maybe the “most written novel in history.”

In this seminar, Bruce Mason will outline the results of a research project held at the Institute Of Creative Technologies (IOCT) which investigated the social behaviour that unfolded during the writing of “A Million Penguins.” What kinds of collaboration, conflict and compromise occurred and what did it tell us about future online writing possibilities? Did a sense of community arise or did we see nothing but chaos and vandalism?

The seminar will not require any particular knowledge of wikis or online writing.

About the presenter
Bruce Mason is an IOCT Post-Doctoral Research Fellow specialising in social research and web2.0 activities. He previously worked at DMU with Professor Sue Thomas on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Funded Project (http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/) that investigated the potential for folksonomy in academic research.

About A Million Penguins
A Million Penguins is a collaborative online novel, a wiki which was open to anyone in the world to write and edit. The project ran from 1st Feb to 7th March 2007, was organised by Kate Pullinger (http://www.katepullinger.com) of De Montfort University and Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin, with Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort and an editorial team of students enrolled on De Montfort’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

[superfast internet]

From the Times

"The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

[...]

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables
that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East,
Europe and around the world. One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton
laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire. From each centre, further connections
radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed
academic networks. It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid
system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up
to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

[...]

“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we
communicate."

[recherche en littératies multiples - multiple literacies]

I recently received an invitation from Diana Masny at the University of Ottawa/Littératies Multiples to attend this amazing conference on multiple literacies. Colin Lankshear will be presenting his research on digital literacy (woo hoo!) from a sociocultural perspective. Check out the blog, Everyday Literacies that Colin writes with Michele Knobel.

[feminism and copyright]

In this month's issue (I believe it is also the first ever issue) of the International Journal of Internet Research Ethics there is a fascinating article by Erin Hvizdak. Her "Creating a Web of Attribution in the Feminist Blogosphere" takes a feminist look at issues of copyright. She begins by suggesting that although legal issues (such as copyright) have been criticised, little in fact has been written about it. Why might this be so? Well, because "women are more likely to participate in collaborate activities, such as quilting, knitting, or cooking, activities that produce domestic "works" not generally protected by Title 17, section 102(a)." (Bartow qtd. in Hvizdak).

Moving from to the very interesting idea of "author" as a singular "'heroic self-presentation of Romantic poets' (Woodmansee & Jaszi, 1994, p. 3)" to collaborative efforts which mean authorship is plural and distributed. Hvizdak (using Bartow) explains that women seeking copyright protection "violate the feminine social norms of caring, sharing, and nurturing, therefore deterring women from seeking this protection" (Bartow, 2007, p. 33). However, usual instantiations of copyright, according to Hvizdak, privilege the singular author over a composite notion of authorship, highlighting binaries as evidence of a certain kind of privileging:

"Feminist theory also deconstructs the binaries present in copyright doctrine, exposing patriarchal power structures. Dan L. Burk cites dualisms such as mind/body and nature/culture, (Burk, 2006) while Craig cites laborer/free-rider, creation/reproduction, and author/user (Craig, 2006). Each of these binaries holds the characteristic of one side being privileged over another, or one side being "inferior and feminized" (Burk, 2006, p.11). For example, the most prevalent binary, author/user, is invoked to determine infringement. The author is the creator, the sole owner of the work, and that who has control; the user, in any attempt to become involved with the piece, such as changing or borrowing from it, becomes an infringer and is punished by law. The user must separate him or herself from the author and his or her work, becoming an outside spectator rather than an active participant. Not only is this binary problematized by the assertion that
culture, and therefore creation, works in a dialogic manner, but also in the fact that it is the public, the audience, or the user that makes a work economically viable or worthy of copyright protection (Zemer, 2007, p. 5-6). In other words, without the user or consumer, the author or creator would have no reason to call him or herself a unique, autonomous, author-genius under copyright protection."

