Just Differently Intelligent...

Surveillance & Society

The latest issue of Surveillance & Society is (finally) out now!

A special on 'Surveillance and Mobilties', edited by Colin Bennett and
Pris Regan, it features many excellent new pieces and artwork too.

It's all at the usual place:
http://www.surveillance-and-society/

Interested in Learning?

Please fill out my survey. Joel Weiss and I are working on a plan for an Encyclopedia of Learning with Kluwer Academic Publishers, and Kluwer has put together a survey go get some general information from folks interested in Learning.

Here's the raw URL. If you could share it, blog it, mail it to your friends, I'd greatly appreciate it.

http://www.zoomerang.com/recipient/survey-intro.zgi?ID=L2233PCDY3U5&PIN=8Y8GBPYDDFCT

Terry Talks

[It was one of Terry's books that first helped me understand critical theory back in the 1980s. He's great.]

Terry Eagleton will be here, in Toronto, in 2 weeks time. He is speaking at U. of Toronto the week of January 26 -29 on a series of lectures concerning the Art of Terror. Below is the blurb:

Jan. 26-29, The Alexander Lectures presents cultural theorist Terry Eagleton, regis professor, University of Oxfod, England on the ART of Terror. The series includes "Terror and Modernity" (Jan. 26); "The Art of Terror" (Jan. 27); "The Metaphysics of Terror" (Jan. 28); and "Beyond Terror" (Jan. 29). All lectures take place at University College, room 140, 15 Kings College Circle at 4:30 pm. (416) 978-7516 or sue.underhill@utoronto.ca

Surveillance and the Undead

Saw this and had to send it to Steve Mann and Berry Wellman... as we wrote a surveillance paper together.

Hampton Court Palace, which I think was King Henry the 8th's, has been picking up strange events on security cams. A door opening on its own, then a hazy figure in medieval robes reaches out and closes them.

Check it out.
Happy Winter Solistice!!!

Senior Fellow

I was just formally invited to join the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology as a 'Senior McLuhan Fellow'.

It has been in the works for a while, and I've had it noted on my .signature for email. But now, it is real. Nice holiday present. Thanks Derrick, Mark and all the exec.

KMD1002 & 2003 Syllabi

I've put up the bare bones of the KMD1002 and 2003 courses at
http://jasonnolan.net/kmd1002/
http://jasonnolan.net/kmd2003/

Just the basics, while I finish marking. There is still room in both courses for any UofT graduate students. But just some. Thanks for sharing it about.

Out and about today...

Job applications and CV revisions this morning. I got a great suggestion for a CV model (Nick Burbules') from a friend who will not be mentioned by name. And letter revision suggestions from Julia et al.

Then Ryerson to collect assignments.

I'm going to be visiting Ron Baecker's KMD1001 course today, to try and entice students to take either of my KMD1002 and KMD2003 courses this evening.

One of those days that make you feel like a teacher.

Content and Busy...

Having a strange fit of calm activity... sending out a number of job applications, and putting the finishing touches on my two KMD courses for next term.

Donna Haraway... audio

Megan gave me this link:
http://www.women.it/cyberarchive/files/haraway.html
to Donna J. Haraway / Alpha Bitches Online: the Dog Genome for the Next Genderation

Presented at the IV European Feminist Research Conference "Body Gender Subjectivity. Crossing borders of disciplines and institutions" (..go..), that took place in Bologna - Italy from September 28th to October 1st, 2000.

My RCAT presentation... as an online movie...

Thanks to James and the folks at iKIT, I have a digital version of my presentation at RCAT's The Significance of 'Communities of Scholars' in the Academic Environment: Blogging and Community of Scholars.

It is an 'off the top of my head' presentation, so forgive my slight slipups and whatnot.

Click below to see the whole hour...

Off to RCAT to speak on blogs and scholarly communities

I'm giving my talk on Blogging and the The Significance of 'Communities of Scholars' in the Academic Environment at RCAT in 30 minutes. Hope some of you can come by. Here are my notes: Community of Scholars if you can't.

Visiting the Osborne, and Yelling at Students

I barked at my Ryerson students today. Almost none of them did the readings. :( Sad. But I guess it is just my old sins coming back to haunt me. I really did plan for a nice discussion on Lisa Nakamura's book Cybertypes. Harumph.

Before that, I took my Vic1 class to the amazingly wonderful Osborne collection of early children's books. Yuka works there, as you well know or know now. Head Librarian Leslie McGrath gave the students an excellent lecture on the resources at the collection, how and why original source materials are to be used, and just gave a great general introduction to the collection and researching literary resources. Tomorrow's class will be a duplicate of this one. Wednesday and Thursday will focus on LM Montgomery and Anne related issues. Vic1 is certainly going to be the highlight of my week.

Charting and Bridging Digital Divides

Wenhong Chen & Barry Wellman's Charting and Bridging Digital Divides: Comparing Socio-economic, Gender, Life Stage, and Rural-Urban Internet Access and Use in Eight Countries is now available online.

