[Air-l] PhD blogring proposal

[Mary-Helen Ward]

At the AoIR conference in Brisbane a group (well, three is a small 
group!) of us PhD students met with the graduate student representative 
on the AoIR board, Ted Coopman. One of the things that was suggested at 
that meeting was that some kind of central place be set up with a list 
of the blogs of graduate student members of the Association - a blog 
ring, I guess, although it could be as simple as a click able listing of 
all the sites with some details about their owners and their research 
interests.

I'm not sure if there's somewhere this could be done on the Association 
website, or whether one of us should just take the initiative and call 
for addresses to create this page and stick it somewhere. I'm happy to 
have a go at designing a button we could have on our sites - it could 
link to this (as yet uncreated) list if we decided not to have a 
'proper' blogring or it could be the blogring button.

The advantage to this would be that this could be a kick start to 
forming a community of common interest - many of us are already linking 
to each other and have each other on RSS feeds, but this would create a 
quick way to connect with and for new student members. Also, at the PhD 
colloquium many PhD presenters found the input from faculty to be really 
helpful, especially as we're all working in such a multi-disciplinary 
and 'out there' academic area and many have supervisors with more 
traditional research experience. Having our blogs linked would mean that 
we could bring up issues we were concerned about for discussion among a 
wider audience that has a deeper understanding of the issues of our 
research areas than many of the people we are in face-to-face contact with.

What do people think?

Mary-Helen
__
Educational Developer
Flexible Online Learning Team
USyd eLearning
Office of the Pro Vice Chancellor, Teaching and Learning