Considering writing in the blogosphere, Hvizdak notes that one might *expect* women bloggers to *not* copyright their work because

"Blogs are highly collaborative efforts, relying on information from external sources (news media, other individuals) to create meaning, and encouraging readers to add to the creation by posting comments. This is in stark contrast to the concept of the autonomous author as sole creator in copyright law, so bloggers might not see their blogs as created by a single person and therefore worthy of or needing protection. Additionally, rejecting copyright protection might align itself with feminist activity, subverting hierarchical patriarchal power by emphasizing and encouraging collaborative creation."

***However, women in the blogosphere do employ copyright.***

"Of 143 blogs surveyed, 55 had some type of copyright statement or a link to it present on the homepage, while 88 did not. These data can be further broken down into women's and feminists' blogs. Women-authored blogs expressed copyright-protected status in 31 out of 72 instances, while feminist blogs expressed it in 24 of 71 instances."

Hvizdak goes on to detail her findings and ends with her conclusion:

"Attribution is a way of bringing these two sides of the copyright binary together - it allows one to retain control over his or her creation and therefore obtain social gains while at the same time emphasizing the collaborative nature of knowledge production and the forging of social relationships. While many of the authors of texts on feminist perspectives of copyright call for a change in the law to embrace traditional 'women's' collaborative works such as quilting or cooking, the feminist focus should instead work to negotiate the author/user binary so that shared knowledge production is encouraged and the rights of authorial ownership and attribution are ensured."

I highly recommend reading the full article.

[gawd...]

I'm
*actually*

printing out my entire thesis.

to submit.

eek.


gulp.

[guiding readers: new book]

A forthcoming book from the International Reading Association that includes aspects of digital literacy.

Guiding Readers Through Text: Strategy Guides for New Times (second edition)
Karen D. Wood, Diane Lapp, James Flood, and D. Bruce Taylor.

"Strategy guides support students during reading, helping them attend to significant information, process and think about content, and engage in meaningful discussions throughout the reading experience. Reflecting what is considered “text” in today’s multimedia world, these guides take students beyond traditional textbooks and into multiple sources of information, bridging print and digital literacies. The book’s question sets, statements, engaging activities, and experiences will build and deepen students’ understanding of topics across all subject areas.

In each chapter, the authors provide procedural descriptions and examples of each guide, as well as “Tips for Diverse Learners.” An appendix of reproducible strategy guides is also included."

Check out the Table of Contents:

About the Authors

Foreword

Preface

Part I: Using Strategy Guides in K–12 Classrooms

Chapter 1
Introduction: From Study Guides of the Past to Strategy Guides of the Present and Future

Chapter 2
Getting Started With Strategy Guides

Part II: Collaborative Guides

Chapter 3
Collaborative Listening–Viewing Guide

Chapter 4
Interactive Reading Guide

Chapter 5
Reciprocal Teaching Discussion Guide

Part III: Thinking Guides

Chapter 6
Critical Profiler Guide

Chapter 7
Inquiry Guide

Chapter 8
Learning-From-Text Guide

Chapter 9
Multiple-Source Research Guide

Chapter 10
Point-of-View Guide

Part IV: Statement Guides

Chapter 11
Anticipation Guide

Chapter 12
Extended Anticipation Guide

Chapter 13
Reaction Review Guide

Part V: Manipulative Guides

Chapter 14
Foldable Guide

Chapter 15
Origami Guide

Part VI: Text Structure Guides

Chapter 16
Analogical Strategy Guide

Chapter 17
Concept Guide

Chapter 18
Pattern Guide

Part VII: Process-of-Reading Guides

Chapter 19
Glossing

Chapter 20
Process Guide

Chapter 21
Reading Road Map

Chapter 22
Textbook Activity Guide

Part VIII: Transferring to Independent Learning

Chapter 23
Student-Developed Guide

Appendix
Reproducibles

Index

Interested? Buy the book here.

[research talks at the ioct]

Heather Conboy began by talking about creative writing and pedagogy

"teacher dependent learners: natural audience is the teachers not the peer group"

"Most of the students interviewed found that they preferrred to read the forum rather than post messages and contribute to the debates (Canole, de Laat, Dillon & Darby, 2006)

What are the cognitive and social aspects of writing?

