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Submissions Deadline: EURO mGOV 2008: Mobile Government Conference
by i k 11 Apr '08

11 Apr '08

----- Apologies for X postings .. Please distribute widely ----- **** About a Month to Submissions: 9 May 2008 Call for Papers, Panels, Special Sessions, Tutorials, Exhibitions and Demos EURO mGOV 2008 ------------------------- The 3rd European Conference on Mobile Government 15-16 September 2008, Sheraton Voyager, Antalya, Turkey http://www.mgovernment.org/events/ SPONSORS, ORGANIZERS and SUPPORTERS: --- TURKCELL (Diamond Sponsor), TurkSat (Gold Sponsor) --- Mobile Government Consortium International, UK; AykeyNet, UK --- Dept. of Computer Engineering, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey, --- Center for Information and Society, University of Washington, USA. Mobile Government involves revolutionary approaches to the modernization of public sector via the utilization of networked mobile technologies in local or central government organizations. It aims to enhance public sector business by creating new opportunities to provide services to society. mGovernment is now a recognized field of practice and research, and constitutes the next evolutionary step of progress in eGovernment. EURO mGOV 2008 aims to be a platform for presenting, exchanging and disseminating the latest developments, ideas, applications and services in the field of mGovernment among three essential constituents: public / private sector professionals and researchers. The EURO mGOV 2008 organization invites all professionals with an interest in the interfaces of Electronic Government and Mobile Business, both from social and technological perspectives. How to participate? ----------------------- Please visit the conference web site for submissions, review policy and further info at www.mgovernment.org/events/ --- Public or private sector professionals: send a page long proposal for a talk presenting, for example, an implementation, application or services deployed, cases studied and experiences gained. --- Researchers: send a maximum of 10 pages of a paper presenting your research and its results. Who will attend? ---------------------- --- Public Sector professionals such as developers or implementers of mobile technologies, policy and decision makers. --- Private Sector professionals from, for example, mobile telco`s, infrastructure, hardware, content, applications and service providers to the public sector. --- Researchers from academic institutions and other research organizations. Please get in touch for further info…. -- EURO mGOV 2008 – mgov2008(a)mgovernment.org www.mgovernment.org/events/ -- Mobile Government Consortium International - info(a)mgovernment.org -- Other mGCI events – www.mgovernment.org/events/

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Submissions to mSociety 2008: Mobile Society Conference
by i k 11 Apr '08

11 Apr '08

----- Apologies for X postings .. Please distribute widely ----- **** About a Month to Submissions: 9 May 2008 Call for Papers, Panels, Special Sessions, Tutorials, Exhibitions and Demos mSOCIETY 2008 ------------------------ The 1st International Conference on Mobile Society 18-19 September 2008, Sheraton Voyager, Antalya, Turkey http://www.mgovernment.org/events/ SPONSORS, ORGANIZERS and SUPPORTERS: --- TURKCELL (Diamond Sponsor), TurkSat (Gold Sponsor) --- Mobile Government Consortium International, UK, AykeyNet, UK --- Dept. of Computer Engineering, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey, --- Center for Information and Society, University of Washington, USA. Mobile Society refers to the emerging trends of the collective life on earth driven by the technology of networked mobile phones and other mobile devices. These technologies and their fast and wide adoption are influencing the way we live in society, the way we run businesses and the way we are as an individual. The First International Conference on Mobile Society (mSociety 2008) aims to be a platform for the presentation, exchange and dissemination of the latest developments, ideas, applications and services involving all aspects of practice and research in mSociety. The mSociety 2008 organization invites all professionals with an interest in how mobility influences society in both positive and negative ways. Possible perspectives may include, but are not limited to, the diffusion and adoption of technology; the dissemination of mobile content, applications and services for business and entertainment; the economical, sociological and psychological impact of mobility on society. How to participate? -------------------------- Please visit the conference web site for submissions, review policy and further info at www.mgovernment.org/events/ --- Researchers: send a maximum of 10 pages of a paper presenting your research and its results. --- Members of Civil Society Organizations and Private sector professionals: send a page long proposal for a talk presenting, for example, an implementation, application or services deployed, cases studied and experiences gained. Who will attend? --- Researchers economists, technologists, sociologists and psychologists from academic institutions and other research organizations. --- Private Sector professionals from, for example, mobile telco`s, infrastructure, hardware, content, applications and service providers to _ individuals and organizations. --- Members of Public Sector, Donors and Civil Society Organizations. Please get in touch for further information... mSociety 2008 – msociety2008(a)mgovernment.org www.mgovernment.org/events/ Mobile Government Consortium International - info(a)mgovernment.org Other mGCI events – www.mgovernment.org/events/

