Youth Festival Music Performance : Deception Bay

Research Background - Young people with negative experiences of mainstream education often display low levels of traditional academic achievement. These young people tend to display considerable cultural and social resources developed through their repeated experiences of adversity. Education research has a duty to provide these young people with opportunities to showcase, assess and translate their social and cultural resources into symbolic forms of capital. This creative work addresses the following research question. How can educators develop disengaged teenager's social and cultural capital through live music performances? Research Contribution - These live music performances afford the young participants opportunities to display their artistic, technical, social and cultural resources through a popular cultural format. In doing so they require education institutions to provide venues that demonstrate the skills these young people acquire through flexible learning environments. The new knowledge derived from this research focuses on the academic and self confidence benefits for disengaged young people using festival performances as authentic learning activities. Research Significance - This research is significant because it aims to maximise the number of tangible outcomes related to a school-based arts project. The young participants gained technical, artistic, social and commercial skills during this project. This performance led to more recording and opportunities to perform at other youth festivals in SE QLD. Individual performances were distributed and downloaded via creative commons licences at the Australian Creative Resource Archive. It also contributed to their certified qualifications and acted as pilot research data for two competitively funded ARC grants (DP0209421 & LP0883643)

Experience of problem-based learning (PBL) in virtual space : a phenomenographical study

This thesis reports the outcomes of an investigation into students’ experience of Problem-based learning (PBL) in virtual space. PBL is increasingly being used in many fields including engineering education. At the same time many engineering education providers are turning to online distance education. Unfortunately there is a dearth of research into what constitutes an effective learning experience for adult learners who undertake PBL instruction through online distance education. Research was therefore focussed on discovering the qualitatively different ways that students experience PBL in virtual space. Data was collected in an electronic environment from a course, which adopted the PBL strategy and was delivered entirely in virtual space. Students in this course were asked to respond to open-ended questions designed to elicit their learning experience in the course. Data was analysed using the phenomenographical approach. This interpretative research method concentrated on mapping the qualitative differences in students’ interpretations of their experience in the course. Five qualitatively different ways of experiencing were discovered: Conception 1: ‘A necessary evil for program progression’; Conception 2: ‘Developing skills to understand, evaluate, and solve technical Engineering and Surveying problems’; Conception 3: ‘Developing skills to work effectively in teams in virtual space’; Conception 4: ‘A unique approach to learning how to learn’; Conception 5: ‘Enhancing personal growth’. Each conception reveals variation in how students attend to learning by PBL in virtual space. Results indicate that the design of students’ online learning experience was responsible for making students aware of deeper ways of experiencing PBL in virtual space. Results also suggest that the quality and quantity of interaction with the team facilitator may have a significant impact on the student experience in virtual PBL courses. The outcomes imply pedagogical strategies can be devised for shifting students’ focus as they engage in the virtual PBL experience to effectively manage the student learning experience and thereby ensure that they gain maximum benefit. The results from this research hold important ramifications for graduates with respect to their ease of transition into professional work as well as their later professional competence in terms of problem solving, ability to transfer basic knowledge to real-life engineering scenarios, ability to adapt to changes and apply knowledge in unusual situations, ability to think critically and creatively, and a commitment to continuous life-long learning and self-improvement.

Regulating roles of the use of the balanced scorecard in shaping corporate identities

The literature on corporate identity management suggests that managing corporate identity is a strategically complex task embracing the shaping of a range of dimensions of organisational life. The performance measurement literature and its applications likewise now also emphasise organisational ability to incorporate various dimensions considering both financial and non-financial performance measures when assessing success. The inclusion of these soft non-financial measures challenges organisations to quantify intangible aspects of performance such as corporate identity, transforming unmeasurables into measurables. This paper explores the regulatory roles of the use of the balanced scorecard in shaping key dimensions of corporate identities in a public sector shared service provider in Australia. This case study employs qualitative interviews of senior managers and employees, secondary data and participant observation. The findings suggest that the use of the balanced scorecard has potential to support identity construction, as an organisational symbol, a communication tool of vision, and as strategy, through creating conversations that self-regulate behaviour. The development of an integrated performance measurement system, the balanced scorecard, becomes an expression of a desired corporate identity, and the performance measures and continuous process provide the resource for interpreting actual corporate identities. Through this process of understanding and mobilising the interaction, it may be possible to create a less obtrusive and more subtle way to control “what an organisation is”. This case study also suggests that the theoretical and practical fusion of the disciplinary knowledge around corporate identities and performance measurement systems could make a contribution to understanding and shaping corporate identities.