Telling Tales Over Time: Constructing and Deconstructing the School Calendar

Joel Weiss and Rob Brown's long awaited article "Telling Tales Over Time: Constructing and Deconstructing the School Calendar" finally came out in TCrecord, the journal of Columbia Teacher's College. You must register to read it, but it is free to register, and well worth reading.

Yay Joel!

Click below to read the abstract:

The September-to-June school calendar has been a fixture of North America for almost a century. Its origins have usually been told as an unexamined tale attributed to features of nineteenth century rural society. We challenge this interpretation by suggesting that multiple pressures arising from increasing urbanization influenced its roots. We present information on the importance of the summer holiday in the development of compulsory schooling in several North American jurisdictions, with the main evidence from Ontario, the most populous province in Canada. We suggest, along with Gold (2002), that this development had wider applicability in several Northeastern and Midwestern American states. Beyond the issue of having an accurate story line, we examine why there has been such resistance in recent times to changing the school year. The school calendar may be another example of an enduring institutional form referred to by Tyack and Tobin as a ìgrammar of schoolingî that resisted fundamental change in the twentieth century. Viewing the school calendarís ties with changes over time in the construction of other clocks of society may enable us to rethink the format of the contemporary school calendar. Finally, we consider the school calendar as part of a larger, ongoing discussion of what constitutes effectiveness of schools.

ECE Annotated Bookmarks Assignment

Just made up a neat Annotated Bookmarks assignment for my early childhood education students at RyersonU. If anyone else does these kinds of assignments, and wants to check it over and make suggestions, I'd appreciate it. It is not something I've done before, and couldn't find any exemplars.

History of Technology at Sheridan

I went out to the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning today. It's out in Oakville, west of Toronto. Commuting. Ugh. Got to the train station at 8:35 for a 9:43 train. But there was a 15 minute line up for train tickets. Missed it. However, after getting a ticket,and having an hour to wait, I went up to the great hall at Union Station. Kenny had sent me an IM last time he was there tosay that there was wireless access. And there is. And it is free. Or seems to be. The network is Bell based, so it maybe recognizing my sympatico account and letting me on. There was a Bell guy there watching me, he'd been installing an internet Kiosk thingy, and he asked me how I was connecting, and was a bit shocked that I could get on, but he too thought it might be because of my sympatico account.

Trains. I like trains. For all too many reasons. They are the great good form of transportation. Though, of course, in Canada, we are punished for taking the trains. Poor and irregular service. And when you do get to a station, it is in the middle of nowhere, and you really need a car to get anywhere from it. Or a bus in this case. I did catch the Oakville transit bus to Sheridan, and got there 15 minutes before I needed to. Sheridan looks very nice, though it seems to be modelled after a shopping centre rather than a university... that is you can't get near the campus unlesss you're willing to wade through a couple of thousand cars. Well modelled after York University. Obviously I have transportation issues on the brain. Don't mind me. I'm a broken record player when it comes to tranportation issues. Sheridan is definately a bright and shiny up and coming Institute. I thought it was more of a college, but obviously not. It's got 'institute of technology' written all over it.

I finally got to meet Dan Zen. I fit in with what appeared to be the manditory departmental dress code: black. I don'tthink that either of us were sure of what to expect from the other, or from the experience, but we both seemed to be willing to 'wing it'. Plugged in my laptop, only to find that I couldn't synch up with one of their two large screens, so we went back to using their system. They did have a bright and shiny touchscreen that allowed me to point and click right on the screen, but I didn't get to make too much use of that. Just a cool building, interesting educators, and an attentive group of students I would rather have spent the afternoon talking with than lecturing to...

Then my mind went blank. And I don't really remember what happened. I call this lecturing. I guess I don't really have room for meta-awareness when I'm trying to get all my synapses firing in syncrhonous orbit. But after an hour, everyone wanted to continue, so I spent another 30 minutes covering what seemed to be the right constellation...

About me:
- computer hostile
- programmer suspicious
- designer demanding
- conceptualizer and creator online learning environments
- http://jasonnolan.net
- Scholar in Res @ KMDI
- Senior Fellow McLuhan Program in culture and tech

New Media?
- Consider the book _New Media: 1740-1915_
Early web... an online community
- What is the net suposed to be?

Why Was the WWW created?
- Network for american military
- able to withstand nuclear attacks

Where to find the old net?

- Ed Krol
- Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet
- http://rfc.sunsite.dk/rfc/rfc1118.html
- The Whole Internet 1992
- OReilly
- Old Web
Browsers
- http://www.dejavu.org/
- Usenet archives et al.
- http://www.archive.org/ wayback machine

How did we communicate on the Internet before the WWW
- ASCII RULED
- talk/IRC - synchronous
- Usenet (uudecode) images
- gopher, FTP - static documents
- telnet
- MUD/MOO polysynchronous
- early chat spaces were MOO-based 'talkers'
- Lost Library of MOO
- Jason's MOO http://projectachieve.net
- development trajectory from MOO > Microsoft
- Pavel Curtis founds LambdaMOO at XeroxParc
- http://lambda.moo.mud.org
- Pavel starts Placeware
- Placeware bought out by Microsoft (summer 2003)
- Microsoft markets Placeware as LiveMeeting