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Results from College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks
by primarydat＠aol.com 11 Apr '08

11 Apr '08

College libraries in a North American sample experienced a dramatic upsurge in the number of information literacy classes or presentations given in 2007, according to a new report from Primary Research Group. Primary Research Group’s new report – College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks (ISBN# 1-57440-099-1) is a North American survey presenting data on the information literacy efforts of colleges from the United States and Canada. Some of the key findings of the 175-page report were that: • The mean percentage change in the number of classes or presentations given between the fall semester of 2007 and 2006 was +20.26%, with a median of +5%. The minimum offered in the sample was -50% while the maximum was 576%. • A mean of 9.64 instructors gave formal classroom instruction or presentations in information literacy in the last year for which statistics are available, with a median of 4 and maximum of 325. U.S. respondents had almost 3 times as many instructors giving sessions than did Canadian colleges. • Business, psychology, sociology, nursing, education, and English were commonly listed as one of the top three academic departments that had requested the most library instructional presentations or classes in the past year. • Librarians in the survey estimated that 23.5% of their students that had not taken any formal information literacy training knew a few essentials of Boolean searching. In our prompt, we indicated that Boolean searching basics included the use of quotation marks, “or” and “and.” Private colleges reported that 32.5% of their students fell into this category; public colleges, 18.3%. • Data was more hopeful in assessing the student body’s skills in using the online library catalog. Nearly 45% said their student body was competent, while 42% said they had basic knowledge at best. Just 9% considered them very unskilled, and nearly 4% reported they were highly proficient. Canadian libraries were 3 times more likely than U.S. ones to consider their students highly proficient in the use of the online catalog. • Just over 13% of survey participants administered a test to assess student skills in Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet software. • Almost 17% administered a test to incoming freshmen or transfer students on their understanding of plagiarism. Almost 27% of research universities gave such a test. Nearly 21% of colleges with over 10,000 FTE students also gave this test, nearly twice the rate of mid-sized schools. • Almost 70% of the sample used student evaluation forms to assess the performance of information literacy or other library science instructors. Student evaluation forms were more popular with public colleges than private, and most popular with research universities, 80% of whom reported using such forms. • 63% of survey participants offer presentations or brief classes to new students during new student orientation. Such classes were more commonly offered by Canadian libraries, research universities, and colleges with fewer than 1,000 FTE students. 71% of libraries at which librarians held faculty status conducted such orientation sessions, while less than 60% of participants whose librarians did not hold faculty status offered the sessions. • Barely 5.4% of the sample required a 1 or 2 credit information literacy course for graduation, and just 3.6% required a 3 or more credit course. However, over 23% of the sample required information literacy training integrated into basic writing or composition courses. • Just over a third of the sample believed that the English department, or equivalent department with similar responsibilities, seemed to try but could do better in terms of carrying out its information literacy responsibilities. Just 23% believed that the department was doing well enough, while 22% believed information literacy was a high priority for them and that the department made time for them. Just 8% believed the English department to be laggard, and 12% believed their collaboration to be an excellent one. • Nearly 48% of the colleges sampled offered interactive tutorials in information literacy topics to students. Just a third of bachelors-granting colleges offered such tutorials, while 6 out of 10 research universities did so. • The vast majority of the sample, nearly 84%, reported that the library was not really involved with computer technology training on campus. • Nearly 73% of the libraries in the sample had one or more instructional labs or learning centers designed for information literacy instruction in which much of their formal literacy instruction took place. • Half of the libraries in the sample reported making tutorial links and other resources available through course management systems such as Blackboard and WebCT. The report is based on detailed benchmarking data from more than 110 North American colleges; data is broken out by type and size of college for easier benchmarking. For a table of contents, sample pages, and other information, visit our website at www.primaryresearch.com.

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Workshop: MEDIA PRACTICES AND CULTURAL PRODUCERS
by Sigurjón B Hafsteinsson 11 Apr '08

