Course experience surveys were returned to RMIT staff today. Students’ experience of the course I taught this semester was at 75% overall satisfaction. About 25% higher than in 2007 and 45% higher than in 2006.

Woo hoo!

This is gonna look great on the CV.

I really shouldn’t complain about being a rural worker among a whole lot of city workers. On the one hand, my managers sometimes forget that I can’t just arrange a meeting with my volunteers, since they may live as far as 500km away from each other (and will be 1100km from each other come February 2009), and so it may take me four days to do what my metropolitan colleagues can do in one. On the other, I have mates who work in WA’s Pilbara who have told me how they can’t get to meetings in the rain as they find it difficult to land the plane.

I do miss having nights at home though. I miss not being around all the time if AJ or Megan need me, and expense-paid meals and accommodation lost its appeal a little while ago. I wish my car didn’t use up so much fuel and I could get some work or study done while travelling for hours at a time. But getting around the place is a great experience, and my volunteers and police are the best. And a relative few people can say that they’ve driven as many kilometres as National Highway One is long in only seven months of work.

Click on the link above marked “paul at work” if you’d like to know what I do, and get involved yourself (sorry, Victorians only).

I did confess to them that most of my achievements had happened in the few days before the panel presentation. One particular area of inquiry that had been discussed and queried last year was about the use of graphic images in blog posts and home pages. I had done some readings on the text-image relations but hadn’t found much that was useful. I was feeling a little apprehensive that questions would arise this time round and I would be terribly unprepared, and I carried that worry to bed with me. During the night I had a dream that I was trying to write my thesis but I was disturbed by a stream of poultry that kept jumping out the computer screen. The chickens, geese and turkeys woke me up at about 2am.

I arose, opened my computer and searched the hard drive for “joyous Christian chick”. A saved copy of the home page of Jen’s musings opened up. I wondered, “joyous” is such a Christian word: it’s found in hymns and prayers and spoken often in churches, yet it isn’t heard much outside those buildings. On the other hand, “chick” is such a street word, so rarely heard in church. Jen’s site is very pink, there are pictures of her scattered around the place, enjoying clear drinks, wedding white dresses, etc. It’s a girlie site. And she appears he feminist in her blog, posting on women’s issues and projects, both locally and around the world.

What Jen’s musings does so well is an interplay between fields of textual discourse: church vs street and girlishness vs feminism. I have found variations of this intertextual play particularly in the arrangement of graphic imagery and text in nearly all blogs. I have found opposites being played with often, including centre/margins, work/pleasure, inside/outside, freedom/imprisonment, dirt/art, youth/age, tradition/heresy, intimacy/distance, even sacrament/profanity.

And I can’t say that they are just play, with text, meanings, attitudes. They all seem to be part of a large, quite conscientious, campaign to shift modes of meaning in religious discourse.

Here are some more examples, taken from Livingroom and Lionfish. throughout the course of my study I will be spending a lot of time looking at the types of meanings that are intended to be generated for audiences, and how they involve some sort of “play”, albeit part of some conscientious project, with different forms of discursive practice, all within a larger discursive realm (being the blogosphere of course).

1. Graduate Research Conference presentation on Friday 13 June. I haven’t done the report yet but will get it done today (I hope - I’m writing this post at Tullamarine airport for a flight to Adelaide for my sister’s birthday and a visit to hear a PhD presentation on abuse in the Uniting Church - interesting stuff - for a nerd like me).
2. Finish first chapter by 13 June (almost all done, but every time I get into it I realise I have so much more reading to do, and end up putting it on hold to read more - have decided to stop reading and start writing and see what gaps come up)
3. Presentation on online religious advertising for CMRC
4. Presentation on emerging church bloggers in Australia for CMRC
5. Presentation on meanings, methods and ethics in blog research for CMRC (found out I’m on this panel this morning)
6. Presentation for AoIR doctoral colloquium (found out I got in yesterday)
7. Presentation on rhetorics and realities in web 2.0 - men, women, literacy and religious authority for AoIR
8. Presentation on religious podcasting for AoIR (had a response from a religious podcaster the other week, and I’m looking forward to talkign with him about his experiences and achievements)
9. Complete organising the data I’ve collected
10. Complete collecting all the data (even though I don’t think I need all of it)
11. Complete all the interviews (has been a while since I’ve contacted bloggers to arrange interviews)

Is anyone willing to do me a favour and eat and sleep for me? Will save me having to do it.

Anyway, if you click on the link marked “articles” at the top of this page you’ll find more links that will lead you to the powerpoint slides I used for lectures. I know one of you guys is interested. If they don’t make sense, don’t worry, there’s no shame in being stupid. Ha ha ha ha, kdding, I mean I’ve been asked to compile a course book for RMIT based on my lectures and when that happens I’ll add notes to these slides.

