Category: life in academia

  • Networks, Rings and Things

    These two paragraphs are completely unrelated. I admit it. Bit 1 I keep forgetting to help spread the word about Phil Agre’s advice piece Networking on the Network, which is specifically aimed at graduate students (it’s almost long enough to be a PhD itself in fact). It isn’t just for academic types, though. It’s full…

  • Grad School Humour

    This find at UFO Breakfast Recipients has had me splurting coffee, snorting, and generally falling off my chair with laughter all day. Advisor haiku I read your comments The red ink was a nice touch You can just bite me I have no money You have a lot of money You can just bite me…

  • Digital Music Symposium

    Video footage of the recent Digital Music Symposium, featuring Fred Von Lohmann of the EFF is now available online.

  • Higher Ed Reforms Passed

    Students face higher fees for university degrees after the federal government finally won support for its contentious $2.4 billion university reform package yesterday. But at least the link between funding and industrial reform has been removed. lowercase yay. Uppercase Sigh.

  • M/C – Joke

    M/C – Journal of Media and Culture’s latest issue Joke is now online.

  • Distributed Creativity

    I keep forgetting to post something about the Distributed Creativity forum which I first heard about on the fibreculture list. Thanks to Anne for reminding me. As regular visitors know, I’m interested in emerging definitions of creativity, and I have a sense that the concept has shifted in meaning and has absorbed or displaced elements…

  • Urban Tribes

    In similar vein to Richard Florida’s influential, but problematic The Rise of the Creative Class, journalist Ethan Watters’ work of pop sociology Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment looks interesting. By the sounds of it, 2 parts Maffesoli and 3 parts Copeland. Here’s the Publishers’ Weekly blurb:

  • Architecture, Modernism, and Postmodernism

    Gary has been thinking about Federation Square in connection with his long running concerns about the modern and postmodern in visual and urban cultures. I posted a pretty long comment to his post, and thought I’d repeat it here as it is very much my kind of discussion. [Federation Square] is monumental and spectacular –…

  • Cappuccino Anyone?

    A few weeks back, Australian Education Minister Brendan Nelson notoriously attacked the validity of “cappuccino courses” in universities (i.e. non-industrial, usually new humanities courses). “Cappuccino”, of course being the drink of the time-wasting, overprivileged types most likely to study a course on mythology in popular culture or gender studies (unlike stockbrokers or corporate lawyers, we…

  • Australian Research Blogs

    Adrian Miles has a good start on his list of Australian research blogs, the idea for which emerged out of a fibreculture discussion. I hope he can find ways to let the list grow without it getting silly, or annoying for him to maintain.