i-Anya

Yay!!! My Sex and the City article has been accepted for the journal (Feminism and Media Studies)
That’s good

Booooo!!! I have to do some revisions!
That’s Bad

One reviewer absolutely loved it, said I was very original, clearly interpreted the theory, and was writing about something very significant.
That’s GOOD!!!!!

The other reviewer didn’t like it, said I didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, and the significance was unclear and they would recommend to reject it.
THAT IS BAD!!!!!!!!

Personally, I thought reviewer number 1 was exceedingly kind, and reviewer number 2 was exceedingly harsh - somewhere in between was what I was expecting. Because the article is a little different in content to my usual topics I figured I might need some direction, so I am not surprised to see comments about framing it up slightly differently for the readership of the audience, but I was surprised to read the one about not being clear about the theory. *sniffle* I was a little upset about that. But then I read the first review again and felt better. Now I have the very difficult job of revising it . My instructions were to take into account all the suggestions from reviewer 1 (extending one part, speaking less about another part, fixing technical errors, rewriting paragraphs x and y), and it was up to me what to consider from reviewer 2.

So, mixed reviews, some more work ahead but… it has been accepted, so:
THAT IS GOOD!!!!

I started uploading some of my old photographs - here’s a mosaic that reveals my life story, more or less:

Isn’t flickr fun!

You are the Moon card. Entering the Moon we enter
the intuitive and psychic realms. This is the
stuff dreams are made on. And like dreams the
imagery we find here may inspire us or torment
us. Understanding the moon requires looking
within. Our own bodily rhythms are echoed in
this luminary that circles the earth every
month and reflects the sun in its progress.
Listening to those rhythms may produce visions
and lead you towards insight. The Moon is a
force that has legends attached to it. It
carries with it both romance and insanity.
Moonlight reveals itself as an illusion and it
is only those willing to work with the force of
dreams that are able to withstand this
reflective light. Image from: Stevee Postman.
http://www.stevee.com/

Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmmm… romance and insanity? Oh, tis an illusion, I have neither!
(via Lois)

Get your flickr ID!

Or make a mosaic of your favourite set of images:

Yes, I’ve been skiving off work again to actually have a lunch hour! Today my brother Robert was in Sydney on business and we met for lunch in the city.

I made him pose for a photo:

then I made him pose for another one:

then he told me to stop taking photos but I still managed to sneak in one more as we were walking away and he was going back to his meetings:

He then got a bit stern about my photo-snapping frenzy so I took photos of tulips instead:

Big Brother has now set a task where the housemates go back to school. It is very interesing to see what assumptions and ideologies about education are embedded in the task. What school do you know of where they sit kids in a corner with Dunce’s cap on, make the kids write lines on a blackboard, or are let loose on a bunch of valuable musical instruments and told: learn!

I remember when I was in grade 2 my teacher had a Dunce’s cap but I AM OLD - are there any schools that still exist where that happens?

I can’t remember writing lines on the blackboard but I saw it in Happy Days, or Little House on the Prairie.

And letting kids loose on instruments and hoping they will pick up how to learn them by magic… well wait a minute, we did have the discovery learning phase, and of course, the throw-books-at-kids-and-they-will-automatically-learn-how-to-read movement - whole language! Maybe that’s still not an outdated practice.

I guess that’s what makes the task so exaggeratedly old fashioned that its ridiculous and funny. But I wonder if kids watching it would understand the meaning of Dunce hat. I’m not even sure I understand where the practice originated from. Presumably some English schoolboy thing :>

Now what would be very funny is if we saw some of those ugly boys get the cane for their mysogynist views! (Joking!!!)

(literally and metaphorically)

I have just been invited to contribute a book chapter on my fan fiction work with the girls from e-sleves! Yippee! I actually have a perfect chapter I can twiddle about with and have ready in a few days for them so that is very exciting indeed. The book will be called:

ICTs, Literature and Learning: Re-engaging readers in the middle school years
Edited by Di Hansford and Len Unsworth

and my chapter will be about fan fiction online communities. fun stuff!! :>

And my colleague Len that is hosting part of my sabbatical at the University of New England tells me that he’s just settled on a new house there and it has a big second bedroom waiting all for me! It is getting so exciting to start mapping out the next 6 months already!

Sabbatical Plans:

mid July: commence sabbatical
July 20-22: ISFC conference

end of July and all of August: complete e-selves book

September : a week holiday with my brother Matthew because he surprised me with a visit to celebrate my birthday! :> (I am a Virgo!!)

