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
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
Sparked in part by the increasing enthusiasm of academics for the possibilities of Facebook and online learning, as well as the ready embrace of the use of this system by students in Internet Studies, I have begun thinking of Facebook as a site for analysis of the relationship between students and academics in society. The results, entitled provisionally, ‘An Education “in” Facebook’, are presented here (full paper attached as pdf) Click to read more
I spoke recently at the Media140 Perth Conference, on the digitalfamily day, presenting some views on the now and future state of education, in which social media and digital media devices will make a big difference to the way that we think about learning. My presentation is a visual evocation of both the similarities between school education in the past and the differences which new connective technologies are bringing. Slides, with full notes, are available. Click to read more
I recently organised a symposium at Curtin University entitled Broadband in Society: International Perspectives and Research Challenges. The symposium was held to mark the formation of the BroadBand Research Team, involving several international researchers all with a particular interest in the social and policy dimensions of emering high-capacity, fast broadband networks such as Australia’s National Broadband Network. My presentation, entitled Broadband in Australia: commonplace but why? considers the extent and significance of the Internet connectivity in this country, especially since most people have some kind of a broadband connection, and also looks at the importance of understanding the relationship between mobile and fixed connectivity. Broadband in Australia – commonplace but why? View more presentations from Matthew Allen
A paper presented at the Australian Media Traditions conference exploring the historicity of the Internet through the use within discourse of Web 2.0. Click to read more
New Challenges in Education: Online learning, knowledge networks, ‘edgeless’ universities Kennesaw State University, 6 October, 11.30 am KSU Center (Room 300). I will be visiting Kennesaw State U shortly to present on e-learning, Web 2.0 and changing nature of education on 6 October, courtesy of Dr Keith Herndon, the university’s Institute for Global Initiatives and the Department of Communication, and the Technology Association of Georgia. Abstract Online learning has been part of the provision of university education since the emergence of the internet. However, in recent years, there have been more intensive efforts to marry together traditions of university learning and academic excellence with the flexibility and creative possibilities of online delivery. This paper summarises the benefits that Internet-enabled learning has brought to distance and off-campus university education in the past decade or more, noting that Australia has a rich history of distance education. The paper also explores the way in which the so-called Web 2.0 revolution in online affairs has, to some extent, created a false sense of novelty in online learning. Nevertheless, Web 2.0, with its emphasis on social media and user-generated content, has made a difference and opens up new approaches to learning. The paper concludes … Click to read more
Speaking in a couple of weeks at the Internet Research 12.0 conference ‘Performance and Participation’ My paper, Web 2.0 from the ground up: defining the participatory web in its own terms, is based on an analysis using Leximancer of 750,000+ words used to describe 12,000+ Web 2.0 applications. Some of the fun I am having includes generating dubious yet intriguing infographics…. However, I am still struggling to find the right way to explain how I get from this to what I seek to conclude, concerning the way the discourse of Web 2.0, very much a language of computing, is now reshaping our sense of self.