Why are blogs the realization of the net?
- everyone can create
- Internet is still text

Cultural assumptions of the internet
- internet is for everyone
- the tools you are given limit what you can say.
- Hegemony of ASCII paper (http://jasonnolan.net/papers)
dead technologies
- ideas for the future
- medieval illuminated manuscripts > web pages
- public documents
- images and text
- marginalia and comments

Know where the future's coming from
- moos > placeware
- moos > video conferencing
- moos > Multi User online gaming
- moos > COLLIDE - hacking as community

The future of community
- Userdesigned design (UDD)
- flash > UDD
- VRML > UDD
- users > prosumers
- controlling the user to enabling the prosumer
- designers will be designing tools
- designers will design infrastructures
- designers will provide the language for design
- designers will not design passive toys

Hint: the triads of technology
- how can you have an opinion without experience?
- how can you have experience without diverse experience?
- the compleat user has experience on at least 3 platforms
- Unix, Windows, Macintosh
- Photoshop, Fireworks, GraphicConverter
- Dreamweaver, InDesign, raw html coding
- MSword, Wordperfect, AppleWorks
- IRC, ICQ, AIM
- enCoreMOO, MOOcanada, LambdaMOO

Found in the trash... EnviroGoth

I was cleaning up my http://projectachieve.net server, cause one of the partitions was running at 100%. This got me poking into corners that I've not look in in years. I found an old abandoned project called EnviroGoth I was starting up when teaching an Environmental Studies course called "Resurrecting the Garden". It has some interesting links and resources. I hope I get to do more environmental studies some day.

Announcement

I was just informed by Derrick that I'm now a Senior Fellow with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.

Just joined the IEEE's LTTF

The IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force runs the journal Educational Technology & Society (ISSN 1436-4522) and I've written some book reviews and been an executive peer reviewer for them for a couple of years.

"IEEE Computer SocietyLearning Technology Task Force (LTTF) LTTF has been founded on the premise that emerging technology has the potential to dramatically improve learning. The purpose of this task force is to contribute to the field of Learning Technology and to serve the needs of professionals working in this field."

The journal, under Prof. Kinshuk from NZ, is very keen on including non-Western perspectives on educational technology. Which is a good thing^tm.

Just a quickie...

Just got back into town, after 2 days consulting up north... ie living on georgan bay, and installing computers at my dad's house. They're now all Mac users. Dad has a new 17" iMac that he has no idea how to use. Cheryl has an old G3 powerbook which still serves her well. Cats and Emily have 14" and 12" iBooks, respectively.Got speakers for Cats, showed Cheryl how to uses her iPod and DV camera. And arranged for a new printer to be delivered. Happy to be home.

oh ya this blog entry was about something else. I now have 2 confirmed courses to teach this year. KMD1002 (half the course I co-taught last year) and KMD2003: Knowledge Media and Learning. Just waiting on an interview that I had a another local university recently. News August 8.

Jobs Jobs Jobs...

Still marginally unemployed, but there are some interesting things to share. My teaching of the brand new course KMD1002W has been confirmed, finally. This is at KMDI of course. I'm tentatively titleing the course "Critical Issues in Knowledge Media Design." Also, pending funding approval, it looks like I'll have another course in the same constellation, with a focus on Learning. No more details so as to not jinx it. And finally, I'll be doing a one month guest spot at Victoria University's VIC1 program in November... teaching critical thinking skills through the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery and Lewis Caroll. We're hoping to focus the class on the resources available at the osborne collection. Nice feeling... part-time employed.

Cyborg and Community revisited...

Mere days after getting Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments published in Surveillance and Society, Steve tells me that someone wants to publish an expanded version in a book. It never rains...

Anne of the Undead

Just sent off a conference proposal to the next Lucy Maud Montgomery shindig in PEI next June called From the Virtual to the Real: The Construction of Landscape in Anne of Green Gables and Dracula. Sometimes you just have to tell things like they are. But the proposal is here for your delectation >

It is not difficult to see L.M. Montgomery and Bram Stoker as contemporaries, writing Victorian fiction at the dawn of the 20th century. These two writers also share a common bond that is rarely matched by other writers in any period. What they wrote about was imaginative fiction that would become created in the real world long after they had written their works. Both authors constructed fictional topologies based on real places: Montgomery created Green Gables and the community of Avonlea, and Stoker created Dracula's Castle in Romania's Borgo Pass.

Several recent critics (Janice Fiamengo, James De Jonge, Patsy Aspasia Kotsopoulos, et al.) have discussed the process that led to Montgomery's selective reproduction of late-19th-century Prince Edward Island landscape for her fiction. In a forthcoming book chapter about virtual spaces, Benjamin Lefebvre argues that this reinvented landscape becomes a sort of simulacrum (to use Baudrillard's term), free of temporal restraints and therefore suitable for national and international consumption; it is in this way, Lefebvre suggests, that Montgomery's imagined community has proven so easily malleable in adaptations by the Disney Corporation that international tourists have been known to find Sullivan's recreated Avonlea (in Uxbridge, Ontario) more "authentic" than the "real" geographic space of Prince Edward Island. This thinking also extends to Anne's World, constructed in Hokkaido, Japan in the late 1990s. Stoker's work has yet to receive this kind of scholarly inquiry, but this may change with the interest in the proposed Dracula Theme Park, recently slated for Sighisoara, Romania.

