International Conference on Popular Culture and Education in Asia

Go if you can. It will be major.

The First International Conference on Popular Culture and Education in Asia will be held at the Hong Kong Institute of Education 11-13 December 2008.

The conference will bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines to focus on the implications of intra-regional flows of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia for educational practices and youth development. We welcome papers that elucidate changing patterns in Asian popular culture as well as papers that explore implications and applications of youth engagement with popular culture inside and outside the classroom.

We welcome researchers and scholars from Sociology, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Anthropology, Language and Literacy, Music, Visual Studies, Asian Studies, Education and other disciplines that take popular culture seriously to join us in this event.

What are you doing?

A number of interesting articles/blogs about the social web and the details of daily life lately. Clive Thompson writes in the NY Times about the 'Brave new world of digital intimacy' and the ambient awareness provided by microblogging services like Twitter (what are you doing?) His articles describes the process where "each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting."

Joe Krauss of Google has also been blogging about the future of the social web, observing that it makes it "easy to share the small stuff -- to make it effortless and rebuild that feeling of connectedness that comes from knowing the details".

Interesting stuff.

Five pedagogies, a thousand possibilities

Ignorance is not a concept usually associated with the work of teachers (or at least with teachers that want to stay in work). But as the philosophy of Jacques Ranciere (see The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation) and Emmanuel Levinas has been increasingly taken up in critical pedagogy debates, ignorance and unknowing have become concepts of increasing theoretical interest. To my mind, unknowing, nonknowledge, or ignorance are essential concepts for theorising pedagogy in our current moment. That's why I've been enjoying Five pedagogies, a thousand possibilities by Michalinos Zembylas, which begins with an accessible and insightful meditation upon pedagogy and unknowing, before moving on to consider other themes such as silence, passion, desire, forgiveness, and reconciliation. It's well worth checking out... 

Commoncraft: Explanations in Plain English

Commoncraft create short and simple videos that make "complex ideas easy to understand". They use a whiteboard and paper cut-outs to demonstrate how things work. The site includes a guide to the US presidential elections, surviving a zombie attack and how to use Twitter.

The guide to wikis (Wikis for dummies) is very useful. See it here.

War on Terror board game

So much to analyze, so little time.

The Zombie Survival Guide

This has got to be one of the BEST book websites I've ever come across. Go and have a look because..


1. Zombies are way cool! 2. The site is brilliant. 3. Did i mention that zombies are cool?


The book is The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete protection from the undead by Max Brooks and it has spawned a range of fan creativity and merchandising.

Well played Random House!

Red the Robot

This article in The Guardian directed me to Red the Robot.

I grew up with the fantasy of robots who would become an integral part of our daily lives: The Jetsons, Astro Boy (aka Tetsuwan Atomu), the robot in 'Lost in Space'. I remember reading 'I, Robot' when i was a teenager.

In none of my fantasies did the robot sit down and teach me phonics. Robots were making lives safer, guiding young adventurers through the galaxy, forcing me to reconsider the moral code of my culture.

...i'm just saying...

I've been following the work of Genevieve Bell of late. Brilliant stuff. Genevieve is a cultural anthropologist working for Intel. I've been particularly interested to hear about her research across 100 households in 19 cities in seven countries in Asia and the Pacific focused on how people in these diverse geographic and cultural locations use technology. Emerging technologies allow both greater connection to a broader community and an increased localization across distances - an interesting complexity that has implications for rapidly diversifying nations and communities.

If you're working with digital technologies, new literacies/media and haven't already checked out her work, you should have a look. My favorite podcast with her is located here. Links to further Genevieve Bell resources can be found here and if you're in New York in mid-September you can hear her speak here.

Digital Futures: The internet in Australia

The ARC Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation has released a new report on the use of the internet in Australia. The report captures a snapshot of how the internet is being used, where and by whom. Important reading.

Download it here.

Schooling and virtual worlds

An interesting story unfolded on Paul Verhoeven's blog last week, which he also related on Triple J's breakfast show (the story starts two thirds of the way through the mp3).

Basically, a secondary school student playing World of Warcraft stole an item from his 'guild' (a group of players who work together within the game). Many of the players in the guild were adults that play the game very seriously, and they took exception to the theft of the rare and valuable 'Warglaive of Azzinoth' (pictured). So much so, in fact, that one of the guild members wrote a letter to the principal of the student's school, asking that the student be held to account for his actions. The letter drew analogies to the action that would be taken if the student, as representative of the school, were caught stealing in the 'real' world. Allegedly, the principal took action, the parents of the student were contacted, and the item was returned.

To my mind, this is an interesting response from the school: in this instance virtual worlds were considered to be a legitimate space of social interaction, with which the school should be concerned, and not 'just a game'. While student behaviour in virtual worlds may already be a subject of curricular and pedagogical focus in some places (especially in terms of online safety), this seems like a different kind of 'whole school' recognition, which frames these worlds not just as spaces in which students are vulnerable, but ones in which they must also be responsible and accountable.