A pioneer initiative

Via Jose Luis Orihuela from eCuaderno I have found that MIT has opened an experimental free hosted weblog to serve MIT students, faculty, staff, researchers, and alumni "with the purpose of facilitating the communication around research and innovation at MIT".
I think is a brilliant idea and a pioneer effort by a major University. As their website states it "Weblogs tools make it extremely easy to publish new content on a regular basis" .
I hope the Unversity of Bergen, very soon, will move in the same direction.

Dr. Jill Walker

I am happy there are no schedule collisions and Jill Walker will be able to attend The Democracy and Theory Seminar on Monday February 2nd.
She has agreed to make a presentation about blogs and Power. I will be presenting some thoughts on similar lines.
Jill is a remarkable woman and one of the few experts in the field of New Media in the Nordic academic circle. Recently she has dedicated a lot of thinking and writing about blogs and the blogging activity. She is a fine blogger self. She has recently defended her Doctoral Thesis on Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make you Part of a Fictional World.
I think she appreciates my referring to her by her title.
Doctor Jill Walker, thanks for accepting our invitation.

A Challenge

The Democracy Seminar began yesterday. We were several colleagues around a large table.

Jostein introduced the main topics to be addressed and made a very good summary with comments around Habermas article. New readings were discussed and future presentations.

It was agreed by “qualified” consensus (or was it the authoritarian voice of Jostein? :-) ) that the Seminar will have a somehow Waltz Rhythm: two heavy theoretical sessions will be always followed by a lighter one focusing on possible applications of Discourse Theory to tecnology changes or other relevant Media phenomena.
I suggested (shyly) discussing the bloggers activity as an interesting phenomenon. Actually expanded forms of the Public sphere appear to grow out of the conversational and autonomous character of weblogs. They are actually congregating a increasing number of individuals (and groups) across the Internet in order to discuss and debate on a wide range of issues.
Given the lack of other suggestions Jostein decided to go for it.

A nice challenge.