Espen Aarseth notes in his discussion of the labyrinth that virtual space predates the development of computers and the Internet by centuries. Both Montgomery and Stoker's works have grown into worlds unto themselves that have expanded beyond the confines of the linear narrative text and that have morphed into labyrinthine worlds that are explored as much as read. And the exploration of these worlds has resulted in pressure from readers for the creation of physical spaces that they can experience firsthand. Despite drawing heavily from her personal experience, Montgomery's work is primarily one of her own imagination. As result of this imaginative text, however, governmental and tourist organizations have had to scramble to (re)create Green Gables and impose Montgomery's vision on already existing topographical features of the area. Stoker, on the other hand, drew from his own imagination and the gothic literary tradition, and worked from published accounts of Transylvannia, such as Emily Gerard's "Transylvanian Superstitions" (1885), in the creation of Dracula's castle in the Borgo Pass (Borgo Prund in Romanian), and the Golden Crone hotel at Bistritza (Bistrita). He went so far as to invent foods such as robber steak, all of which are ficticious constructions. The hotel now exists in downtown Bistrita, as does robber steak. And what was the dirt forest track through the Borgo Prund has been transformed over the past 25 years into a major highway leading up to the Castle Dracula Hotel. Furthermore, this forested area is now a blossoming community of farmers and cottagers, complete with church and nunnery. In both cases, the author's imagination has returned to haunt, cryptically as Derrida conceptualizes it, the landscapes what were in themselves the inspiration for the fiction.

This paper will explore how these two authors' adapted existing landscapes into imaginary fictional constructs, and how the popularity of these fictions, in turn, resulted in real places being transformed to conform with the fiction.

References

Aarseth, Espen. (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins.

Baudrillard, Jean (1988) "Simulacra and Simulations." In Selected Writings. Mark Poster, ed. Stanford: Stanford. Pp. 166-184.

Castricano, Jodey (2001) Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing. Montreal: McGill

De Jonge, James (2002 )"Through the Eyes of Memory: L.M. Montgomery's Cavendish." Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Pp. 252-67.

Fiamengo, Janice (2002) "Toward a Theory of the Popular Landscape in Anne of Green Gables." Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Pp. 225-37.

Foucault, Michel. (1980) "Questions on Geography." In Power/Knowledge. Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon. Pp. 63-77

Gerard, Emily. (1885) "Transylvanian Superstitions"

Kotsopoulos, Patsy Aspasia (2002) "Avonlea as Main Street USA? Genre, Adaptation, and the Making of a Borderless Romance." Essays on Canadian Writing 76:170-94.

Lefebvre, Benjamin. (Forthcoming) "Virtual Avonlea." In The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Peter Trifonas eds. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Montgomery, Lucy Maud (1992) Anne of Green Gables . Toronto: McClelland. Orig. Boston: Page, 1908.

Miller, Elizabeth (2000) Dracula: Sense and Nonsense. Wescliff-on-sea: Desert Island Books.

Nolan, J., Lawrence, J. & Kajihara, Y. (1999). ìMontgomeryís Island in the Net: Metaphor and Community on the Kindred Spirits E-mail List." Canadian Children's Literature. 91, 24:3-4.

Nolan, J. (2002). ìText as Horror: Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derridaís Ghost Writing.î Journal of Dracula Studies. No. 4.

Rubio, Mary, and Elizabeth Waterston. (1985) The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume I: 1889-1910 . Toronto: Oxford.

Rubio, Mary, and Elizabeth Waterston. (1987) The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume II: 1910-1921 . Toronto: Oxford.

Stoker, Bram. (1998) Dracula Unearthed. Annotated and Edited by Clive Leatherdale. Wescliff-on-sea: Desert Island Books.

Zizek, Slavoj (1997) The Plauge of Fantasies. London: Verso.

7/7

The best of all possible days. Happy birthday to me!

Spending the day getting into the major summer workload... that is figuring out how many book chapters and papers and conference proposals I have to write between now and September. That should take all day to do that and work out a plan. Actually a great way to start a new year... figuring out what to do with the first big chunk of it.

Still here...

I'd mentioned to some folks that I might drop off the face of the earth July 1, if I didn't have an academic job. Well, I still don't have full time work, but I do have *just* enough teaching for next year to keep my finger in the pie.

I just wonder why I bother at all... though I have my enthusiasm back in full swing, and am working away on various and sundry projects.

"The Influence of ASCII on the Construction of Internet-based Knowledge."

Just finished the final final revisions of "The Influence of ASCII on the Construction of Internet-based Knowledge." (.doc file) for Jim Hewitt's forthcoming book OISE-UT Paper in Technology Education Dave Goulden provided his usual wisdom and insight and helped me correct some stuff that I'd not really made clear enough.

Influence of ASCII

I just finished a the *final* draft chapter for the forthcoming book OISE-UT Paper in Technology Education called "The Influence of ASCII on the Construction of Internet-based Knowledge." If anyone wants to read it and provide any comments, that would be great.