Discourses as kits - James P. Gee, 2005, page 21

Framework from processes of writing
Stage 1: text (corporeal analysis, independent words), stage 2: cognitive processes (immediate surroundings of the reading process), stage 3: Event, Stage 4: Sociocultural and political context (ideology)

Community Relationships/social
Tacit/informal/declarative/subjectivity

Psychological distance - depends on written alnguage and diacritics, paalanguage which depends on emoticons, paralanguage of body language...

CMC - idea of social presence:

"the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships"

(Shore, Williams & Christie, 1976 p. 65)

- reduced social cues, reductio in social and contextual cues affects social behaviour (see Sroull and Keisler)

Self-Presentation:
Goffman's dramaturgical actors theorise this...
Signs and signs given off...
Idealisation (receiver) optimization, misrepresentation

Social Presence - extension of transactional distance

"the ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project themselves socially and emotionally, as "real" people."

Garrison et al, 2001)

Social Presence and Learning
Has a positive impact on learning satisfaction (Tu & cIssac, 2002)
Linked to levels and quiality of interactions (Richardson and Swan 2003)
Provides essential scaffolding for cognitive activity (Garrison et al 2001)
A strong correlation exists between and insturctors presence and student

In terms of pedagogy - what behaviours can tell you that there is presence?- design a framework using content analysis but what is now apparent is that content analysis isn't enough on it's own (good for transferability though) so:

"If any group of scholars ought to be interested in CMC, it is linguists. Indeed, CMC is arguably the greatest boon to the study of language use since the invernstion of the protable tape recorder in the 1950s."

(Herring, 1996, p.155).

What the Research Tells Us:
1: Corpora - Reasearch indicates that gender and other structural inequalities do exist and operate within this medium. Social markers are cues and may mirror power imbalances and other inequalities present in society (Yates 1997)

2: Content Analysis - Although remaining as an area for investigation patterns of group engagement as viewed in the terms of social and cognitive presence have been found to vary over time (Richardson and Richardson and Swan, 2003)

3: Discourse Analysis: highlights the manner in which students are aware of institutional and situational factors such ast eh need to perform for assessment (Jacobs and Cook 2004)

What are the main questions to join these frameworks together:
What is the experience of CMC in the learning and practise of creative writing?
What if any is the relevance of CMC for the development on the creative writer?

Research Design and Methods
Interpretivist, Constructionist epistemology
Mixed methods: Interview, transcripts
Discourse analysis; content analysis, network analysis

Heather seeking to use concepts developed by Jonathan Potter, but would consider how to adapt for online environment.

Network Analysis - exchange patterns are defined as "the recurrent transactions which begin to charcterize the interaction among specific members of groups." (Fayer)

What is the main question: how the social fits in with the meaning-making of the group (around creative writing)

Ian Wilcox: Multimedia and Live Performance - Developing an Infrastructure fo Support Creativity

Is is possible to have a tool for performance and what might that tool look like?

Activities: Survey of multimedia use in Live Performance, Creative activity, System Development
Outcomes: resource for artists, awareness of activity
Criteria for Success: Development and promotion of diverse, innovative and creative activity using multimedia and live performance

Taxonomy of usage:
gathering input from performers or users
gathering information about the environment
outputting and presenting information
controlling devices and systems
Processing information

Initial Results of what should be in the system:
Connectivity: interfacing equipment, allowing one area of performance to influence others
Access to resources: applications and hardware, knowledge and expertise
Accessible to artists: usable by non-technologists


Not just about performance but the practise and preparation of the performance.

Step 1: Need a model of performance, a bare-boned framework of what is happening without trying to explain it (so not including social, cultural, emotive etc...aspects)

So: performance is made up of activity and some of those things are significant (they affect the future unfolding of that performance, so a structural sense of significance)

Rule: if something then... (but this need not be a conscious decision)


Describing Performance
Epistemology - performance elements, actions and events, and rules
An open set-based model - content cannon be specified or enumerated, not a complete theory of performance, a generalised model suggesting how technology might support and integrate

All the decisions of what is significant etc...should be left to the people actually performing.

