Blog Hui 2006

Paper Summary:

This presentation will examine how blogging can be used as a tool for media and community activism. It examines a number of examples where blogging has been used as a training ground for converting activists into writers with a view to enabling changes in social attitudes toward unpopular and unconventional groups and ideas.

Presenter Profile:
Irfan Yusuf is a 36 year old Sydney-based industrial relations and human rights lawyer. He is also an occasional lecturer in the School of Politics & International Relations at Macquarie University.

From humble beginnings of writing in small community-based publications at age 16 until he was forced to take time from lawyering in February 2002, Irfan’s writing was largely limited to small ethno-religious based publications.

In February 2003, Irfan published his first online article in the progressive Muslim website MuslimWakeUp!. Since that time, he became an almost regular contributor to the site.

Irfan’s work has also featured on other North American and Middle-East-based Muslim websites, including NaseebVibes, The American Muslim and Arab World Books.

Irfan started writing his first blog, Planet Irf, in July 2002. His passion for writing and blogging really took off after he co-authored a piece for the Ramadan diary of MWU. Since then, he has built up a stable of five full-time blogs and one seasonal blog. Irfan also contributes to the Ihsan blog which has over 25 contributors from all shades of Sufi and Muslim opinion.

Since April 2005, he has also been publishing commentary and opinion pieces in mainstream newspapers in Australia and New Zealand. His pieces cover a broad range of topics including: religion and spirituality, gender relations, international relations, conservative politics and legal issues. Irfan’s articles have appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Canberra Times, Brisbane Courier-Mail, New Zealand Herald, Dominion-Post and The Press.

Despite a long history in Australian conservative politics, Irfan’s blogging and writing pursuits have offended conservative Parliamentarians. He was even named in Federal Parliament after offending one prominent conservative MP. Irfan’s blogging has also landed him spots on community and mainstream radio.

Irfan is also a columnist for a number of news and commentary websites including www.NewMatilda.com, www.altmuslim.com, www.WebDiary.com.au and www.OnlineOpinion.com.au. His blog entries have also been cited regularly in the Australian e-zine www.Crikey.com.au.

As a confirmed addict of American humorist PJ O’Rourke (though more likely as a means to avoid defamation proceedings), Irfan’s preferred writing genre is humour and satire.

Paper summary:
This praxis paper is about informing one’s practice through ‘blogging’ or ‘diarising’.

As many a budding trainee teacher knows, research informs teaching, or at least from the literature one reads (for example, Roach, Blackmore and Dempster, 2001). Occasionally, however, it also leads one away from teaching. This paper will discuss in brief the evolution of The Power House from a mostly personal online diary to a blog where mostly online reflections of educational theory and women’s studies topics are discussed. Some thought will also be made with regards to womensstudies.info, a proposed collaborative blog to be shared among volunteer gender and women’s studies undergraduates past and present. The author’s hypotheses about the likely success or failure of womensstudies.info will be discussed, and how it may hinge (Reason, 2006) on ethics.

In turn, the paper will talk about how use of The Power House ‘informed’ [1] the author’s teaching, changed his career focus [2] from primary to tertiary level teaching training, and [3] how it is proposed this evolves to an experimental method of the author to encourage interstudent participation in women’s studies research, teaching and learning.

Presenter profile: Jonathan Ah Kit
Jonathan is an honours candidate in Gender and Women’s Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington College of Education. He popped his head through the door of the women’s studies department at the college 1½ years ago and never left. His paper talks in part about why he didn’t return to the teaching programme, and how he thinks perhaps his diary helped inform that.

His research interest is currently in magistrate Oswald Mazengarb’s seminal 1954 report on juvenile moral delinquency in the home of his youth, Lower Hutt, and earlier inquiries on alleged sexual ‘deviancy’ in the 1920s.

When acting as if he isn’t studying, he pretends to be webmistress of Student Christian Movement Aotearoa, a liberal Christian student group, and masquerades as the secretary of its VUW (Victoria University, Wellington) branch.