Conference Over

We found a house that we'd like to buy as the TSD's research centre. Only $15k USD. It is part of the same block as Vlad Tepesh's (Dracula) house, opposite the Sighisoara Hotel. Anyone have any change? Then we went for a tour of the place they were going to put the Dracula THeme park. Wow. It is a massive field at the top of a hill covered with hundreds of oak trees, many 400-500 years old. Luckily this is not going to happen. Yes, I have pictures of it all.

And I finally have a faster ethernet connection. Thanks to the hotel. I'm behind the desk, typing away. Luckily it is quiet, so I am not too much of an imposition.

We're off tomorrow for a 2 day trip of the fictional Dracula sites (i.e. the vampire), but will be back in Sighisoara for two more days before going to vienna.

I have many many wonderful pictures. Pity that I can't share them yet.

J

PS: Yes, yuka is tired of all this conference stuff, and is happy that we will be able to get more tourist stuff done. Oh, and I have pictures of the Hollywood film crew to post, in case they make me look funny in their documentary.

Greetings from Cafe Dracula

Hello all! I'm sitting in the cybercafe "Cafe Dracula" in Vlad Tepesh's home town of Sigishoara, Romania! Two days of the conference have passed, and this is the first opportunity for me to get online. This will be a short post, as I got something in my right eye on the train in from Budapest, and my vision is blurry, and the screen is not that good here, ,so it is hard to see what I'm typing. Thank god there's no romanian keyboard here, so I can type without too much trouble.

Got into Frankfurt and met up with Elizabeth Miller (Barroness of the house of dracula) and flew on to Budapest and caught the 8 hour train to Sighisoara (I'll correct spelling later). and got into the hotel in the old medieval part of town, 30m from Dracula's birth place.

I've got tonnes of amazing pictures, but they'll have to wait until I figure out if they'll let me plug in my computer here. On the train in, I couldn't believe Romania. Looks like a lost war was fought here. Dozens of burned out factories along the way. Amazing but depressing.

The farms are the most wonderful. Everyone is in the fields working. Mostly by hand. Imaging seeing people farming, plowing fields with horse drawn plows! More horses on the roads than cars.

The town of Sighisoara is a dream. I can see why UNESCO has named it a world heritige site. It is a place that should be preserved for future generations. It is untouched by tourism, yet is totally welcoming of visitors.

Most of the conference is going on in Romanian, with simultaneous trranslation, which is particularly exciting. Lots of information from local Ethnographers. I've never been to a conference this small, mostly about a dozen folks at each presentation, but the quality of the presentations is right up there, and the questions are excellent.

After the lectures today we went out for a visit to a fortified Church in a local village. And some young woman was found who could open the church and show us around. I've been to big and famous medieval churches, but nothing like this. It is just the local village church in the middle of a small village. Everything looks like it is out of some fantasy story. More goats in the streets and kids everywhere. There are so many young people around. I guess the G7 notion that chinldren are a major expense doesn't fit here. Children are working in the fields, playing about, and helping out all the old folks. It really feels like an organic existence, especially when you realize how connected they are. Everyone's dressed overly western, interms of fashion and all that. So you don't feel that you're in a back water in terms of culture and information, but that life is more simple and relaxed without being isolated.

Strange, now. There is a small audience looking over my shoulder and poking about in the Cyber Cafe. It seems that I'm worthy of viewing. I guess it is my lack of being local. The folks here are not what I was expecting, much more dark and Roma influenced, I'd guess. But I don't understand how the local cultural et al works, so forgive my generalizations. Romania is now, or soon to be a member of NATO, but I feel like I'm in Transylvannia, whcih I am, the land beyond the forest. A land out of time... well wired, but content to be itself. So much to learn.

Oh, and I just heard from Cal, the GM of the Toronto Zoo, to tell me that we will have the opportunity to meet up with the people handling the Pandas at the Vienna Zoo. Yuka will be thrilled to the nines. And I just can't wait. Thouugh of course I'm in no rush to leave this beautiful place. And I have a paper to worry about reading tomorrow.

Fun Central!

A(o)IR: It never rains.

I heard about my conference proposal for AOIR Toronto this fall. My proposed paper "The Hegemony of ASCII: Rethinging Research into Online Communities in Light of the Deep Structures of the Internet." was ACCEPTED! And I'm also presenting on a blogging panel. I'm also doing the tech for the conference, and I was a conference reviewer. BUT the review process was blind, so I don't feel too bad. The bit that makes me happy is that I'm the only one at the conference giving a paper and doing a panel. Someone else is doing two panels. Apparently I wasn't suposed to put in two proposals. There are 367 out of 560 proposals accepted. I just wish I could remember what the panel was about... (Jason runs off to dig through his outgoing email. Found it. It is called "Broadening the Blog" chaired by Alexander Halavais, SUNY Buffalo)

Accepted!

Just got the word that my paper "Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices to Challenge Surveillance" (with Steve Mann and Barry Wellman)(PDF) as been accepted by Surveillance & Society! With some minor modifications. And with some great reviewer comments. It is worth it when you finally find a forum that is interested in what you're doing.

