Currently
Since 2012 | Co-Director and Founder of Centre for Creative & Social Technologies (CAST) and Senior Lecturer in Management at Goldsmiths, University of London in the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths and convener of the MSc Management of Innovation.
Formerly
2011-2012 | Convener of the MA Digital Journalism programme at Goldsmiths, University of London and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing
2005-2010 | Lecturer and Director of Online Journalism at City University, London. Responsible for online journalism teaching to over 2,000 graduates across eight MA programmes.
And Before That …
2003-2005 | Visiting Lecturer in the Management School at Camosun College, Victoria, Canada. Course leader for Business Information Technology.
Teaching
Innovation Case Studies
Chris Brauer convenes this module for all the CAST Digital Innovation MA programmes (Digital Journalism, Digital Sociology, Creating Social Media) and delivers 60% of the lectures. All lectures feature an industry guest experimenting with the innovation case in real-world applications.
Digital Sandbox
Module leader for the MA Digital Journalism programme focussed on ‘playing’ in the sandbox with various emergent technologies and tools. Students are encouraged to experiment in creating or evolving innovative forms of journalism and media using software and code. Every student has a dedicated virtual server environment.
Digital Research Methods
Mixture or quantitative and qualitative methods for investigation and research in digital and social media. Quantitative tools include data mining with SPSS and R while qualitative methods explore databases, social networks, and ethnography.
Current Research
My interests are in the intersections of emergent technologies and craft. In practice this typically means hitting the physical and digital streets as a field researcher intervening in social lives and experiences using multimedia, code, and good old fashioned door stepping. My research topics nearly always generate media interest as they relate to the transformations underway in our individual and collective socioeconomic and cultural lives.
Firesheep and Facebook
Research project featured on BBC Newsnight exploring methods of ‘packet sniffing’ on unsecure or poorly encrypted wireless networks. Focus of the research is to explore research participant reactions and behaviours when alerted to substantial virtual privacy invasions.
Generation Cloud
Research director for project reported on by over 450 newspapers and media outlets worldwide. We found emergent social types engaging with cloud computing including ‘e-hoarders’, and those concerned with leaving a ‘digital inheritance’. Methods included crowdsourcing, field interviews, sentiment analysis, and use case scenarios.
Digital Interventions
Series of mini-research cases on the impacts and methods of Digital Interventions building on the theories of French philosophers Alain Touraine and Pierre Bourdieu and the work on collective intelligece by Pierre Levy in Canada. Cases include the Twae Twitter feed, BlogScholar, and investigations of the August 2011 London riots.
