I'm off for the holidays and on my way out of town. Back at work again January 5th.
Been busy days, I've been heading a one-woman taskforce ;) which had to define the competencies of the future students of ITU's study programme in Design, Communication and Media, including figuring out what kind of profiles we can produce, what kind of profiles would be "hot", and what kind of profiles potential employeers are looking for. I've talked to A LOT of people, sent mails, had meetings etc and ended up writing a 10 page long document which I handed in 2 min before leaving work yesterday night. It feels good to have it over and done with.

Talking of organisational tasks, my new year's resolution for 2006 is in fact to stay away from all forms of administrative and organisational development tasks, since I will likely be leaving ITU at the beginning of 2007 (when my current contract terminates) and therefore basically will need to spend all my time in 2006 qualifying further for tenure and looking for a new job (if you know of any at your institution, let me know!).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:26 (0) comments

Sometimes the use (or misuse) of the word "interactive" really triggers the worst side in me. I came across this article in BBC NEWS, Technology: Mobile games to 'go interactive' and was really annoyed (ok, so it's from April, but they still link to it upfront). Huh - what's going on here? If you read the article, nothing much new in it, basically big guy from Electronic Arts is saying that you should design social games or "care-games" for the mobile phone instead of nice graphics games. Perhaps it is because I have been involved in MIL for some time now, perhaps it is because I already know someone working on a tamagotchi concept (mentioned in the article), but it just seems pretty self-evident what is stated there. I like the BBC Technology pages a lot, but wonder why they printed this article...and why don't they talk about game concepts like using a mobile camera phone for a "bat" and playing virtual ping pong that way? This game was showcased at a recent exhibition NEXT 05 - thinking about mobile phones as "physical objects" in the gameplay is another much more fruitful way of thinking about mobile games, that isn't mentioned at all in the article.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:53 (1) comments

Tje Journal of Information Technology and People, an article from which I linked to in my previous post, has several interesting papers which can be find online in fulltext by searching on their title: Emerald Online newspapers in Scandinavia - A longitudinal study of genre change and interdependency.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:06 (0) comments

A paper which promises to discuss digital genres based on the fact that "digital genres act not only as text but also as medium": Digital genres: a challenge to traditional genre theory. I'm really on the look for articles like this, Im finding it increasingly difficult to find articles like this for my students.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:59 (0) comments

Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:46 (0) comments

I'm sorry, I didn't spot this before: DR's regional radio (P4 Copenhagen) has a christmas calendar story running, based on sms input from users. They started the continuing story on December 1st, and every day since a short continuation of the story, no longer 160 characters long, is chosen amongst all the sms's submitted by listeners. The story of the day has to include the word/theme given by clicking on the number of the day on the christmas tree on the frontpage.The Copenhagen Radio Christmas Calendar Frontpage.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 20:28 (0) comments

Hehe.
With the help of X at the supportchat function on the Telmore.dk website, I just bought my first 3G mobile phone (a sony ericsson k600i). They launched their 3G service on a test basis this monday and "only" offers it to 1000 customers, so I definitely feel like an early adopter this time around. It's the first time I've done an online purchase with the help of a supportchat-support-person - it's like being on messenger with someone you can just ask semi-rude questions without all the niceties of normal social interaction(in principle), that's kind of fun ;).

After my k750i broke down (coke+water+hairdryer+water+hairdryer treatment didnt become it), I have really missed moblogging - somewhat of a surprise to me. I think it is because I like to be able to communicate pictures of moments rather than reflections on trends and communication, - and with no expectation of clever thoughts to accompany them.

Now I just need to find someone else who uses 3G, then it'll be real fun!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:37 (2) comments

I continue to look at death online as part of my ongoing research project on character death in online worlds. People have started to send me links - and if you know of any examples similar to those listed here, let me know!

Via the air-list
Description of a funeral in World of Warcraft for real-life player

And via Patrik, a link to the Infocult blog, whose author, amongst other things, maintains a "cybergothic" category. Recent entry "Death in the Blogoshpere" includes a link to a MySpace website listing all the Myspace profiles/bloggers who have died in real life. It's really sad reading, most are young people who have died in car accidents, from drunk driving, gunshots or suicide. Almost devastating, the young guy who on his blog - shortly before he committed suicide - told people to call the police so they could come find his body.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 23:44 (1) comments

I got yet another "buy a watch" (read: "chronometer") spam mail today, disguised as a personal mail. But it is definitely weirder than the others, this is what I found/read at the end of the mail:

"harmful Momaya pleaded judgement treat and from the ape's crude description
as the grotesque castle parodies upon humanity who inhabit the parcel ruins
of Opar. And the girl's fate he people, doubtless, but join do I know them? Are they anything weekend to me?"

Im wondering if the text above was once something completely coherent, but then went through an online translation machine? As it stands now, there are promises of a tale from 1001 nights wowen into it...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:37 (4) comments

There is a lot of talk in Danish Media these days about fusion of some of the Danish Universities and regional research centers; spawned by statements from the government regarding the global competitive advantages of, in a tiny country like Denmark, having bigger universities rather than smaller ones. The IT University at which I work is clearly one of the smaller ones, but it is the explicit wish of our university (approved and recommended by our board) that we remain a small and independant university - hopefully it will remain so, despite what ideas other universities and research centers might have and may chose to disseminate to the media.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:16 (0) comments

The Danish Government has decided to terminate group exams at the Danish Universities. From 2007, all students have to be tested individually at an exam and cannot present a joint project as a group for the exam. This has - justified, I think - enraged quite a few students and academic staff, especially at those universities in Denmark (Roskilde and Ålborg) where group work is the core of the studies - and a pledge to keep the group exams have been started. You can sign the pledge at: bevargruppeeksamen.dk.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:57 (4) comments

At the Danish community of poets, Digte.dk, populated by clever amateurs as well as professionals, they have made a poetic christmas calendar, with randomly (?) selected poems by their users about christmas, one for every day in December leading up to Christmas Day. In Danish.

Fyi, one of the cool things about this site (apart from the impressive amounts of poem writers it is home to) is the fact that you can actually resample other people's poems, if you want to.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:59 (0) comments

I think my close to last moment idea of having a conference wiki for DAC2005 has worked out well (thanks to Jesper, who installed the wiki!). Because of a handful of dedicated online people, it's alive in a small, but nice way. So while I continue to be busy doing the chair thing(as in 6 hours from now, when I get up again), visit the wiki to see who is blogging about the conference and go read their blogs.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 00:56 (0) comments