My move to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania is finally complete. It took a little longer to get settled than expected – blame it on two damaged research servers and the corrupt hard drive on my laptop. Note that my contact details have been updated and my homepage has been updated in general. I-neighbors.org has also successfully been moved to ASC. As an active research project the website had to go through Penn\’s Institutional Review Board (also took longer than I expected). The IRB was generally happy with the current ethical guidelines and required no changes with the exception of some minor new wording in the Terms of Use, which further highlight that I-neighbors is a research project. I think the change was a good thing as many people till confuse us with a for profit dot com.
When I think of schoolyard bullies, hi tech does not exactly come to mind. NCH, a UK based children’s charity, recently published a report with what I think is an alarming figure, that 1 in 4 children between the ages of 11 and 19 have been bullied or threatened via their cell phone or computer. They have even put together a website to help kids that are being bullied online Stoptextbully.com. Read the article in The Register on how bullies are using cell phones with built-in cameras.
I have a couple new publications out. The first is a book chapter in Manuel Castells\’ new book The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective titled \”Networked Sociability Online, Off-line.\” The book is currently only available in hardback (at a ridiculous price) but should be released in paperback any day now. The second publication is a chapter on \”Social Ties and Community in Urban Places\” for Harry Hiller\’s new textbook on Urban Canada: Sociological Perspectives. This textbook is intended for 2nd or 3rd year students studying urban and community sociology. It is an excellent collection and all around reference, not just for urbanists interested in a Canadian perspective. My chapter deals with both place based and online community, of course. Since these publications are book chapters, I will not be posting them in the publications section of my website, sorry.