Godcasting: exploring religious audiences and podcasting communities

In 2006 it was reported that, second only to radio station programs, religious programs are the most popular genre of podcasting. Yet to date very little research has been conducted on religious podcasting, its content, production or consumption. I would like to offer some preliminary findings from data collected in 2006 and 2007 from individuals’ and organisations’ use of podcasting for religious purposes. In my presentation I will consider how information produced by religious practitioners has been framed by podcasters for online consumption, and its effect on the messages received by audiences. I will also put forward some arguments and questions to consider on how podcasting is working to create and enhance online religious communities, and shape relationships between producers and consumers of podcasted religious content. I will focus particularly on the new role of “podcast priest” and how religious practitioners’ roles are changed in this relatively new online medium.

So when I moved to Melbourne I decided that ministry was the route to take. I scored another youthie-type gig in the city’s northwest for a while, and worked my way towards becoming a student of the reverendist arts. By 1995 I was a candidate. During all that time I knew I would not be made of money, that I would never expect to be completely comfortable financially, that I would have something new to learn about being without money from time to time. So when the Synod offered to raise my student stipend by way of a loan, I accepted without thinking too hard. After all, money is money and I should take it when I can get it.

Little did I know (well, little did I choose not to ignore) the bill that I would receive at the end of 1997. Can’t remember exactly what it was, but knew it would take a short lifetime to pay it off.

And Friday, I did. 10.5 years paying back the church.

Ah the sweet freedom.

Clergy vs. Google & Technorati: Religious authority in Web 2.0

This presentation will explore how authority is distributed among religious bloggers and their readers, with a particular focus on a Protestant movement known as the “emerging church”. This paper will highlight findings from data viewed in religious blogs in the years 2006-2008, of online posts and conversation concerning the authority of religious offices and personalities, and comments and concerns of and by bloggers who receive high “authority rankings” in search engines such as Google and Technorati.

While Web 2.0 and its applications has been heralded by some as the great democratising force in Western culture, giving voice to the otherwise silenced in many of our institutions, including politics, journalism and religion, this presentation will argue that who has the power offline still has power online. Moreover, while the authority of traditional religious offices, such as the episcopacy or the academy, may be overtly challenged by bloggers and their audience, the social factors that are favoured by these places of authority (gender, age, class and ethnicity) are equally favoured in Web 2.0 as they are in the offline world.

Last Friday I picked Megan up from school. Sometimes I dare never ask the question, as it often results in an answer that starts with a long preparatory inhalation and ends at bedtime. But last Friday I plucked myself to say to her, “So, Megan, how was your day?”

Somewhere in the middle of her story was a minuet of a moment when she recalled how her new teacher had posited that in his day children who were naughty were spanked and how he thought that it wasn’t such a bad thing, that it toughens kids up and sets them on a straighter path than the one today’s children are following. I asked her how she felt about it and she giggled and said, in a plumbed-up English accent, “I was mortally offended. I think I should write a letter to the department!” We suspended all conversation for a few minutes to giggle like eight-year old girls and cackle like 37-year old men.

Then she got serious and said, “You know dad I didn’t think of it at the time but now I think what he said wasn’t right. You know, I don’t think anybody should hit anyone else, no matter how bad they are. I think I’m going to tell him that on Monday.” I became stoned in silence, while the phrases flooded my head: My daughter said that. My daughter. My little girl. Only eight years old and already taking the world by its horns.

Later that evening AJ and I sat on the couch so he could teach me how to say different colours in sign language, a project his day-care teachers have made a learning priority for the month. It took me a little while but I managed to get the hang of about eight colours, and we made a game of it where I would write the colours on his arms and face while singing the words to a made-up tune. Brown, white and black would tickle him and he’d giggle, getting ever more excited as he sang along.

While watching his eyes and mouth get brighter as he laughed and sang I was positive that the walls would start crumbling as the light from his smile would cause an eruption, and the only way I could deal with the immensity of it was to scream out “Yay!”, which only made him laugh harder. Megan, who arose from the depths of her Harry Potter decided to join in, and we sang and laughed until we fell off the couch onto the floor, rolling around. I felt like my ribs were losing their strength and my heart and lungs would burst, causing an awful mess on the carpet.

All the plans I’ve made in my life, all the goals I’ve set for myself, all the achievements I’ve made, have not allowed me to understand why I’ve been given these moments, or why these jewels should want to show themselves in my presence. In these instances I feel completely undeserved, robbed of any value, in comparison to the size of the joy that has swallowed me whole. And there is nothing, not words, not tears, no gratitude that can even measure the feeling, let alone respond to it. Only the desire to keep on feeling.