When I was working on my portfolio-site I was thinking about our projects name. And to jump on the bandwagon I thought about calling it “ePanopticon”, what I did in the name of the Hyperlink to this website. ePanopticon because the focus of our work lies on the social tendencies related to the so-called web 2.0 - using sociable web applications like Flickr, Blogs, del.icio.us etc. and thus leaving traces online. These traces are only virtual, electronically based - in form of digital data. These digital traces can be only cookies, a user name appearing somewhere in the web, IP-adresses stored on different sites or even photos or description of the personal life. We chose the term panopticon because these traces provide the possibility to keep track of other peoples activities, interests etc. and in return to be watched by other internet-users.

The other idea that came to my mind was “panopticon 2.0″ as we are dealing with the present tendencies of using more and more sociable web applications summarized under the buzzword web 2.0. But I really don’t like adding everywhere a “2.0″ to indicate to belong to something that is going on at the moment - but lacks a clear classification.

Ok, it is not the most important thing to think about how to name the framework for our work but it just came to my mind.

The first step of our project work, leading to a learning object about transparency and surveillance in education, surveillance culture and ubiquitous education is done: the tool for the transparent documentation of our process is now online.

We will use this blog for the communication about our topics, to publish the state of the our work, to start discussions about question and arguments… Everybody is invited to follow this process and to be active by commenting, asking, writing down ideas… And please feel free to link to this page to help us in our try to be test objects of our research about transparency and surveillance - especially in the era of web 2.0.

Next to this blog we use a Wiki to collect our material, to structure our thoughts in an order using semantic criteria, not in a chronological order. References for literature or other material are highly welcome!

At a point, when we feel we need to close/interrupt our process of research and regard our collection of material as a useful learning object for other people - also thirsty for knowledge - this blog will be closed and becomes thus the process becomes part of the learning object; but the starting point to the learning object will be a more static possiblity to enter the transparency of our project.

Brotherly love,

Christina