Paper summary:
This research examines the convergence of Learning Management Systems and Weblogs. It examines the use of hosted blog software and syndication to integrate Weblogs into password-protected LMS environments. We suggest that existing Learning Management Systems inadequately support Blogging, as they do not allow for the natural development of social networks.

Using this framework, a Weblog-based Learning System is proposed to test and evaluate the efficacy of integrating Blogging systems with online learning environments.

The proposed Weblog-based Learning System will create an ‘Institutional Blogosphere’. Each user will have a Blog, and Courses will be presented as collaborative Blogs. As social software, it enables Blogging beyond the institution while providing options for access control. User’s content can be exported for inclusion in e-Portfolios or importing to a personal Blog. Theories of Weblog-based Learning Management Systems have been put forward, although most follow of the model of Administrator – Lecturer – Student. Drawing on the concept of an “Architecture of Participation”, the proposed system will focus on facilitation, rather than management, of online learning.

This paper will present a case for a Weblog-based Learning System, exploring the possibilities of an Institutional Blogosphere through a prototype Learning Facilitation System.

Presenter profile: Kate Rodgers

Kate is a Master of Science candidate at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Her research interests are in the use of blogs in Online Learning, and how they can be implemented within existing learning environments. Her other research interests include accessible and usable web design, narratives of games, hypertext and wireless networking.

She has diverse experience in educational Information Technology, having previously worked as a trainer, administrator and designer. Her day job is an LMS Systems Administrator, and she runs a small consultancy business providing web design and information management services. Passionate about web standards, she is always finding ways to extend the limits of her CSS/XHTML skills, although her clients sites often come before her blog.

When not working or studying, she spends way to much time tinkering with her Macs and collecting retro toys.

Paper summary:

The development of blogs can be traced as far back as 1994 and the creation of the term weblog to 1997. However, while for pioneers of ‘logging the web’ the process of hand-coding pages with regular updates was of little consequence, for the majority, this was and remains to be a difficult and tiresome experience. Consequently, it was not until the development of hosted and streamlined blogging tools that that the popularity of blogging became more widespread. Indeed, this popularity in use has led blogging to become, for many industries, a key, educational, professional development and communicative activity.

In these contexts, however, the generic hosted blogging services offered by ‘blog providers’ such as Blogger, Live Journal and Typepad do not meet the requirements of most organisations. Universities want ultimate control over the content that might be published on student (and staff) sites, businesses want commercially-in-confidence information to be blogged securely on the intranet and most corporate and institutional users want greater degrees of customisability, control and flexibility than these services are able to offer. In this context there has been a surge in the development of open source and for-profit multi-user blogging tools which allow organisations to provide, develop and control the use of blogs as a business exercise.

This paper examines the development of these tools from a technical and practical perspective. It asks which elements of these tools have developed in importance over time, which have ceased to be used and which have been added. It explores current and future possible applications of these tools in light of existing and developing functionality and asks what the future holds for the uses of organisational and institutional blogs and blogging in education, communication and business.

Presenter profile:
James Farmer is a social architect with a particular interest in the development and use of web 2.0 technologies. He’s the founder of the edublogs.org group of sites, runs the web consultancy business Blogsavvy and works in the public and private sectors looking at how technologies can shape the way organisations and individuals communicate. He’s also got a sideline in events management having co-organised the 2005 conference Blogtalk Downunder and being the founder of The Edublog awards. When not involved in running all of this under the incsub flag, he keeps the blog Incorporated Subversion, spends a fair bit of time wandering up and down Melbourne’s Yarra river and will quite happily bore you death on the subjects of football (the real version) and poker, but beat you at neither.

Paper summary:
How do we get teaching staff interested in using blogs for learning and teaching? Do professional development workshops actually make a difference?

This paper will present the findings to date of a one year study following three groups of participants who attended introductory workshops on blogging. The aim of the study is to follow up with the participants a three monthly intervals for one year following their attendance at the workshop. Are they or their students blogging after one year?

