from: Snurb 10 months ago

Paper presented at the PerthDAC conference, Perth, Australia, 15-18 September 2007. For more information (including the full paper), see http://snurb.info/node/719. In the emerging social software, ‘Web2.0’ environment, the production of ideas takes place in a collaborative, participatory mode which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as much as producers of information and knowledge, or what can be described as produsers. These produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage – the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement. This paper examines the overall characteristics of produsers and produsage, and identifies key questions for the produsage model.

Tags: None

from: Snurb 10 months ago

Paper presented at the Creativity & Cognition conference in Washington, DC, on 14-16 June 2007. For more information (including the full paper), see http://snurb.info/node/720. This paper outlines the concept of produsage as a model of describing today’s emerging user-led content creation environments. Produsage overcomes some of the systemic problems associated with translating industrial-age ideas of content production into an informational-age, social software, Web 2.0 environment. Instead, it offers new ways of understanding the collaborative content creation and development practices found in contemporary informational environments.

Tags: social-software user-led produsage collaboration web2.0

from: Snurb 10 months ago

Paper presented at the ICE3 conference, Loch Lomond, Scotland, 23 March 2007. For more information (including the full paper), see http://snurb.info/node/721. If produsage is an increasingly significant element of intellectual, economic, legal and political processes within society, then educational institutions must pay more attention to developing produser capabilities in their graduates – focussing on learners’ collaborative, creative, critical, and communicative capabilities (or C4C, for short). Indeed, they must lead by example and base more of their teaching and learning frameworks on produsage models. Social constructivist approaches to education already call for a greater role for learners in the educational process, but even pedagogies based on this framework often still retain a strong role for the teacher, and standard tertiary education practices continue to allow for innovation only within the confines of otherwise persistent and immutable institutional structures. Beyond this, however, there is a potential for more wide-ranging changes which reposition learners as co-produsers not only of knowledge, but also of course and institutional structures. Applying a systematic understanding of current cyberspace trends towards produsage in Web2.0 environments to tertiary teaching practice in the ‘real world’, this paper outlines potential avenues for such pedagogical approaches, and investigates the extent to which they address the needs of what Trendwatching.com describes as ‘Generation C’.

Tags: education socialsoftware content web2.0 user-led

from: Snurb 9 months ago

This paper by Axel Bruns and Sal Humphreys for the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Vancouver, 17-20 Oct. 2007,describes the first phase of the Emergent Digital Grassroots eXpo (edgeX) project – a research and application project centred on mapping grassroots and amateur content creation, community engagement with new media, and strengthening local identity. Developed in conjunction with the City Council of Ipswich, a city of some 150,000 residents in regional Queensland, the edgeX project provides a site for local residents to upload creative content, to participate in competitions, to comment on each other’s work, and to develop new skills. Research goals associated with edgeX arise from a broader project of mapping the creative industries and their role in the knowledge economy, and a growing understanding of the significant part user-led content creation plays in these processes, especially including the role of amateur creatives.

Tags: produsage ipswich edgex creativity aoir8

from: Snurb 9 months ago

This paper by Axel Bruns and Sal Humphreys for the International Symposium on Wikis in Montréal, 21-23 Oct. 2007, traces the evolution of a project using a wiki-based learning environment in a tertiary education setting. The project has the pedagogical goal of building learners’ capacities to work effectively in the networked, collaborative, creative environments of the knowledge economy. The paper explores the four key characteristics of a ‘produsage’ environment and identifies four strategic capacities that need to be developed in learners to be effective ‘produsers’ (user-producers). A case study is presented of our experiences with the subject New Media Technologies, run at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. This progress report updates our observations made at the 2005 WikiSym conference.