Ian's concept:
is overlaid on an existing performance topology (music, dance etc...) and concept would selectively connect performance elements, choice of when and for how long to connect elements

Architechture - modified server actuator controller, takes input from source (musician, lighting board, dancer etc...) info is sent to the client and then the central controller provides cue

The central controller:
trackes events via messages from clients
stores and validates rules (mysqul and javacc)
maintains rule list and identifies rules that have been triggered (jess)

Rules - are written in near natural language (and or logical constructs)

An event has three parts - a reference, a description, the test for the event to have happened


Subsequent activity is influenced

[thesis]

Have just printed out a draft of the entire thesis...first time I've actually seen the *whole* thing.

It's BIG.


And I've already found typos...

[kristeva: the woman question]

As I begin to write (or at least think about writing!) my thesis introduction I'm reflecting on the double-bind I find apparent in certain web fictions: a desire to multi-mimetically represent combined with a simultaneous recognition of its inadequacy. In her text on Colette, Kristeva sees representation (or creation) as incommensurable with any singular identity. For any identity must constantly be questioned, reworked, and repositioned:

"Is there a feminine genius, then? The genius of women from the last century has invited us not to elude the question and to consider this: concerns about the feminine have been the communitarian path that has allowed our civilization to reveal, in a new way, the incommensurability of the singular. Although it took root in sexual experience, that incommensurability of genius is realized in the risks that each person is capable of taking, by calling into question thought, language, one's time, and any identity that finds shelter in them." (Kristeva, Colette 426-427).

An interview with Kristeva (which I found thanks to the Continental Philosophy Blog)



She explains that the epistemological tradition underpinning modern linguistics presuppose a split between subject and object. This "soliditiy of consciousness" (Descartes anyone?) becomes contentious during periods of social flux which Kristeva suggests are times of creation and innovation. And this is her theory, that the subject is dynamic and its constitution (signifiance) is dynamic. An example of this dynamism in language is found in Joyce (for Kristeva) as he wants readers to "hear the rhythm of his sentences." I wonder how this might transform in the online environment. How might the rhythm of image come to bear on the signifiance of Red in Donna Leishman's fiction or on the autodiegetic narrator of Dene Grigar's Fallow Field?

[matricide in leishman's red riding hood]

I'm tidying up my final thesis chapter (omg!); making things a bit clearer, rephrasing, adding some quotations, and deleting what is repetitive or unneccessary. I'm finding this last bit (deleting) the most difficult as there seem to be so many things I want to say about the works I'm researching. While going over Donna Leishman's Red Riding Hood in terms of the multiple worlds that are available to the reader I've been stuck on the penultimate scene (of the linear reading). Red is in bed at her grandmother's house, with what looks to be a bag of knitting paraphernalia at her feet. As she sleeps the suspicious boy-wolf draws back a curtain and enters. He reaches over, seemingly to brush the hair off Red's face but then, suddenly and wholely unexpectedly (at least on my part) he reveals a gun which he holds to Red's head. Ok. So maybe this is *straight-forward* murder, boy kills girl. But, before the wolf entered the room the reader also had a chance to *violate* Red, though not as violently. The reader can touch Red's distended stomach to reveal a pregnancy; Red is carrying a girl. This is really a double murder, a murder of mother and daughter. But how might we interpret this? If Showalter demands the killing of "the Angel in the house, that phantom of female perfection who stands in the way of freedom" and who turns out to be Woolf herself [Showalter 265], then does the killing of Red signify the death of a blockade to Red's freedom? Is it with death that Red can escape that double-bind: the inadequacy of representation and the concomittant desire to represent her becoming subjectivity? Kristeva argues that we are always negotiating the other within as subjects in process, so here is this an overt inability to negotiate (or at least a challenge) the pivot between self and other? Also, if Red is unaware of either the wolf or of the reader touching her stomach, does this suggest a Cartesian split between mind and body, the two for Red here are seemingly disconnected? Or is this simply the death of the woman as "body"? (I'm thinking here of Robyn Longhurst who writes about pregnant woman as "containers"). Then in death that bind and that split dissolve? But, because it is the wolf who facilitates this, does that intimate that a man is necessary to bring a woman *together*, to resolve her identities? And what about choice...and, the most important question: does Red really die?