Sigh...

I didn't get a job offer from Trent. I don't post the ins and outs of my job application process, but since this was one that I really was looking forward to, I just wanted to share. Sort of sucks, but I'm just not finding the academic world that interesting these days, so it is hard to get depressed about it.

Good to be back in class...

The one thing I do miss is when I'm not around class for KMD1000. As usual, students RAWK even when other parts of an educational institution are somewhat moribund. I'm enjoying the student's presentation of their work, and I'm getting eager to see what their final papers/projects are going to look like.

Kelly, Stuart, Henry and Ryan presented today. Some on new and some on previously completed research. More interesting than some of the faculty presentations, and that's a good sign for the future of academe.

[Air-l] Call for Papers - Internet Research 4.0: Broadening the Band - 4th Annual AoIR Conference

[Note: Katherine and I are working on this conference. So you'd better submit something. You folks in KMD1000 better submit something!]

Subject: [Air-l] Call for Papers - Internet Research 4.0: Broadening the Band -
4th Annual AoIR Conference
Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org

[please distribute widely]

Call for Papers - IR 4.0: Broadening the Band
International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of
Internet Researchers in Toronto, Ontario, Canada October 16-19

Lead organizer Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto

Submission site opens: January 15, 2003
Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2003

Conference Website:
http://www.aoir.org/2003 | http://www.ecommons.net/aoir

Digital communications networks such as the Internet are changing the
way people interact with each other, with profound effects on social
relations and institutions. Yet many remain excluded from access and
meaningful participation. It is timely to consider who is included,
who is excluded and what we now know about the composition and
activities of online communities.

Internet Research (IR) 4.0 will feature a variety of perspectives on
Internet, organized under the theme Broadening the Band. As in
previous conferences, the aim is to develop a coherent theoretical
and pragmatic understanding of the Internet and those that are
empowered and disenfranchised by it. IR 4.0 will bring together
prominent scholars, researchers, creators, and practitioners from
many disciplines, fields and countries for a program of
presentations, panel discussions, and informal exchanges.

IR 4.0 will take place at the Hilton Hotel in the heart of downtown
Toronto. The conference is hosted by a team led by the Knowledge
Media Design Institute (KMDI) and its partners at the University of
Toronto. The IR 4.0 steering and working committees reflect the
growing pan-Canadian network of Internet researchers, including
members from Quebec, Alberta, and New Brunswick, in addition to the
local contingent from Toronto, York and Ryerson Universities.

This year's theme, Broadening the Band, encourages wide participation
from diverse disciplines, communities, and points of view. Under the
umbrella theme, contributors are called to reflect upon, theorize and
articulate what we know from within the emerging interdisciplinary
space known as Internet Research.

In a cultural sense, the theme calls attention to the need to examine
access, inclusion and exclusion in online communities. What role do
race, gender, class, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, age,
geography, and other factors play in the degree of online
participation? What are the indicators of meaningful participation?

In a technical sense, the theme points to the development of
broadband, wireless and post-internet networks and applications that
are currently coming on-stream including community, private, public
as well as national research networks (e.g. CA*net 4, Internet 2).
We plan to use these technologies to make the conference an
internet-mediated and internationally accessible event.

In an organizational sense, the theme reflects a widening of AoIR's
reach to include more researchers and constituencies involved in the
evolution of the Internet. French language presentations will be
included in the call for papers for the first time. Researchers and
practitioners in the arts and culture sectors are encouraged to
participate alongside social scientists and humanities scholars and
researchers.

In a thematic sense, "Broadening the Band" suggests widening the
scope of topics and problematics considered within past conferences,
while retaining the consistent emphasis on rigorous research work.
This call for papers thus initiates an inclusive search for
theoretical and methodological correspondences between this expanding
theme and the many disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that
are required to address it with precision.

Possible Topics:
- Who is bridging what: questions and answers on the digital divide
- New directions in digital art
- E-me, e-you? (E- Health, E-Governance, E-Commerce,E-Business,
E-games, E-entertainment, E-other)
- Ethnicity, Race, Identity, Gender, Sexuality, Language(s) and
Diverse Cultural Contexts Online
- Who Decides: Ethics, Law, Politics and Policy of the Internet
- We can't measure that, can we? Meaningful Indicators for Internet
Access, Participation, Use and Effects
- Who owns what? Value, Space, and Commons on the Internet
- Is there an Author, a Publisher, or writing on the internet?
- Transformed by Technics: New Technologies and The Post-Internet Age
- Who is watching your computer, when You're not watching it....
- When we are glocal: the internet in global and local manifestations
- I put my lesson plans on the internet, what changed? Teaching,
Learning and the Internet
- Digital media and terror/ism: global flows, economies, and surveillance
- Social movements, net-based activism, and hactivism in a global arena
- Which methods, whose theories? determining approaches to internet research
- Why did we digitize that, and what's it worth? Exploring the value
of digital content

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to trigger ideas
and encourage submissions from a range of disciplines. The organizers
will take an active role in generating and joining the various
interests into appropriate formats.

