This week, the relaunched Canadian journal of higher Education, Academic Matters, published with a theme called ‘Professor 2.0′. In it, i have a piece that examines how media change and impact are reshaping what it is to be a 21st century academic.

Last night, I attended the PODIUM awards on behalf of #media2012. PODIUM is the London 2012 education initiative, which has been focusing the HE, FE and school sector on the build up to the Games. Their awards ceremony has 8 categories and #media2012 received a Bronze medal in the Creative and Cultural Category. It was also shortlisted among 5 other candidates from the 230 nominations for the Pierre de Coubertin Vision award. While we didn’t win, the competition was really fierce with some massive projects being our competitors. It was really amazing that we were shortlisted.

A couple of weeks ago, the Scotland on Sunday published a 4-page profile piece about my work. It was written by the awesome Anna Burnside, with whom I’ve been in dialogue about my research for a few years. It’s a really lovely article and a real privilege to have given so much space to explain what I do. It’s certainly the most in depth and personal examination of my background, motives and interests. Here’s the link to the full piece. The portait was taken by an amazing photographer called Ian MacNicol, who turns out to be (we think) the only Scotland based photographer accredited at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Small world!

Last week, I took part as a judge in the Debating Matters programme, part of the Institute of Ideas work, funded by Wellcome Trust. It was one of the most rewarding work days I’ve had in a while and so exciting and inspiring to see the school students get into debates about contemporary issues. This is an awesome international programme and every school in the country should try to compete.

The #media2012 project is really ramping up now. We have been shortlisted for a prize, which will be decided on public vote. Please vote for #media2012 here (takes 5 seconds).

Over the next week, I’ll be speaking at 2 events within the @edscifest. The first is on Thursday 5th April titled ‘Designer Athletes: Fair Play or Foul?‘ and the other is called ‘Human 2.0‘ Hope you can join us.

Today I hit the road again to Brussels for an EC Digital Futures foresight workshop.

Here’s the plan:

The workshops will address the following four elements:

a) Visions describing possible futures (i.e. snapshots of the world in the future), with perceived likelihood and year of maturity (if and when the visions would materialise), desirability, and impacts associated to them.

b) Trends identifying complex phenomena observable today that may have an influence on the futures, either directly or because they would lead to intermediate situations that would in turn generate other trends affecting 2040-50′s scenarios.

c) Issues stemming from the envisaged futures, i.e. possible opportunities and risks that can be associated to them.

Furthermore, the workshops will identify opportunities for intervention to shape the above visions, together with associated actors (‘implementers’), and possibly roadmap sketches towards the futures. These will then be translated intopolicy options underpinning possible paths to the futures.

Last month, I had a photo essay published in the Dutch architecture journal S+RO.

Their special Olympic Cities edition covers a range of subjects, mine presents an overview of ways of seeing the Olympic city, framed by the following proposition:

Occupying the Olympics:
Spectacle, Subversion, Surveillance, Sponsorship

Sponsorship, surveillance, spectacle and subversion are not discrete categories within the Olympic city. Everyone attempts to hijack each others’ message or get around the other’s guidelines.

The International Olympic Committee limits the sponsors’ privilege by forbidding their presence within Olympic venues.  The sponsors limits the host city’s privilege by securing all billboard space for their own campaigns and erecting their own meta-event within the mega-event with vast temporary buildings and by staging their own Olympic programme. The Host City draws people away from the sports towards experiencing their culture and heritage, in order to recover some of their financial loss. Spectators roam the streets searching for scalpers’ tickets, finding that the only scalpers are executives from top sponsors who have wads of free tickets they will sell at face value. Even the athletes try to get around the rules by doping.

The Olympic park is a new kind of theme park – ‘a theme park without a theme’ as writer Iain Sinclair put it in his latest book Ghost Milk. However, the park is no longer enclosed; the city has become the park.  For London 2012, there is already a big wheel installed for tourists to ride.

This world is not hyper-real like a Disneyland, but an Uberland where consumption even relies on its own global currency – VISA, the exclusive card of all Olympic activity.  All 204 visiting nations are able to access the Olympic experience by this simple chip and pin transaction, while London 2012 banks on providing its second Austerity Olympics anxious that the city may be burning with unrest, as it was in the summer of 2011.

These images tell stories of alternative Olympic experiences the protests that go unnoticed by the 20,000 journalists who shuffle form one sports venue to the next blinkered from what happens in the city.

Here is an indication of the layout:

Photography from Taipei

Last week, I was in Taiwan and gave a lecture about social media and sport at Da-Yeh University. I focused on aspects of the London 2012 Olympics, while also talking about other dimensions of my next book titled ‘A Digital Olympics’, which covers everything digital in sport, from citizen journalism to virtual reality simulations. Taiwan is an amazing place, unlike any other place in Asia I have visited.