[nano technology]

I was reading an article on the super conductor/layered oxide NaxCoO2 that, through various "conducting probe-mediated reversible electrochemical sodium intercalation/deintercalation reactions" information can be written and then erased (I'm sure I'm over-simplifying). In awe of the words used (oxidated, intercalated, superconductivity, nitrogen flux, nanolithographic) and wondering what this might mean for us, the end users of technology led me - via a google search - to a whole new world. A world of a thinking so different from my current, humanities-based research. (it's invigorating to be reminded how we can (or is it just me) get very focused one something which is just a tiny part of a bigger everything) In this world where one can measure conductivity (among a myrid of other things so different from my current examination of multi-mimesis and transliteracy in women-authored web fictions), language and story and critique have the privilege of ephemerality, rather this seems to be a world where experiments are necessary and quantifiable results are produced. One such product is the 3D Atomic Holographic Optical Data Storage Nanotechnology. It is a rewritable holographic removable disk.

"An Atomic / Photonic / Molecular / Quantum / Spintronic / Holographic Switch is the method of using a UV laser atom nanoparticle optical switch defined by a non-contact terahertz nano/microwave electric field modulator using attosecond, femtosecond, terahertz UV photons (electromagnetic radiation) simultaneously to alter properties of ferroelectric molecules for data and light expression. Through the use of UV photon induced electric field poling and dynamically changing the internal geometry of individual ferroelectric atoms in a 3 dimensional optical crystal coated on a high / low velocity substrate.
The UV laser diodes and electric field transducers of the Integrated Read/Write Head can be used in any combination or sequence to control the molecules which include UV/blue photon frequencies and quantum energy level as well as Nano/Micro electro static field strength (voltage) and switching field densities (frequency).The only rub is the cost per bit will be cheaper, faster to access, and faster to store for a much longer time uneffected by many environmental conditons." (see here for more)

[dr. steve's ph.d graduation ceremony]

[to-do list]

Today I have:

• Written next week's post for Frontline Books
• Researched the Creative Industries in the U.K.
• Written "sexy" (or sexyish) copy for a conference on creative industry
• Read my usual blogs
• Answered (or at least attempted to) work e-mails
• Completed tasks relating to work e-mails
• Finished presentation for Tuesday's Transliteracy Colloquium
• Began work on paper to be submitted for the Multimodal Narratives conference collection
• Read two papers on multimodality and learning
• Checked train times for my EARLY trip up to Leicester on Tuesday
• Wrote 1.5 pages of chapter 4! woo hoo!
• posted to my blog

I still have to:

• Write chapter 4!!!
• Read - well, loads really!
• Answer other e-mails
• Write 2 papers
• Create 2 presentations (more on those later)
• go food shopping (that's sooo boring)
• and way too many things to actually list here

[ALT-X Press ------ Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix]

BOULDER, Colorado, May 10, 2007

The Alt-X Online Network, a space "where the digerati meet the literati" and on the Internet since 1993, announces the release of a new Alt-X Press ebook entitled "Illogic of Sense: The Gregory Ulmer Remix" edited by Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye, and designed by artist Joel Swanson of hippocrit.com.

Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer RemixEdited by Darren Tofts and Lisa GyeDesign by Joel Swansonhttp://www.altx.com/ebooks/ulmer.html

Contributors include Niall Lucy, Jon McKenzie, Linda Marie Walker, Craig Saper, Rowan Wilken, Marcel O'Gorman, Teri Hoskin, and Michael Jarrett, with an introduction by editors Tofts and Gye.

"Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix" is an exciting new ebook publication that employs theorist Gregory Ulmer's invocation to invent new forms of electronic writing. As the ebook's editors, Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye, write in their brilliant introduction, "Ulmer has been at the forefront of thinking about new cultural formations as the paradigm of literacy converges with digital culture." Ulmer's work has been central to contemporary thinking on the future of writing and his international presence as one of the leading figures in media arts discourse has influenced a multitude of disciplines from electronic literature and Internet art to critical theory, communications studies, and art history. The ebook features a diverse group of artists, theorists, and creative writers who develop new forms of hybridized "digital rhetoric." Their inventive and audacious experiments take advantage of recent developments in the field of new media studies, and as part of Alt-X's mission to participate in the creative commons provided by the Web, are available for free download.

This provocative collection of multi-tracked writing puts into play many of Ulmer's breakthrough theories summed up in his most recognized hot-button terms: applied grammatology, heuretics, post(e)-pedagogy, textshop, mystory, and choragraphy. Encouraged by the example of Ulmer's own hyperrhetorical writing style, the authors incorporate collaged imagery, mp3 soundtracks, and QuickTime movies into their innovative multimedia mix while exploring how these same extensions of "writerly performance" explode the false barrier between academic discourse and spontaneous poetics, narrative and rhetoric, and autobiography and fiction. Positing an "illogic of sense" to reclaim what Ulmer calls an "anticipatory consciousness," designed to utilize the force of intuition as a way to invent emergent forms of knowledge, this grouping of hypermedia texts showcase how interdisciplinary writers can remix the methodological approach of an avant-garde philosophy propelled by Ulmer, one that prioritizes an ongoing process of discovery and media arts assemblage.

The ebook is beautifully designed by artist Joel Swanson of hippocrit.com, who crosses his visionary design sensibility with state of the art technology to produce an original work of ebook-art that many will view as finally fulfilling the long-promised potential of online publishing to use stimulating visual arrangement, media hybridization, and typographical ingenuity to blur the distinction between publication, exhibition, and design performance.

"Simultaneously celebrating and expanding on the writing performances located in Gregory Ulmer's rich oeuvre of totally remixable source material, the collection of essays in 'Illogic of Sense' adhere to an experiential approach to creative/critical writing and in so doing teach us how to write a theory of poetics that will help us invent a new field of study that I would call interdisciplinary digital humanities." - Mark Amerika, series editor, Alt-X Press; author of "META/DATA: A Digital Poetics" (MIT Press, 2007)

You can download "Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix" ebook as well as other Alt-X ebooks for free at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/

[thinking blog award]

Yay! Angela Thomas has tagged me with the "thinking blog award."



From the thinking blog site: "remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all - blogs that really get you thinking!"

Five blogs that get me thinking:

• Angela Thomas - especially all Angela's research into second life re: pedagogy and her unfaltering enthusiasm (and great presentations!)
• Sue Thomas - (no relation to Angela) although Sue posts on a variety of blogs it is her extensive work at trAce that I found when beginning my ph.d which showed me that there was someone *out there* with a deep interest in new media technologies and storytelling/writing. Of late, I'm a follower of Sue's musings on all things transliterate at the PaRT blog.
• Ruth Page - and her blog aptly named "digital narratives" which just fits so well with my research especially as Ruth is also concerned with where feminist theory comes into play in new media narratives.
• blogher - "where the women bloggers are." This blog, with numerous bloggers, is a space where (go figure) women bloggers can come together and (yup, that's right) blog. In 2005 the blogher co-founders (Elisa Camahort, Jory Des Jardins, Lisa Stone) held their first conference asking "where are the women bloggers" and now link to over 8000 blogs by women. Uplifting.
• Chris Joseph - originally known to me only as babel and as the uber-creative designer of works such as Inanimate Alice. With his current post at IoCT digital writer in residence his blog keeps me up-to-date with digital art side of new media.

So, what five blogs get you thinking?