Presenter profile:

Carol Cooper and Peter Gossman work in Teaching and Learning Services at Lincoln University.

Carol has been using technologies in teaching for over two decades and has recently become interested in blogging in the last two years. She writes regularly in her own blog carol-cooper.blogspot.com and runs workshops to encourage others to explore blogging possibilities with students. She was an Edublog 2005 nominee.

Peter is a relative newcomer to interactive educational technology but has a background in teaching and teacher training and an interest in educational research.

Paper summary:
A presentation in two parts. The first argues that most blogging fits into a definition of play conceived as activity in a ‘flow channel’ described by Csikszentmihalyi in ‘Flow: the Psychology of Happiness’. In short, blogging makes bloggers happy and, as such, is an essentially playful activity. Part two then looks at the Baghdad blogger, Salam Pax, and at recent blogging in China, and asks what happens to the blogging ‘flow channel’ when things get serious, and whether these examples are a break from playful blogging or in fact an extension of the same principles.

Presenter profile: Professor Dan Fleming

Dan is interested in the relationships that interconnect popular culture, critical pedagogy, social realities and communication technologies and in how the creative industries relate to these. The author of the books Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (1996) and Media Teaching (1993) and editor of Formations: a 21st Century Media Studies Textbook (2000), Dan has lectured in Scotland and Northern Ireland, worked in community video, was a visiting research fellow in British Telecom’s video-on-demand trials, has held a visiting lectureship in new media at a Brazilian university, was one of the founding faculty in the Centre for Media Research in Northern Ireland and helped launch Northern Ireland’s pioneering industry-approved Masters degree in Film and Television Management and Policy. The recipient of a Distinguished Teaching award from the University of Ulster, he was subject leader there for Media Studies, Media Arts and Journalism before coming to Waikato in 2005. An Ulster Scot, Dan is keenly interested in questions of cultural identity and centre-periphery relations. Among several research grants, he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship in 2001 to investigate visual constructions of identity in the ‘Last Best West’, the Canadian prairie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is exploring ways of using multimedia to present work of this kind.

Unfortunately, work demands has meant Brad will be unable to present at Blog Hui. Brad and Team Blog Hui are disappointed by this unexpected turn of events.

Paper summary:
As blogging moves increasingly into the business domain, its potential use for communication and collaboration within an organisation is now becoming apparent. IBM has embraced blogging wholeheartedly and this paper examines the following aspects of this initiative:

• Genesis: How did blogging get onto the agenda at one of the world’s largest organisations? Who were the instigators and how did they gain executive support?
• How: What does IBM’s blogging program look like? What tools and guidelines have been provided, and how effective have they been?
• Examples: Who is blogging in IBM? What are they talking about, and has it been well received?
• Results: Has the program been a success? If so, in what respect? What (if any) conclusions have we been able to derive so far?
• Future Directions: What’s in store for the IBM bloggers? How does this align with supporting programs around Wikis and Podcasting?

Finally, this paper will attempt to draw conclusions from IBM’s overall experience and map those to the needs of enterprises (of all sizes) in general. As an early adopter of enterprise blogging, IBM’s experience can act as a microcosm of the entire social networking movement.

Presenter profile:
Brad Kasell is the Asia-Pacific Manager for IBM Software Group’s Emerging Technologies division. Brad’s primary responsibility is helping customers get started with Rich Internet Applications, Open Source, and Social Networking, as well as various other technologies such as Autonomic Computing that are related to IBM’s On Demand software strategy.

Brad has recently re-joined IBM after spending six years working in a consulting capacity for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Excite@Home in the United States. During a prior tenure with IBM Australia Brad worked as a Senior Software Engineer and Project Manager on a variety of application development projects. Brad’s industry experience includes retail (apparel), telecommunications, pharmaceutical, utilities (electricity), insurance, and interactive marketing/advertising.

Brad holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (Honours) and a Master of Business Administration (International Business), with both degrees from the University of Technology, Sydney.