Reflections on BlogOz (2): Sessions

Now that BlogOz is well and truly over, here’s some well digested reflections on the sessions I attended.

The opening plenary was interesting as far as seeing John Quiggin, Sen. Andrew Bartlett and Duncan Riley talk about blogging in general. However, meta blogging isn’t really that interesting to me. T’other thing is that the first session seemed a little skewed towards the idea that blogging has the power to change the world and also that the “Australian” blogosphere needs to have more of a voice internationally. I’m shy of revolutionary statements so I won’t say anything about changing the world through blogging. Whether the Australian “blogosphere” needs more national or international influence is also something that I’m not really particularly interested in, from the perspective of my blogging. I blog in a (set of) very niche areas that will, in general, never cross into the two main thrusts of “blogosphere” interest: (1) current, commercial, tech-stuff and (2) politics. Not that I have no opinions about either topic, just that it’s not why my blog is for. I’m not looking for international influence, or, as Mel put it, eyeballs.

The second session for the day was Research(ing) Blogging and Blogging about Research which is a topic I’m much more interested in. Axel’s contribution, as a research blogger who does research in blogging was interesting and he had the most to say that would be of interest to the non-academic audience. As someone who has more than a bit of programming and maths geekiness going in, Axel’s stuff was very cool. Jean and Mel’s focus, as bloggers and as researchers who are interested, in part, in blogging was more closely aligned with my experiences as a researcher who blogs. Of course, there aren’t too many interaction design researchers who blog on the topics that I’m interested in so my “community” is really quite small. (see previous paragraph!) The discussion in that session was interesting because it seemed that many researchers who blog have a similar perspective on blogging. Perhaps this is because many people in the session were post-grad students who are using their blogs as on-line research diaries. Career academics who blog, as Jean and Mel and I have recently become, could perhaps have a different focus of achieveing more influence. However, the recent kerfuffle surrounding danah boyd’s posting of a draft of an idea about class divisions perhaps being apparent in who uses myspace and facebook might serve as a cautionary tale about academics putting incomplete research into the non-academic public sphere before it has coalesced into a fully formed and well articulated argument. Or perhaps it also serves as an example of how the non-academic (in the career sense) public don’t understand the difference between published and unpublished research in the same way that academics do.
Lunch was served.

I attended the Blogging in Education session after lunch, ably moderated by Tama Leaver. This session had a focus on the use of blogging in, and for, teaching from K-12 and in higher-ed. I currently don’t teach but it was interesting to hear of how primary school teachers and children have used blogs to extend classroom activities. Tama spoke about his experiences using blogs in his teaching at university. I was particularly interested in how he got around the, in my experience, often restrictive policies that universities enforce on web-content that is used for teaching. Tama said that he was using blogs in teaching before such policies were implemented so he was, in some sense, outside the walls that those policies erect. I was inspired to think about how I could use different web-supported content in my future teaching.

The final session was The Future of Blogging which was a nicely free-form session. Joanne Jacobs blogged it “live”, saving me from explaining it here!

Lastly there was the obligatory pub session which I had to skip out on early. T’was sad to miss the most social aspect of the day, but, as most everyone who attended blogs, finding out what people thought isn’t difficult.