Submission of Proposals

The Association of Internet Researchers invites paper, presentation,
and panel proposals from AoIR members and non-members on topics that
address social, cultural, political, economic, and aesthetic aspects
of the Internet. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions as well as
submissions from within specific disciplines. French language
presentations will be included in the call for papers for the first
time. We especially seek panel proposals that establish connections
across disciplines, institutions, and/or continents. We also
encourage creative presentations that will make use of Internet
technologies and artistic techniques. Proposals for papers should be
in the form an approximately 500-750 word abstract. Creative
presentations and demonstration projects should consist of an
approximately 500-750 word abstract, plus brief illustrative
material. Panels will generally include three to four papers or
presentations. The panel organizer should submit an approximately 500
word statement describing the session topic, include abstracts of up
to 250 words for each paper or presentation, and indicate that each
author is willing to participate in the session. Abstracts and
proposals may be submitted for review in English or in French.

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted
abstracts on the basis of peer review, coordinated and overseen by
the Program Chair, assisted by sub-chairs with expertise in specific
areas of scholarly and aesthetic knowledge relating to the Internet.

Proposals can be for three types of contribution to the conference: -
papers, creative presentations, and panels. Each person is invited to
submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. People may also
propose a panel of papers or presentations, of which their personal
paper or presentation must be a part. Average time allotted for a
paper or creative presentation will be 20 minutes. Average time
allotted for a panel will be 1 hour and 30 minutes, including
discussion time.

Detailed information about format of submission and review is
available at the conference website http://www.aoir.org/2003. All
proposals must be submitted electronically at
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/confman/ (_note_ - submission site opens
January 15, 2003).

Deadlines:

Submission site available: January 15, 2003
Final date for proposal submission: March 1, 2003
Author notification: April 1, 2003
Presenter's Registration to the conference: September 1, 2003
Student Award: Completed paper: September 1, 2003

Graduate Students:

Graduate students are strongly encouraged to submit proposals. They
should note their student status with submission in order to be
considered for a special Student Award. Students wishing to be a
candidate for the Student Award must also send a final paper by 1st
September 2003.

Canadian graduate students outside of central Canada should note that
funds may be available for travel and subsistence. Notice will be
sent out to the AoIR list as soon as funding commitments are
confirmed.

To ensure diverse participation, registration fees will be kept low
for presenters, and a billeting and room sharing system will be
established. Simultaneous French language translation will be
available (subject to budgetary considerations) in certain sessions.

Pre-Conference Workshops

Prior to the conference, there will be a limited number of
pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with
in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals
for these pre-conference workshops; local presenters are encouraged
to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their
labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000
words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology,
structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well
as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals
will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add
significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth,
hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic
connections. These proposals and all inquires regarding
pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to
the Conference Chair aoir@ecommons.net, and will be accepted up to
June 15th. Notification of terms and space allocations will be sent
out as soon as details are confirmed, with final acceptance required
by June 30, 2003.

CONTACT INFORMATION

If you have questions about the conference, program, or AoIR, please contact:

Program Chair: Matthew Allen, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
m.allen@curtin.edu.au
- All inquiries on review and acceptances

Program Co-chair: David Mitchell, University of Calgary
mitchell@ucalgary.ca
- Inquiries on conference themes and special technology themes

Conference Chair: Liss Jeffrey, Knowledge Media Design Institute and
McLuhan Program, University of Toronto
aoir@ecommons.net
- All inquiries on Toronto conference and pre-conference workshops

Associate coordinator: Katherine Parrish, OISE/University of Toronto
aoir@ecommons.net

AoIR President: Steve Jones
sjones@uic.edu

Association Website: http://www.aoir.org

Conference Website: http://www.aoir.org/2003 | http://www.ecommons.net/aoir

SousveillanceRus

Steve just put up the PDF version of our paper... for your dining and dancing pleasure... Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments (pdf - 900k) by Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman.

Weddings, parties, anything. And Bongo-jive a speciality...

For Kat and Ben

From Something Awful, here is I'm Always Right: The Definitive Guide to the Simpsons. I was looking about for the blogging image I put up yesterday, which the nice people at Something Awful so nicely blocked. And I found this article from Dec. 15.

Steve and Barry's 42 Flavours...

Putting the finishing touches on the paper that Barry Wellman Steve Mann and I have been working on since forever. Actually, my most recent activity has been to join version 37 with version 42. In 38 we had to cut it in half, and reposition it for a publication that then didn't take it, for silly reasons. Now we have to put in what we cut, but not lose all the polishing from 38-42. It has made my brain hurt.

So, I'm spending the day at home in my PJs.

Ack factor x

I just got 6 job applications ready to be sent off tomorrow. And then I was looking through the University Affairs web site. I found fifteen (15) more jobs to apply for. Will this insanity never end?

AAUP - List of Censured Administrations

Who says you can't find everything on the Internet? This site lists US colleges that have been blacklisted for not living up to the responsibilities that institutions have to their faculty. "Investigations by the American Association of University Professors of the administrations of the institutions listed below show that, as evidenced by a past violation, they are not observing the generally recognized principles of academic freedom and tenure endorsed by this Association..."

