Links to four papers I presented in the 1990s at the excellent Teaching Learning Forum in Perth which remind me that subjectivity and discourse are crucial terms which remain of great relevance to understanding why and how education works. Apologies for the archival publication! Click to read more
Facebook occupies a significant amount of attention in thinking about the proliferation of digital networking in everyday life and this attention now also extend to universities which have, for some years, been wrestling with the appropriateness of using Facebook (in various ways), to improve student learning. In this paper I do two things. First, I try to present a comprehensive summary of Facebook’s principal features, noting that its underlying function is to permit reciprocal exchanges of attention. Second, I review the way several academics have written about their experiences of using Facebook ‘in education’ to discern the tensions between norms of university education and this everpresent system. The main conclusions concern the way Facebook blurs boundaries between traditionally separated spaces of formal and informal education, while noting the risks involved in academic becoming part of the attention-oriented norms of contemporary social networking. Click to read more
This paper, co-authored with Barratt and Lenton, demonstrates that the use of filtes and other generalised internet censorship mechanisms can produce harmful results, specifically in the context of drug education for harm reduction. Blocking the many drug information forums and sites drives discussion of drugs into the ‘dark web’ where it cannot be easily controlled and where it is linked to the actual distribution of illicit drugs. Click to read more
This short paper presents some ideas about the difficulties which have arised in ‘selling’ the National Broadband Network in Australia in recent years – the paper is delivered to the symposium “Convervging on an NBN future’, held at the University of Canberra and organised by Sora Park, Catherine Middleton and myself. Click to read more
A speech given, in my role as Chair of the Library Board of WA, on the importance of local libraries, in the 60th year of the partnership between state and local government in Western Australia. Click to read more
Details of the up-coming symposium – Converging on an NBN Future: Content, Connectivity, and Control – to be held in Canberra on 9 October. My contribution will be a short paper, Selling the NBN: The politics of broadband in Australia. Link to the free symposium registration inside. Click to read more
What was Web 2.0? Versions as the dominant mode of internet history, published in New Media and Society, is now available through Online First publication. This paper is one of several that I have written / am writing that attempt to explore the consequences for how we collectively ‘think’ the internet as a result of Web 2.0. Links here to the other posts. Click to read more
In this recent paper, published in Media International Australia, I argue that Web 2.0 cab be understood, not as a technology or practice, but as the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, historicising the internet so that it is now understood as different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. While Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the ‘future’, it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality. Click to read more
Some thoughts about community, work, business and differential profit, but recognising that community management is here to stay. Perhaps community management however is a new research object for scholars, rather than the communities themselves? It seems to me that managers are creating subjects Click to read more
An attempt to mashup Barry, boyd and Baym – networked individualism egocentric networks and more. A long form version of a shorter keynote talk to the SWARM community management conference. Warning: exposure draft so watch out for dodgy logic and excessive wordiness. Click to read more
