Conference Time

I am attending two excellent one-day conferences this week. This first is co-organised by my supervior (Steve Brown) and Paula Reavey entitled 'visual Psychologies'. This looks to be an excellent opportunity to discuss the increase of the the visual in a number of disciplines and how this relates to notions of subjectivity, discourse and organisation.Speakers here include Alan Bryman, Carey Jewitt, Maggie O'Neil. I will post most details of the conference tomorrow. The second is the International Graduate Conference (IGC 2008) taking place in Cambridge (for more general info see here) where I will be speaking on the challenge 'faced' by academics who use Facebook. Here is a crib of the Abstract:

... In 2005, Facebook was opened to a public network (whereas before users had to be connected through a school or college) and millions of people, young and old, snatched at the opportunity to connect with people all over the globe. This evidently brought many challenges into the 21st Century regarding SNSs including: privacy issues, data protection and searchability. There is also a collection of sub-issues that manifest with the enigmatic growth of Facebook. One potentially difficult issue is how academics can get the most out of Facebook without forcibly encountering the personal lives of their prospective students (this is based on a variety of studies finding that many students disclose personal information on these sites, see Stutzman, 2006). This recognises that there is a wealth of communication to be harnessed through Facebook, which can be incredibly useful at all levels of academia. The secret to unlocking this potential will be unpacked into three main areas: 1) the balance between Facebook as a useful tool for communicating with students and the traditional ways that Facebook is abused 2) the implications of combining institutional ‘blackboards’ with Facebook applications 3) how Facebook represents a natural progression of communication through the ages and not a unique phase in web 2.0 history that can be ignored. The challenge to the academic community is to take some simple steps that will maintain the equilibrium between students and staff who utilise Facebook.