October-Nobember: working with Len Unsworth in Armidale on grant application for ARC grant proposal to research children creating and interpreting online multimodal texts

December: NRC conference in Miami and a visit to somewhere exciting on my free stopover on the way home (any suggestions anybody? maybe I should visit vitriolica in Portugal!?)

Christmas: back to Tasmania for family holiday

January: back to Armidale for three more weeks to finalise our grant application

So, overall aims for sabbatical:

two conference presentations
several seminars and workshops for community groups of teachers
one book completed
chapters for two other books completed
new book proposal researched
ARC grant application.

Plus: to have a little break and my annual holiday with family so that I can be relaxed!!!!!! No more crazy singing and dancing on this blog due to stress and overwork!! :>

I want to visit the Victoria and Albert museum in London to see this Touch Me Exhibition! I loooove interactive art / interactive science museums / interactive galleries! They’re so much fun! Here’s a blurb from the website:

Touch is our most neglected sense. We are always touching something and being touched in return, but we seldom think about it. Scientists know less about the workings of touch than about our other senses.

Touch can produce delightful sensations or uncomfortable reactions. The right touch can make us feel secure, happy, loved. But social taboos and new technologies often seem to get in the way of human contact.

Many of our ordinary interactions with the world make poor use of our sense of touch. Using a computer keyboard, flicking a light switch or pushing a door provide few tactile rewards.

However, designers are now creating novel objects that engage more playfully with the touch senses. Some explore unexpected materials. Some reinvent how we use objects and technologies in order to produce more satisfying encounters. Some are even creating designs that aspire to promote richer human relationships.

This uniquely touchable exhibition explores the pleasures, sensations and future of touch, bringing us closer to each other and the designed world around us - from site specific art and design commission to games, live science experiments and a fantastical petting zoo.

There are also some fun experiments for visitors to participate in, like this oral size experiment…

Another writing deadline met today! Phew! More happy dancing!! That sabbatical countdown is beginning to look very exciting. Just a few more meetings, a few more days of administrivia, a couple of reports and voila! bam! yahoo! yippee!

Errr… now after this embarrassing display of pleasure (or maybe I have just cracked under all the pressure of academic life!?) I should go and make a new to-do list.

Yay!!! I have finished my marking!!! Yipppppeeeeeeee!!!!

dlg
Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

I was invited to be a member of the flickr “calling card” group, a group where you put a photo through this fun “polaroid-o-noizer” site to transform it into a digital poloraid.

I am constantly amazed at the fun new things people are doing with images!

Odaesan Trip - Page 12
Originally uploaded by macaddict.

I have just discovered this fun program - Comic Life - to turn your photos into comics! There’s a sort of flickr group tagged with “comiclife” and some very clever people are playing with the program. Some people’s lives are graphic novels! I think it’s fantastic and I almost wish I had a Macintosh because there’s no Window’s version yet :>

The Uses of Cultural Studies is a book by Angela McRobbie that I have been dying to find time to read. Angela McRobbie is one of the most significant scholars writing about feminism, media and cultural studies, and I like reading her work and then overlaying it with my own questions. Because I seem to be writing more interdiscipinarily about literacies across vaying media and cultural contexts, I committed myself to studying the field of cultural studies. Some of the authors McRobbie discusses I know well from my own previous studies of literacy or gender, such as Bourdieu and Butler. But others she draws from include Bhabha and Jameson - two writers who I know very little about. Here’s a little synopsis from the website:

Students of cultural studies frequently struggle with the subject’s primary texts. For example, the work of Hall, Bhabha and Butler can be complex. Having grappled with these texts however, the student is then confronted with having to apply these insights to their own areas of study.

The heart of this book comprises a series of extended critical chapters on six of the foundational theorists of cultural studies - Hall, Bhabha, Butler, Gilroy, Bourdieu and Jameson. By looking at the key themes and central dynamics of these writers work, Angela McRobbie introduces their work and their contribution.

Alongside these chapters, McRobbie has added six shorter essays which demonstrate how one might actually do cultural studies using insights from these six key theorists.

Aimed at students of cultural studies this book offers an introduction to both the theory and practice of cultural studies. It also provides readers with an opportunity to regard Angela McRobbie ‘in dialogue’ with six of today’s leading cultural studies theorists. As such it will be eagerly welcomed by all students of media and cultural theory.