11 Apr '08

***PLEASE CIRCULATE***** MEDIA PRACTICES AND CULTURAL PRODUCERS EASA Media Anthropology Network Second Workshop Barcelona, Spain, November 6-7, 2008 The workshop addresses media practices and the arenas of cultural production in the context of the "new media" landscape. In broad terms, the workshop will inquire into the leading theoretical and methodological perspectives for doing anthropological research on digital mediated practices and their implications for the understanding of people's interaction with media. The aim is to explore the circulatory flows of media practices and in particular, how digital technology use is changing media culture, cultures of media circulation and the very definition of cultural producer. Anthropological and ethnographic studies of media have been largely focused on analyzing reception of media products (television, radio, press and film) and media consumption related to domestic appropriation of technologies. There is also a wide body of research devoted to the study of the political dimension of alternative and indigenous media. However, there has been a separation between media and Internet studies, and between the analysis of media reception and practices of self production, such as family photography or home video. Current digital media practices urge scholars to examine self production contents and media flows from a broader perspective that cross-cuts divisions between public and private, media corporative products and people releases, home production and cultural industry, political activism and domestic affairs. The workshop aims to become a locus for discussing innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that deal with such interwoven practices of media production and consumption. The workshop will address questions like: how is self production entering circulatory matrices of media and power? How does cultural production itself become a practice of reception or consumption? What are the implications of understanding audiences as cultural producers? Do new media practices redefine the role of cultural producers? Are self production and content sharing new cultural forms of media production? What are the cultural implications of people's media productive practices? Rather than an uncritical celebration of people's empowerment, this workshop encourages exchange of research experiences about ways of doing ethnographic research by following social networks and the circuits of new media practices. Key note speakers Elizabeth Bird (University of South Florida) Don Slater (London School of Economics) Dorle Drackle (University of Bremen) Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths, University of London) Coordinators Elisenda Ardèvol Open University of Catalonia Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson Coordinator of the European Association of Social Anthropologists Media Anthropology Network Organization Committee in Barcelona Begonya Enguix Edgar Gomez Cruz Adolfo Estalella Studies of Humanities Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Gemma San Cornelio Toni Roig Studies of Sciences of Information and Communication Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Call for "research in progress" presentations The workshop will include presentations and a poster session. Please if you are interested in presenting your research about such topics, send abstracts (500-800 words) to mabcnworkshop(at)gmail.com (please replace (at) with @). The deadline for submissions is 17 May 2008. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee, and will be selected for a paper presentation or for the poster session. Notice of acceptance will be sent by 17 June. This event is funded by a conference grant from the MEC and the UOC. Funds are available to cover travel costs for researchers whose submissions are selected for presentation at the workshop. Registration Due to the limited number of places available, please register in order to take part in the event. Registration fee: Euro 80 (Euro 60 students) Coffee breaks and one cold lunch is included Registration until 17 of July For registration and further information please contact mabcnworkshop(at)gmail.com (please replace (at) with @). Venue Drassanes University of Catalonia (UOC) http://www.media-anthropology.net/events.htm

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HCI - Blogging meets literary analysis: why people read blogs
by Richard Forno 11 Apr '08

11 Apr '08

First picked up via MSM article: Blogging meets literary analysis: why people read blogs By John Timmer | Published: April 09, 2008 - 10:20PM CT The rise of blogging clearly represents a significant social phenomenon, but studying it poses a challenge in part because defining a blog is not a simple thing. There have been a number of attempts to do so at the technical level, where the presence of material organized by time stamp or the existence of RSS feeds have been suggested as defining features. A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers. Mixing in a dose of literary theory provided some interesting insights into how readers view and define blogs. < - > MSM article continues: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080409-blogging-meets-literary-theory -in-new-analysis.html The study's authors kindly provided Ars with a copy. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI Conference, and is available through their website. The ACM link (reg' reqd) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1357054.1357228

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going solo conference 16 may
by Jeremy Hunsinger 10 Apr '08

10 Apr '08

Going Solo is a one-day conference for freelancers from all over Europe, organized by Going Far, Stephanie Booth’s new media company. It will take place in the beautiful city of Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, on 16th May 2008. Who’s involved? Until we get a proper ordered list, here is a bunch of names (organisers, advisors, helpers…): Stephanie Booth, Elisabeth Stoudmann, Charlene Knoetze, Stowe Boyd, Suw Charman, Imran Ali, Stephanie Troeth, Sibylle Stoeckli,Martin Roell, Carlos Pacilio, Anne Dominique Mayor, Chris Brogan, and others… http://going-solo.net/about/ http://going-solo.net/programme/ jeremy hunsinger Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (www.cipr.uwm.edu ) wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ Learning Inquiry-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series

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Coding websites
by Philippa Smith 10 Apr '08

10 Apr '08

As part of a large study on Internet use we are surveying people on what websites they access most regularly. For coding purposes these websites need to be categorised and we are wishing to establish if there is an existing classification system already in use by researchers for a question of this nature. Philippa Smith Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication AUT University Auckland NEW ZEALAND

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CCi International Conference - Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons
by Axel Bruns 09 Apr '08

