All hail, Christian, who really knows how to get some spiritual bang for his livejournal buck:
2005 is the year great things are built. From the waves, iron and rock will emerge, vaulted into being by our ability and willingness to swallow pride and cough up roses. We will be known. Certain in our doubt, and incandescent in everything else.
Inspired by Matt Borondy, I constructed these using of some the google search strings that have led people here in the last 24 hours:
1.
what influenced the streets to write music?
organic creativity
bohemian urban tribes
2.
Pictures inside my head
the sounds of silence
fruity loops cracked
They would have been a lot more colourful had I not deleted vast quantities of x-rated spam comments recently.
Beautiful, often poignant fragments of everyday life at The Department of Me:
The almost daily ritual includes a photo of the day (PoD) and a haiku of the day (HoD):
Wet grass after rain -
the fertile damp of dark dirt
smells like green to me.
I can relate to that after our recent deluge: thunderous sheets of water have swollen the river and soaked everyone’s shoes.
cool! Marika’s PhD (in media and comm at the University of Oslo) on the interplay of personal media in the everyday lives of young people is right up my alley. And she has an excellent blog, which will go straight on my blogroll.
I’ve been waiting for this for a while: 
Nokia’s Lifeblog software beta has been released (for Windows). Background from the BBC:
The Lifeblog software automatically arranges all the messages, images, videos and sound clips people capture with their phones.The PC software organises information on a timeline and lets people add to the collection with images from other digital still and video cameras.
Eventually the software will let people publish some or all of the information they collect to the web to let them create their own biographical blog.
An interesting reconfiguration of the blog – a “lifeblog” is evidently a kind of chronological scrapbook that hybridizes diarising daily experiences, consumption habits and visual documentation of events and relationships. I am very interested to see what Nokia users do with it – something that Nokia most sensibly knows that they do not yet know.
At the last lecture of MSTU2000 Music Subcultures and the Media, I administered a student questionnaire as one way of evaluating the usefulness of the research weblog assessment task I had implemented for the first time this semester. Here are the results (apologies in advance to any stats junkies – bare frequency tables only, I’m afraid). Generally, it’s a thumbs up.
There has also been some dissent – but paradoxically, an exercise like the weblog task actually enables the public voicing of such dissent and has encouraged me to think more about participatory course design.
I’ve had an exciting and astonishingly busy week. I’ve finally managed to put together a diverse lineup for the music industry panel discussion that takes the place of a final lecture in the Music Subcultures and the Media course I’m coordinating.
This week also winds up the experiment with blogs as a form of assessment I’ve incorporated into this course. It’s been exhilirating to watch an authentic peer-to-peer learning community evolve. The level of dynamic interaction in tutorials has improved since they started blogging too. Even more interestingly, offering this space to students to reflect on the issues of the course has apparently empowered them to build their own critical positions, and to develop and discuss their ideas much more extensively than the one hour tutorial slot allows. They have without exception been warm and supportive toward one another, and they haven’t forgotten to be camp, humorous, or weird, as their choice of music subculture dictates!
All this is as I had hoped. As it was important for me to be around to facilitate and support these fledgling research bloggers, the exercise has sucked quite a lot of my time and my own blog has suffered, but it’s all good. I’ll actually miss reading them, although I’m hoping they won’t all stop.
On the other hand, there have of course been access issues (both physical and in literacy terms). Note to all teachers: the “young” people are not all as “wired” as we think or fear. And there has been some resistance due to the unfamiliar nature of the weblog as an assessment task. That said, paradoxically the blog has also given some of the resistant a space to communicate and reflect on their feelings. I’m doing a student survey in class today, and will post the results for the benefit of anyone else thinking of incorporating blogs into their course design. All in all, now that i’ve seen it in action, I would hate to see it taken away again, especially in a course on music communities and the media, which is just *begging* to be given a life online.
I’m also making another Digital Story (about urban “decay” and “renewal” through the story of a vanished restaurant) in preparation for doing some training in remote communities for the Youth Internet Radio Network, which forms part of my PhD research. And hatching secret plans with some cronies to move the Digital Storytelling format off the desktop…
I’m doing some extra work as a research assistant on a university project that is planning ways of integrating wireless networking with teaching and learning strategies in a meaningful way – would love to hear from anyone interested in this field.
I’m also happily digging myself into a massive theoretical maze in which I will explore the ideas of cultural participation, citizenship, the public sphere, and literacy in relation to the history of media change. That is, for the PhD.
Sometime I have to get around to printing up the final copy of my Masters thesis and getting it bound so I can graduate.
I know I’ve been quiet here lately, but that is because life is so noisy everywhere else. Here are the headlines:
teaching
It was with great trepidation that I introduced my undergraduate music/media studies students to research blogging this week. I was dumbfounded in some cases when I realised the size of the conceptual leap I was asking some people to make – from occasional email, chat and random googling to genuine network literacy. I guess it brings home the fact that “young people” are never, or at least not all, as wired as we “older people” think. Some of them are doing such cool things, though, that it warms the cockles of your heart.
I have also been and/or should now be:
coughing
and generally having the flu.
marking
All the essays by the above brilliant people…
thesising
I have my formal thesis proposal thingy due, well, imminently. ‘nuf said
travelling
Off to Perth for a couple of days on Sunday. Oooh, I forgot to announce, I’m also off to Oxford in July!
editing
The “porn” issue of M/C is jointly parented by me. we are snowed under with articles…
reviewing
3 books and an article, some already more overdue than others….
Listing things like this only makes it worse. I might go back to doing some of it now, instead of…
blogging, which often feels suspiciously like
procrastinating
I’ve just blogrolled Alex Halavais – for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he just went and whipped up a little script that scoops out the 8th-to-last sentences of blog posts, generating a collective stream of consciousness mimetic literature much like the wee bibliomancy craze of last week does. The results are intriguing and nifty. Secondly, he’s gone out and tried to aggregate the various lists of phd/academic bloggers that exist on various websites and blogs – the result is the publicly editable Scholars who Blog list.
In an unrelated epiphany, I realised that there has to be a word for the terrible feeling of discomfort I get when I realise that a third of my site visitors are search engine refugees who come here in the Googlejuice induced belief that I have some sort of insights to impart in the areas of postmodern architecture or swarm theory. The name for this uneasy feeling has to be… Googleguilt, does it not?
I’m wondering if experiencing guilt on this score is an academic thing – or is it just me? Any thoughts?