I don’t mean to blow my own horn but, well, actually I’m going to blow my horn!

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.

One of the things I hate about my job is this the amount of time I spend in the car. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, I had a 9am meeting in Wodonga, a 1030am meeting in Yackandandah, a 1230pm in Benalla and a 4 o’clock in Melbourne. However, one of the things that I love about my job is that I get to drive from Wodonga to Melbourne through the high country. My phone camera sucks arse, but these might give you an idea of the type of country I get to drive through. It’s actually quite breathtaking.

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).

One down, so many more tasks to go. A couple of Fridays ago I presented to the Graduate Research Panel at school. The previous semester I didn’t do as well as I had done in my first year, so I was really scared that I wouldn’t improve as much. Turns out I did really well; the panel noted that the issues they had with my last presentation had been addressed and resolved in the work I had done since.

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).

This post is a reminder of the big to-do’s coming up for me…

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.