Last night I presented a seminar and follow-up workshop for ALEA (the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association) in this professional development seminar series. I presented an updated version of my paper called “The Affordances of Digital Fiction”, and the workshop notes are here. The first version of the paper is embedded in a rather big pdf file of some conference proceedings here.
I put the workshop notes on my blog because it was just so much easier to access, edit and work on than anywhere else! And since I wanted the participants to access different forms of digital fiction it was much easier to have the link there ready to click rather than having them type in individual addresses. Anyway, because it was on my blog I side-tracked a little and talked about academic blogging. Lo and behold, Len pointed out to me that yesterday’s Higher Education supplement from the Australian had a section on academic blogging (see the top left corner):
I was so excited that somebody in Australian Higher Education would be writing about academic blogging and raced to read the article, only to discover that they had pilfered Henry Farrell’s article from here, which I mentioned both here and here!! I said to Len, not only have I already read that article, but I have already cited it in my book chapter! It’s quite fascinating that as a blogger I am a week ahead of some of the print based news - the immediacy of blogging is very exciting!
Anyway all those reflections aside, I was thrilled with the generous response by the workshop participants - their engagement was highly positive and enthusiastic. I have to say that at many workshops I encounter an element of resistance - some teachers feel threatened by the implications of new literacies - i.e. the changes they might need to make in their teaching if they were to embrace technology more. But none of that last night - lots of laughing and pleasure expressed about the new forms if fiction I discussed and they explored. Perhaps the red wine in between my lecture presentation and the workshop had something to do with it :> I think I’ll make it a habit to include drinks into future workshop presentations!!!