Amazingly, I have a 20 minute window of unstructured time and I thought, is now the time that I pop up my head and reflect on the last period of time in my academic practice? You mean I can breathe for a moment and review what’s going on? Wow… that sounds good.  So here we are.. or at the very least, here I am, at your writerly service.

I’ve been grinding under the rock of academic teaching, which has its joys, but also its challenges. Working in the Masters of Communication program at Deakin for my second year has allowed me to create and shape the units that I work with. This has been a wonderful experience in terms of influencing student’s learning, but also a huge undertaking with much learning about organisational engagement. Still, I’ve written my very first unit on research methods, Alexia styles. That has been fun.

In terms of research, my Cryptocurrency use study has lost momentum and my attention and is sadly languishing. I pine to return to the active practice of ethnographic field work and hope, that there will be a gap in my workload to priorities this project. What is happening in this space and where is the community imaging the next possibilities are coming from now that speculation and investment has created a bubble and drawn out the oxygen for imagining alternative financial practices that are more inclusive.

Under my rock is also the small pebble of future research directions, including the project idea that I’ve had bubbling along for some time about how to model social form and make interactive and reactive social surfaces that can be animated and used to understand and interpret social trends and currents.

Still further, I am taking small steps in learning how to work with social media data, do sentiment analysis and build up a applied toolkit for social media analysis using available software such as NLTK. These bits of learning are just small pieces of the puzzle to the future skill set that I see as necessary to build up interactive and dimensional models of social form.

In terms of writing, well, that suffers also under the grind the teaching practice. When do I have space to dream and breathe and wend words into stories that shape and reshape my world?

It’s sad to see projects that I am invested in and my writing practice languishing whilst I turn my attention to establishing financial security, professional development and gaining professional experience working within a university department. These things matter, but to what cost? This trade off is a balancing act and at some point I will need to give to the other sides of my creative practice. Right now, I am in a holding pattern acquiring skills and preparing for whatever next. What is next? Maybe I need to raise my periscope higher up.

Right, well that’s time up for now and I haven’t shared with you any of the creative writing or ideas that I have started to manifest.  Here’s one of them, my piece for the Agile Opera research project called Mirror Play. It’s something I’m very proud of. Another piece of work that I’m proud of is a small blog piece that I’ve derived from the Silk Road research and have happily joined it to the development of a special issue for a journal with some wonderful crew. This is a reflection on some of the challenges and themes from this research project that haven’t yet had an appropriate channel through which to share them. In this blog I consider Silk Road as a Digital Bermuda Triangle. Enjoy.