Themes

Theme 1: Technologies for Human Use

  • Technology, knowledge and society: re-examining the connections.
  • Human-technology interaction, interfaces and useability.
  • Cybernetics, informatics, systemics and distributed networks.
  • New media, new communications channels: broadcasting, to narrowcasting, to pointcasting.
  • Open computing: the theory and practice of open source and free software.
  • Creative Commons.
  • Copyright and digital rights management.
  • Proprietary software and its human influences.
  • Data and metadata: meanings, boundaries, functions.
  • Open standards and the logistics of communicability and interoperability.
  • Structure and semantics in information.
  • The Semantic Web.
  • Markup languages, new markup practices, new literacies.
  • Wireless and mobile information and communications technologies.
  • Multilingualism, Unicode and machine translation.
  • Artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, intelligent agents.

Theme 2: Technologies for Participatory Citizenship

  • Technology, participation, access and equity.
  • Technology in capacity development.
  • Digital development: bridging the digital divide.
  • E-government, e-democracy and cyber-civics.
  • Participatory systems.
  • The politics of information.
  • Globalisation and technology.
  • Multilingualism and cultural diversity in the digital age.
  • Technological meets social transformation.
  • Technical and social systems of sustainability.
  • The wild world of the Web: regulation and its discontents.

Theme 3: Technologies for Autonomous Communities

  • Communities of practice and knowledge-creating communities.
  • Virtual communities.
  • Communities as publishers.
  • Communities as networks: the dynamics of collaboration and community building.
  • Information architectures: scaffolds for autonomy or restrictive straight-jackets?
  • Multi-channel publishing.
  • E-books and alternative reading devices.
  • Digital print, variable print and print-on-demand.
  • Digital repositories, archives and libraries.
  • Disability and access.
  • Differences of sensibility and access: gender, language, culture.
  • Cyber-identities.
  • Creative sources: the technologies of art and the arts of technology.
  • Cyber-ethics and cyber-law.

Theme 4: Technologies for New Learning

  • Learning by design: curriculum and instruction in the era of networked computing.
  • Edutainment: gaming as pedagogy.
  • Perception, cognition and interactivity.
  • Children of the digital era: learning styles and the challenges of engagement.
  • Interactive and collaborative learning.
  • Digital meanings, multimodal communications and multiliteracies.
  • Lifelong and lifewide learning.
  • E-learning on the job and in work-related training.
  • Organisational learning and the learning organisation.
  • Formal and informal learning.
  • Help menus and user-guides: website and software-integrated learning.
  • The virtual university.
  • E-humanities and e-social sciences.
  • E-learning in the professions.

Theme 5: Technologies for Common Knowledge

  • Technology in the service of the ‘knowledge society’.
  • Data, information, knowledge, wisdom: re-examining core concepts.
  • Knowledge management: nurturing personal and common knowledge.
  • Information systems and people in organisations.
  • Research infrastructures.
  • Participatory design.
  • Intellectual property: approaches digital rights management.
  • Creative Commons and commercial realities: what are the economic conditions for knowledge and innovation?
  • E-commerce, open markets and open knowledge: contradictions or complementarities?
  • Technologies of security and terror.
  • Collaborations: from personal to interpersonal computing.

Theme 6: Technologies for Development

  • Information and communications technologies and development.
  • ICTs: how the poor will benefit.
  • Situating ICTs in development policies and strategies.
  • Global interactions: technologies, development and globalisation.
  • Globalisation, technology and social transformations.