As that excerpt implies, its through a series of extended discussions and applications of each of the key theorists to contemporary pop culture that have been helping me understand these varying theories. The Bourdieu application for example, was a critique of the television show What Not to Wear as exemplifying instances of symbolic violence. The Bhabha application used The Kumars at No.42 to highlight aspects of Colonial theory. The Butler example used the movie 13 to explore her ideas about the social processes of “being girled”.

I really like the way the text is divided into one theorist at a time, with the theory and then an application of that theory to take the reader carefully through the field of cultural studies. This helped me especially with the theorists I didn’t know about. I guess its probably a first year undergrad text for the actual field of cultural studies, but I’ve been thinking about using it as a supplementary text for post-grads in Education because it provides a really strong theoretical framework to situate the more analytical lingusitic analyses. Too often I see students get excited about fine tuned analyses but they can’t answer the question: well, so what? What does this mean? Who cares? Theory theory theory, I love theory!

I do have to say I feel a bit upset about the critique of What Not to Wear though because I think Susannah and Trinny are a hoot. They remind me of me showing my friend’s younger sister how to shave her legs, or the girl in the grade above me at boarding school giving me some of her clothes because they suited me better than her, and we’d all have fashion shows in the girls dorm. But Angela McRobbie speaks of it as exemplifying symbolic violence against women. I fear my lack of understanding is connected with my lack of knowledge about the English class system because that seems to be one of the major critiques of it.

Channel 10 must be over the moon at the amount of publicity they are getting over BB Uncut. For people bored with the debates I’m putting them on the next page.
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Ooohhh…. mobile phones that connect to dolls and a related television series (the concept for the phones came before the tv - that’s unusual) - the ultimate must-have girlie fashion accessory for teens and tweens.

JACKSONVILLE, FL, (NAMC) - Smartphones Technologies, Inc. announced a mobile content agreement with G Studios, LLC, to license Earth 2 Jane(TM) and Chosen Girls, two new lifestyle brands targeting teen and tween girls. Earth 2 Jane is a hip, fresh brand bringing a positive message to teen girls. The Earth 2 Jane characters include fashion designer Jane, art-crazy Paris, photography buff Jett, glamour girl Liberty, honor student Emma, and surfer girl Tess. Earth 2 Jane merchandising includes a creative line of novelties featuring everything from dolls, sportswear, plush, charms, stationery and much more. An Earth 2 Jane television show is planned for next year.

Full report here. (Via textually.org)

I think it’s a very clever marketing plan (ploy) to combine the specialised phones with their respective dolls. Not to mention charms and other novelties. But I’ll be interested to see how the tv show fares. I wonder if there are plans for a playstation game as well. If so, it better be more exciting than the incredibly boring Barbie “game” that all of the girls in my electronic games research study rejected. Let’s see if any of the girls have potential for some rivetting narrative action:

- fashion designer Jane
- art-crazy Paris
- photography buff Jett
- glamour girl Liberty
- honours student Emma
- surfer girl Tess

I’m feeling slightly sick imagining the pathetic stoylines for the girls already - shopping, talking to each other on the phone (about what I wonder?). Surfer girl Tess might have some cool storylines, but honours student Emma could go either way… Maybe I’ll get my research girls to devise some exciting narrative plot and backstories for these characters :> All the characters could have their own blogs or livejournals!

What are 5 things you miss about your childhood? (via Profgrrrrl)
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Last night on the movie show I heard a fantastic quote:

“Cinema is Frankensteinian: there’s nothing natural, organic or wholistic about it.”

I recently came across a whole heap of fantastic papers about the media and its role in culture, from four years worth of conferences about Media in Transition. Here are links to the papers, analysing anything and everything from feminism and action chicks in films and television, to narratives of war. Some of my favourite reality television shows (The Amazing Race! Yay!) are the focus of fascinating critiques, and examples of digital fiction are discussed in terms of theories of narrativity. It’s really a little gold mine for anybody writing about media and culture!

MIT 1: Media in Transition,
MIT 2: Globalisation and Convergence,
MIT 3: Television in Transition,
MIT 4: The Work of Stories.

One of my Master’s students wrote a fabulous paper about using the film Donnie Darko and the associated website with her secondary English class. The website is amazing - it goes beyond the world of the film narrative and adds all sorts of other dimensions and layers to it. As a piece of digital fiction I don’t think it could stand alone without reader’s knowledge of the film but it does include different text types, music, sound effects, hyperlinks, a game element to it, and all sorts of visuals. My student reported that her kids were actually racing to the class before the bell because they loved the unit of work so much.

