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Annotated Bibliography #5

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How the text relates to themes in the course Networked Media – why was it chosen?

This is an article about the use of weblogs in research, and keeping and maintaining a blog is a big part of this course. The blog’s we keep can be seen as meta-blogs; blogs about other blogs. Keeping track on this involves a big amount of research, mainly on the work that other people have already done.
Mortensen and Walker write about the use of weblogs and how they can function as a professional tool but also a personal one; they claim that it is just as useful in both arenas. In comparison with this course, we have been encouraged to fill up out blogs with information that interests us, not only entries with relevance to school. Both of the authors claim that having a blog made it easier staying focused on their research, but also that it helped them as a tool of research. This might be one of the intentions behind encouraging the students to add their own “touch” and content to the blog; it might help them in the right direction in regards to their future career.

Adrian Miles, a Senior Lecturer in New Media at RMIT, claims that “blogs are very useful to document your practice, to encourage and support reflective and process based learning, to nurture peer support and learning, to provide a record of achievement, in assisting idea creation, supporting collaboration, and finally in developing multiliteracies that allow participation within contemporary information ecologies as creators, rather than being limited to being passive consumers.” (Miles, 2006) Miles was part of the team that established the use of blogs for the bachelor of Communication (Media) in 2005, and seeing as it is still in use, it must have served its purpose. Like Mortensen and Walker was at that time, he is using the blog as an equipment for his PhD research. From his article “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning” the main idea behind having a blog in this course is to somehow link it to the research we do in class, and if we have something we are working on outside school.

The HTML part of this course can’t be related to the article, because they decided to focus on personal experience and a more “user friendly” approach, in stead of numbers and statistics. I still think that HTML is an useful tool while keeping a blog, as it allows it to construct your posts (to some extent) as you wish. One part of me wish that I had to read all the three articles that are available for this assignment, as the two others is about Hypertext and Spatial montage, which seems to be very interesting topics. When I find time for it I will try to go through them, as they in many ways (especially the Hypertext one) can be related to blogging.

References:

Miles, Adrian. “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning.” Australian Screen Ed.41 (2006): 66-9

Mortensen, Torill, and Jill Walker. “Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool.” Researching Ict’s in Context. Ed. Andrew Morrison. Oslo: University of Oslo, 2002. 249-79. p.259.

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Annotated Bibliography #1

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Torill Elvira Mortensen

torill

Torill Elvira Mortensen is the associate professor at Volda University College in Norway, but is at the moment on a leave working at the Digital Culture and Mobile Communication department at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her research is on computer games, web culture and web publishing. She claims that whenever she gets a new interest for something, she ends up researching it, with the exeption of picking chantarelle, traveling and reading fantasy novels.
Torill has a Master’s degree in Media Theory from the University of Bergen.
In the research I did trying to figure out more about her I went through endless pages of her blog, which contained posts related to the very artcle I just finished reading. In the article they claim that the blog became useful to use in research, but also how it leaves room for more personal input. This can be seen in her blog, where she researches everything from female rights, online gaming, which parts of the book they left out of the movie in LOTR, and much more. I also found that she bakes when she is stressed.
Another interesting thing I found was that she knows Adrian Miles, who is a lecturer here at RMIT. Torill visited Melbourne in 2003 with Jill (I feel like a bit of a creep for tracing her steps like this).
Here’s a post from her blog:


Btw, to see the full text press the image, I’m a retard and couldn’t work out how to  get it in a proper size.
Torill has recently been interviewed in relations to the Norway terrorist attact, because the killer wrote in his manifest that he evolved skills and new strategies through playing Modern Warfare 2. She says that there is no research that has proven that playing videogames makes you more violent, but that violent people often seek out these games. “It is always the new, unknown media that is considered dangerous. And we are always worried for the weak souls that gets affected by it. In the 50′s cartoons were the medium that made teenagers more violent”.

You can download her CV here, and have a look at her blog.

Jill Walker Rettberg

jillwalkerrettberg09

Jill Walker Rettberg is an Associate Professor at the University of Bergen, where she also studied for her degree. She grew up in Norway with Australian parents, so she is fluent in both languages. Her research is on ways in which people tell stories online, looking at electronic literature, blogging, games and participatory media. Her specialties are blog research, social media, new media research, narratology, teaching with blogs, lectures on blogs and new media.  In 2006 she won the Meltzer Award for Excellence in the Dissemination of Research, mainly for the work on her blog. In June 2008 she published the book “Blogging”, and she is the co-editor of “Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Worldcraft Reader, which was published in May 2008. She was a visiting scholar here at RMIT several times between 2000 and 2002.

 

References:

< http://www.forskning.no/blog/torillhivo >

< http://torillsin.blogspot.com >

Brathaug, O 2011, ’Ikke skyld på dataspill’ Sunnmøreposten, 29th July, viewed 30th July 2011 < http://www.smp.no/nyheter/article363124.ece >

< http://jilltxt.net/ >

< http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blogging-Jill-Walker-Rettberg/dp/0745641342/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214810393&sr=8-1 >

< http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Culture-Play-Identity-Warcraft/dp/0262033704/jilltxt-20 >

<http://no.linkedin.com/in/jillwalkerrettberg>

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