Tags: social-constructivism produsage pedagogy education tertiary

from: Snurb 6 months ago

Recent decades have seen the dual trend of growing digitization of content, and of increasing availability of sophisticated tools for creating, manipulating, publishing, and disseminating that content. Advertising campaigns openly encourage users to 'Rip. Mix. Burn.' and to share the fruits of their individual or collaborative efforts with the rest of the world. The Internet has smashed the distribution bottleneck of older media, and the dominance of the traditional producer > publisher > distributor value chain has weakened. Marshall McLuhan's dictum 'everyone's a publisher' is on the verge of becoming a reality - and more to the point, as the Wikipedia proudly proclaims, 'anyone can edit.' The effect of these changes is not simply more (and more informed) consumption, however - we are not turning into Alvin Toffler's 'prosumers': consumers with an almost professional level of knowledge about what they consume, but consumers nonetheless. Instead, the networked and hypermediated persona that emerges is a very different beast: users are becoming active producers of content in a variety of open and collaborative environments. Whether it is as members of the distributed development and testing community for open source software projects, as authors, editors, and fact-checkers for one of the multi-lingual Wikipedia sites, as reporters, commentators, and pundits in open news publications ranging from South Korean citizen news site OhmyNews to tech-nerd haven Slashdot, or as global explorers and annotators for Google Earth, they are no longer producers or consumers, publishers or audiences, but both at the same time. They are not prosumers, but user-producers: produsers. While born perhaps out of a collaborative, open source ideology, produsing is now increasingly recognized as both a challenge and an opportunity by business and governments alike. For example, the Sims range of games relies overwhelmingly on its users as content produsers - 90% of content in The Sims itself is contributed by user-produsers. Similarly, Brisbane-based games company Auran has established a community of produsers around its popular train simulator Trainz, with some 200,000 'assets' (locomotives, carriages, scenery and other elements) prodused so far. BBC News Online and other agencies now regularly call for their users to send in camera phone footage of unfolding events. And Trendwatching.com even sees a whole 'Generation C' of produsers emerging before our very eyes. More broadly, the Chinese government is in the process of initiating a shift in its economic focus from 'made in China' to 'created in China', aiming to turn the country from the world's factory to the world's ideas generator. This shift, with its strong links to the recognition by European and Australian governments of the creative industries as a key economic driver, also builds on the move from users to produsers - it seeks to harness collaborative, grassroots creativity as a means of generating new ideas and new content (while at the same time attempting to maintain state control of the process). So who are these produsers - and how will they fare in the light of increasing business and government involvement? As economic interests begin to explore ways to generate revenue from produsage, will they undermine its collaborative foundations, and will they reintroduce a regime of stricter intellectual property licensing? Or can the grassroots movement of produsers effect lasting change in our engagement with content, establishing a solid foothold for creative commons and other alternative IP licensing systems, and developing an equitable approach to relationships between the produser community and commercial partners?

Tags: web2.0 software social user-led collaboration

from: Snurb 6 months ago

My talk at ATOM2006 outlined the produser concept, with a view also to how educators can aim to enable students to engage in produsage through the development of their critical, collaborative and creative ICT and media literacies.

Tags: software social web2.0 collaboration user-led

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 7 Slidecast for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: network produsage kcb201 collaboration diy

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 8 Slidecast for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: collaboration user-led kcb201 produsage

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 7 lecture slides by Barry Saunders for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: produsage kcb201 collaboration media diy

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 8 lecture slides for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: production user-led collaboration del.icio.us produsage

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 9 Slidecast for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: collaboration produsage software opensource kcb201

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 12 Slidecast for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: collaboration expertise produsage knowledge kcb201

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 13 Slidecast for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: collaboration produsage intelligence collective kcb201

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 10 Slidecast for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: news collaboration produsage journalism citizen

from: Snurb 3 months ago

Week 11 Slidecast for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: kcb201 wikipedia collaboration produsage knowledge

from: Snurb 2 months ago

Week 9 lecture slides by Adam Muir for KCB201 Virtual Cultures in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, semester 1/2008.

Tags: collaboration produsage software opensource kcb201