First Thursday June 3rd - please welcome Laurie Kagetsu June 1, 2010

Please join me to welcome Laurie Kagetsu in the chat room on First Thursday June 3rd. (Time and log in details) I am delighted Laurie is joining us (I'll explain why later) and given she is in Canada and will be getting up early to join us I feel a heavy responsibility to make her effort worthwhile ;-)

I am delighted to welcome Laurie because I long for better communication between academics and practitioners. I want the academics (with all their time to research, and to think and to present information) to be informed by the "practitioners" (i.e. all of us who are actively "doing things"). I want this to happen so that their research will be relevant and useful, tied to what is really happening and what needs to happen. Some academics are still trapped in their ivory towers but some are using the Internet to connect their research with "real life". Laurie will be doing that when she joins First Thursday. She is about to start a new course of study, and within it there is a short course on Community Informatics with Professor Mike Gurstein. Mike knows about my obsession about better communication between academics and practitioners so he is encouraging Laurie to link up with me and the people I know. Please come and meet her if you get this message in time and if you will be near an Internet connection on Thursday.

Our chat depends on what you want to chat about. Nothing is fixed yet. I don't want to dominate the choice of topics but, once I see who is in the chat room I will help you to recognise your shared areas of interest.

Pamela