Our Aims

The Network Literacies Project allows the UNSW community—students and staff—to develop their network literacies. It’s a flexible project—it has to be. Contemporary networks are very dynamic. Tools, techniques and communities change rapidly. At the moment we are very much in development and  are really only ‘open for exploration’ by and for media staff—but we plan to expand this soon if we are able. Indeed, anyone else interested in developing a good network culture and is more than welcome to start a blog and join us.

The NetLit projects main aims concern the people and communities that use networks. We aim to enhance UNSW communities of learning and research by building a community of people sharing techniques to get the most out of networks. We also aim to connect UNSW communities more effectively to the rest of the world—both in the Sciences and what are increasingly called the Digital Humanities.

This site, New South Blogs, is a multi-user blog installation, using WordPress Multi-User (WP-mu). It is the notional centre of what is actually a distributed and largely decentralized project. Those involved also inhabit other networks and use other technologies (such as Twitter, their own blogs, Flickr or YouTube) with varying degrees of connection.

The NetLit project’s activities are a complement to more ‘centralised’ technical platforms (such as WebCT) used at UNSW. Being open platform, often open source, highly flexible (read constantly changing) and in general just very usefully “open”, the NetLit project deals in different aspects of learning and research to more formal platforms: probably less formal aspects but no less effective for that. We think that NetLit ideas and techniques will work best in blended environments of learning and research—centralised and decentralised, formal and informal.

We are grateful to the UNSW IT Investment Plan process, for an initial scoping and seeding grant for this project, in 2008. The project was conceived and developed by Mat Wall-Smith, with assistance from Andrew Murphie, as part of a long series of explorations of network literacies by the staff of the Media Program in The School of English, Media and Performing Arts.

Mat Wall-Smith and Andrew Murphie