Will it’s been ages since I blogged anything – not that anyone would notice! Anyway, I wanted to write up a few things about this week. First – it’s been amazing – to get invited to the University of Auckland (thanks Cathy Urqhart!) and to get to do two talks – one on SingStar to the business faculty and another on Gaydar to the Arts faculty. Both were so much fun and I felt so privileged to get to talk about things I wanted to talk about twice in one week (and we had a good hour on each too – the luxury!).
I’ve got to meet some really nice people too the staff at Auckland are a great bunch and so interesting to talk to! So many suggestions and ideas and collaborations – no idea where I’ll find the time to get it all done. Plus, after my Gaydar talk, I got invited to meet the staff of the New Zealand AIDS foundation and got to talk about Gaydar and social media some more – they’re launching a new social networking site aimed educating people about ‘sex stuff’ and more www.broonline.nz It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out!
The SingStar talk has reawakened my interest in pushing the link between gaming and work that Gordon Fletcher and I tried to get into the IS community with little luck (although people in sociology and media both liked it). We have a paper on this so if you fancy a look, let me know – comments appreciated as to how we take it forward (if at all). Our argument, essentially, is that if we look at games like SingStar it can widen our view of technology use in ‘formal work’. Specifically in areas of user relations, collaboration practices and contexts of use.
The Gaydar work was pulling together the papers I have in EJIS, ITP, Information and Management and adding in (working through) ideas that I’ll be presenting properly at AOIR 10 in Milwaukee later in the year. Specifically – looking at the links between Gaydar and Facebook and the implications of this.
So, all in all, a really productive week!