09 Apr '08

G'day ! For those of you who are looking for another reason to come to Brisbane (or didn't make it when we held AoIR 2006 here ;-) - the following conference might be interesting. Abstracts are due on 21 April. There's more information and a tentative list of some very high-profile keynote speakers on the CCi Website: http://www.cci.edu.au/event/creating-value-between-commerce-and-commons Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons -------------------------------------------- 25-27 June 2008 Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Deadline extended - Closing date for Abstract and Full papers is now 21 April 2008 Call for Papers Guidelines Detailed abstracts (up to 500 words) for papers are now called for. Deadline is April 21 2008. Abstracts will be refereed. We will be considering selected papers for publication (subject to separate negotiation). Please seperate author identifying information from the abstract proper. There is also an option to submit a full paper which will be subject to double-blind peer review. If accepted it will qualify as a 'refereed conference paper'. Full papers should be (at most) 3,000 words, including an abstract and full reference list. Please ensure that all submissions clearly state which theme they fall under. Please separate author identifying information from the paper proper. Please send abstracts and full papers by 21 April 2008 to: Dr Jean Burgess, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Queensland University of Technology je.burgess(a)qut.edu.au and also to Jodie Rapley, CCi Coordinator j.rapley(a)qut.edu.au Conference themes We are planning six broad strands of themed content at the conference. These are not separate mini-conferences; programming will be designed to cross-fertilise approaches and interrupt disciplinary comforts. Papers are solicited for all strands. Further details about each theme are available click here. Cultural Science Convened by John Hartley (research director of CCi and leader of its citizen-consumer program) Creative Capital and Workforce Futures Convened by Erica McWilliam (leader of CCi creative workforce program) Legal Issues for Social Networks and Creating Public Value Convened by Brian Fitzgerald (leader of CCi legal frameworks program) Citizen Journalism: Diversifying Information? Democratising Conversation? Convened by Terry Flew (leader of ARC-funded citizen journalism Linkage project) Broadband innovations and the creative economy Convened by Julian Thomas (leader of CCi international [global and regional] program) Creative Industry development agendas: design as value-add Convened by Stuart Cunningham (director of CCi and leader of its innovation policy program) -- Dr Axel Bruns http://snurb.info/ Senior Lecturer, Media & Communication a.bruns(a)qut.edu.au Creative Industries Faculty, Z1-515, CIP Skype: LexaSnurb Queensland University of Technology +61 7 3138 5548 Musk Ave, Kelvin Grove, Qld. 4059, Australia CRICOS No.: 00213J

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One-year appointment at Univ. of Memphis
by Kris M. Markman 08 Apr '08

08 Apr '08

Please see job ad below. I'd be happy to answer questions if anyone is interested. -Kris ---------- ---------- ---------- Kris M. Markman, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Communication University of Memphis Office: CFA 231A Phone: 901-678-5458 K.Markman(a)memphis.edu https://umdrive.memphis.edu/kmmrkman/www/index.html ---------- The Department of Communication at The University of Memphis seeks to hire a one-year appointment at the assistant professor level in Electronic Media. PhD desired, but candidates with a MA will also be considered, especially those who have experience working in the broadcast industry. Teaching responsibilities include some combination of three courses per semester in traditional and/or new media studies, such as history of electronic media, computer mediated communication, audio production, and broadcast management. For more details about the Department, College, and University, see the Department's web page www.memphis.edu/communication. Send letter of application, vita, evidence of teaching excellence, sample of research, and contact information for a least three references to Dr. Michael Leff, Department of Communication, 143 Theatre-Communication Building, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152-3150, Attn. Electronic Media Position. Review of applications will begin April 25th and may continue until the position is filled. The University of Memphis is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer

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IR 9.0 submissions
by bl506＠york.ac.uk 08 Apr '08

08 Apr '08

Well just about everyone should have received a decision by now on their proposal(s) for IR 9.0. There are a few outstanding which I have been assured will be completed this weekend. So anyone who has not heard anything by Monday, and believes that they submitted something, should contact me directly. I'm walking in the English Lakes (a smart trick I think you will agree!)for a couple of days and out of email contact so please get in touch on Monday. A big thanks again to all the reviewers and especially the Track Directors who have given so much time to this process. The quality of the abstracts was excellent and we can look forward to a really good conference again this year. Brian -- Brian D. Loader, Co-Director, Social Informatics Research Unit, Department of Sociology, Wentworth College, University of York, Heslington, YORK YO1 5DD. United Kingdom. Tel: +44 (0) 1904 432639 Fax: +44 (0) 1904 433043 email: bl506(a)york.ac.uk

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