Princess Mary’s bump featured on the front page of the Daily Telegraph AND headlined the channel 7 news today. Her burgeoning body is an acceptable spectacle for public viewing.

Not so acceptable, Big Brother Uncut bodies also made more than one report on both every single newspaper today and special news reports on television.

But the most interesting bodies the subject of censor today were not the nude ones on a reality television show, no, they were the bodies of English schoolgirls that must have been so offensive that the school has BANNED the wearing of skirts!!!! The girls now have to wear trousers.

This new feminist zine has some really interesting interviews, articles, media, etc… This interview with Gloria Steinem is particularly interesting. I like this quote which relates to reading any text from a critical perspective:

So, whatever it is we’re reading, we have to say to ourselves “Ok, what impact does this have on the female half of the world, and on the invisible folks, whoever they may be, by race or class or whatever it is.”

Critical Literacy! Making the invisible, visible.

The SMH reported today that the government is getting so concerned over the Big Brother Uncut’s content that new talks of revising censorship laws are being discussed.

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Fro-zen
Originally uploaded by drp.

Happy Winter Solstice!

I usually have my mobile phone switched on silent (it’s mega-embarrassing to have it ring in the middle of a lecture!). Well, via ringtonia, I have now discovered that ringtone choice can tell me about my identity. Here’s the details of the report cited, with my identity highlighted:

Research indicates that people do judge mobile users based on their ringtone. Earlier this year, U.K.-based carrier Tesco Mobile surveyed 1,000 customers and discovered that 21% of them thought having a standard ringtone was “uncool.”

— The survey also concluded that people who use their own recorded voice as a ringtone are self-obsessed, and that users who constantly change their rings might be flighty and unreliable.

— If your phone plays a classic rock tune, you’re showing your age, but you get points for figuring out how to change the ringer, Gramps.

— If your phone is still playing “Jingle Bell Rock” in July, you’re not going to impress people with your productivity.

— If your ringtone is a current hip-hop or R&B hit, you’re young at heart, but you’re not particularly original. Hip-hop ringtones accounted for more than half of the $300 million U.S. market in 2004.

— If your phone plays the sound of an old mechanical phone bell, you’re not as funny as you think you are.

— If your phone plays the theme song to a television show, you’re not going to impress anyone with your intellectual acumen.. Perhaps a Mozart or Beethoven ringer would do some damage control.

— If your phone never leaves vibrate or silent mode, you may be the kind of important person who can’t afford to waste time answering a phone call right now. Or maybe you just think you’re that important. However, you may also be considerate and respectful, the kind of person we’d like sitting behind us in a movie theater.

— Unfortunately, we tend to get saddled with seatmates whose phones play the popular “Crazy Frog,” the clucking chicken, or any number of other annoying animal noises. If you’re one of these folks, you may be a sociopath.”

(Like my selective bolding?).

Today has been yet another day of prac visits followed by assignment marking (and tomorrow its going to be the same again!). Marking is one of the tasks I often find incredibly onerous, but I have to say that today I have been absolutely amazed and impressed at the quality of some of my students’ work! I had students argue a case for using various forms of “new literacies” in the classroom context and they really wrote some exciting papers! (Using blogs, using hypertext poetry, using digital fiction are some examples).

I also had my second year undergrad writing class doing online discussions about using popular culture texts in the classroom context and I have to say, I read the best, most critical and well researched discussion I have ever seen ever today. One group were writing about manga comics (and then comics in general) and the discussion went way beyond the “its a way to bridge the gaps between home and school literacy” or “it will get the boys more involved” (which are both valid arguments but ones I was expecting). This discussion started with those points but then went on to discuss, in detail, the INTER-MODAL reading demands of comics!!! Not only that, but the actual DISCUSSION was a genuine discussion - to-ing and fro-ing of ideas, adding onto each other’s points, etc etc. I was so impressed I gave it *drum roll* 100%!!!! And…… guess what mode their discussion used? No, not that awful WebCT (I truly hate that!), not blackboard, not any artificially-designed-for-educational-purposes software… no it was… A BLOG!! Yes, a blog!!! I am going to ask them for permission to link to it if they decide to keep it online and not delete it.

It’s exciting to see students get excited over their assignment work!!!