Via Twitter I heard about two essays of University of Amsterdam colleague dr. Linda Duits. Both accounts are very (very!) familiar from my perspective as a lecturer at the UvA. Please do read them as they provide a painful insight in the day-to-day and long term institutional problems “we” (lecturers at Dutch universities) encounter. Some of these problems have a deeper political and cultural background, and it is not that all problems can be traced back to either the university, students, or “The Hague” (politics), but that should be no excuse in finding a way to fix them. I am thinking what I can do about this, but the only thing I feel I can do now is to draw attention to these somewhat profound issues:

Please read: “De Onderwijsfabriek” & “Excellent onderzoek leidt tot benedenmaats onderwijs”

Has been a while, so here’s a round-up of what I did last month (of May). For starters, I have been busy working on my PhD (and will continue to do so for the coming months). Next to that there were some cool projects I participated in. For example, May 3 I did the opening talk for Upload Cinema. The 18th edition focused on games (titled “All play and no work”) and I was a guest-curator to select the most hilarious and fascinating web clips (to be shown in Theater De Uitkijk). We had a record of 270+ submissions and 32 clips made it to the final selection. Here’s the entire list which represent (a selection of) the best web clips on games and game culture.

This month I also participated in the Bashers.nl podcast. We talked about the iPad (yes, I haz one), Little Big Planet and User Created Content, and about the book “Nintendo Magic”.

And, to top it all off, I did two talks this week:
- 2010 (May 20). “Journalistiek & Social Media”. Talk at Kringcongres 2010 at Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen (HAN), Nijmegen.
- 2010 (May 21). “Blurring Boundaries: War & Games”. Talk at ‘(new) Media and the United States’ event organized by the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA), Utrecht.

For the coming months I will be less busy with talks and the like. There are some interviews I did last week which will be published the coming weeks, but other than that, expect more sporadic updates on this site as I am slowly getting into crunch mode with my PhD.