Quote of the day

Acutally yesterday. Talking with Roger and he couldn't understand why I love Baudrillard until I told him: "Baudrillard's French poststructural trailer trash." And somehow that made it all better.

cyborg42.pdf a big honking PDF

The $*@#^@!~!! Sousveillance paper is finally done and submitted. I just like the file name, cyborg42.pdf, and the fact that it has the number 42 as a version number. It is a big honking 1.2meg pdf file, but it is ever so pretty. The editor has it now, and hopefully it will be in print sometime this fall.

Special thanks to Salmoon and Rhonna for proofreading help. You're both mentioned in the acknowledgements.

kewl, eh?

Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers

Workstudy

Yay! Had a meeting with my first workstudy student this year... Shelby! She was in my ENV321 class last year. I hope she gets 'permission' to participate in the workstudy program. If all goes well, she's going to help with library work on the Newburgh/Map 12thC vampire stuff, Ben and my 'Anne of the Undead' paper (both mentioned below), and perhaps even Pollen... if there's something to be done. Good start to a happy day.

Blogging the Critics.

I've not got 36 blogs set up for English 3150 The Writer-Critic that Roger's teaching up at York. It will be an interesting experiment in using MT (moveabletype.org) as a class tool. I've used Twiki and Blogger.com in the past, and this one has had some neat advantages and disadvantages. So far, Twiki tops my chaotic list... though I miss comments in Twiki.

Cryptomimesis: Endebtedness, Haunting and Desire in the Works of Jacques Derrida

I just finished a 'final' draft of a book review called: Cryptomimesis: Endebtedness, Haunting and Desire in the Works of Jacques Derrida that should be going off to the Journal of Dracula Studies at the end of the week. Anyone wanna read it and leave any comments? If you dare. They'd be muchly appreciated...

the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter

From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter [NY Times, login required.]

I do want to rant long and deep on this issue. I got online in November 1987. I cried when the net opened to biz. I cried, though later cheered, when the WWW came along.

Now people (like bruce sterling) are complaining that the net is dying because of the dotBomb, and the post-apocalyptical porn and fraud biz, along with the snakeoil salespeople.

I didn't want biz, but they came, they failed, they complained. And they think that their revenant afterglow is some nasty plague.

The net will get back to people talking to people, and looking for the information that they want from public and personal caches of information.

The sooner that people give up on the net as a get rich quick scheme and go somewhere else, the more quickly we can go on living our lives. Hopefully some of us will make a living online, but I don't want to see anyone making a killing online.

Building Virtual Communities is out!

Building Virtual Communities - Cambridge University Press is out!

Inflated Highschool Marks? Never!

U of T examines results of private academies
in an attempt to see if students are buying inflated marks. Next we'll have entrance exams.

Just let me teach first year courses, and we'll find out bloody quickly who should be there and who shouldn't. What a comforting thought.

Nobody told me it was online.

If you go to Barry Wellman's Publications page you can find http://wearcam.org/cyborg_and_community/cyborg.pdf, the forthcoming publication that Steve and I did with barry.

Encyclopedia of Community

[Just posted this on GTAbloggers first...]
I just got an invitation to contribute an entry on blogging for the Encyclopedia of Community to be published by Sage in 2003. As the editors say, "We believe that this much-needed work will define the field of community and community studies and provide a common ground for future research and exploration..."

Don't you bet that for some reason the notion of weblogs is going to centre on Toronto and my friends? I hope not, but I know that when I read about online community, you wonder why it seems to reflect a community I'm not part of. Well, perhaps not htis time.

Sousveillance

Just finished a paper withSteve Mann and Barry Wellman called "Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices to Challenge Surveillance" and submitted it to the "Bulletin of Sociological Methodology" (I don't remember how to spell the title in French, which is the correct one).

KMD1000

The web page for the new graduate course,KMD1000, I'm teaching next year. If you want to take the course, here's where you get the information. You can register through ROSI, and the course is open to select 4th Year students by permission of the course instructor(s).

Going Legit.

I just joined the a.(o).i.r, Association of Internet Researchers. That is I actually paid my dues and am a card carrying member, rather than haunting the list forever as I have... and I'm on the committee for the 2003 aoir conference in Toronto, so it is time.

I don't know what this means, but I just wanted to share.

BlogWars in the Times

A Rift Among Bloggers.

strange, I was online mooing and blogging with Hildegarde on September 11... it was just another part of blogging... being there. Figures that I'd miss this post-Sept 11 rant of Americanism.

What Salmon says about the blogging community is true. ;-)

Reading Movies with Salmon

Spent the day doing many things... meeting with Peter, Joel, Vera and Katherine at OISE to work on the International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. Then meeting Ron about the KMD 1000 course this fall, which will be public tomorrow! Then I met Salmon and drank beer while waiting for Yukazine for some Mexican shrimp and beer.

Yuka later ignored us while we started reading Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. It is both hard and dangerous to read movies. First you need paper. Then you need a remote control. And anyone stops the movie at any time to make notes. Then the laughter starts. It took 20 minutes to just get through the credits! And after 2 hours of note taking hilarity, we had to stop... only 40 minutes into the movie. Some people!