Do technologies of convenience shape activity? I work with students to rethink the concept of the ‘filter bubble’ and locate it in a much broader context of how the subject position of user is created through affordances of technologies and services. At stake is whether or not there is a new kind of audience passivity, […]
Category Archives: Academia
Facebook Research Critiques
Engineers at Facebook have worked to continually refine the ‘Edgerank‘ algorithm over the last five or six years or so. They are addressing the problem of how to manage the 1500+ pieces of content available at any moment from “friends, people they follow and Pages” into a more manageable 300 or so pieces of content. Questions […]
Nieman Lab 2015 Predictions for Journalism
Last week I delivered the first lecture in our Introduction to Journalism unit. I am building on the material that my colleague, Caroline Fisher, developed in 2014. One of the things about teaching journalism is that every example has to be ‘up to date’. One of the things that Caroline discussed in the 2014 lecture […]
Education and Cluster Funded Explanations
The way fields of knowledge are split into teaching and research clusters in higher education in Australia is confusing . We have Field of Research codes through which we align our research outputs with disciplinary groupings and we have Field of Education codes through which the government analyses student numbers, teaching performances and funding. They don’t always […]
Journalism Jobs
The ABC is reporting on a leaked “issues paper” from the University of Queensland (UQ) and that UQ apparently plan to merge most of their Communications offerings. Part of this process is allegedly dropping the journalism course (although the leaked document states the contrary: they have no intention to drop the BJournalism degree). “Issue paper” author and UQ […]