Experiential knowledge representation and the design of product usability

The topic of designers’ knowledge and how they conduct design process has been widely investigated in design research. Understanding theoretical and experiential knowledge in design has involved recognition of the importance of designers’ experience of experiencing, seeing, and absorbing ideas from the world as points of reference (or precedents) that are consulted whenever a design problem arises (Lawson, 2004). Hence, various types of design knowledge have been categorized (Lawson, 2004), and the nature of design knowledge continues to be studied (Cross, 2006); nevertheless, the study of the experiential aspects embedded in design knowledge is a topic not fully addressed. In particular there has been little emphasis on the investigation of the ways in which designers’ individual experience influences different types of design tasks. This research focuses on the investigation of the ways in which designers inform a usability design process. It aims to understand how designers design product usability, what informs their process, and the role their individual experience (and episodic knowledge) plays within the design process. This paper introduces initial outcomes from an empirical study involving observation of a design task that emphasized usability issues. It discusses the experiential knowledge observed in the visual representations (sketches) produced by designers as part of the design tasks. Through the use of visuals as means to represent experiential knowledge, this paper presents initial research outcomes to demonstrate how designers’ individual experience is integrated into design tasks and communicated within the design process. Initial outcomes demonstrate the influence of designers’ experience in the design of product usability. It is expected that outcomes will help identify the causal relationships between experience, context of use, and product usability, which will contribute to enhance our understanding about the design of user-product interactions.

A structured return to the 'Fourth Estate': interviews and inquiry that challenge entrenched authorities' 'knowledge'

Contemporary debates on the role of journalism in society are continuing the tradition of downplaying the role of proactive journalism - generally situated under the catchphrase of the Fourth Estate - in public policy making. This paper puts the case for the retention of a notion of a proactive form of journalism which can be broadly described as "investigative ", because it is important to the public policy process in modern democracies. It argues that critiques that downplay the potential of this form of journalism are flawed and overly deterministic. Finally. it seeks to illustrate how journalists can proactively inquire in ways that are relevant to the lives ofpeople in a range of settings, and that question elite sources in the interests ofthose people.

An instrument for assessing primary students’ knowledge of information graphics in mathematics

Information graphics have become increasingly important in representing, organising and analysing information in a technological age. In classroom contexts, information graphics are typically associated with graphs, maps and number lines. However, all students need to become competent with the broad range of graphics that they will encounter in mathematical situations. This paper provides a rationale for creating a test to measure students’ knowledge of graphics. This instrument can be used in mass testing and individual (in-depth) situations. Our analysis of the utility of this instrument informs policy and practice. The results provide an appreciation of the relative difficulty of different information graphics; and provide the capacity to benchmark information about students’ knowledge of graphics. The implications for practice include the need to support the development of students’ knowledge of graphics, the existence of gender differences, the role of cross-curriculum applications in learning about graphics, and the need to explicate the links among graphics.

The city, self, and connections : transyouth and urban social networking in Seoul

The end of the Korean War in 1953 marked the beginning of Seoul’s transformation from the shattered capital city of South Korea to one of the most connected, populous, and fast-changing hubs of global economy. Seoul’s technosocial development has been celebrated nationally and internationally. To the outside, young Koreans’ swift and extensive adoption and adaptation to digital technologies has been a subject of exotification; to adults in Korea, it has been a subject of criticism (see Yoon in this volume). With the understanding that ‘the city is connections,’ it is crucial to study not only the macro-level design of the city as a network (through policy, for example), but also its micro-level construction at the intersection of people, place, and technology. Accordingly, this chapter explores this exact intersection to comprehensively portray the constant renewal of the city as imagined and experienced by young Koreans. The chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in Seoul, South Korea, from 2007 to 2008 as part of a research project on the mobile play culture of Seoul transyouth, the transitional demographic situated between youth and adulthood, and the pioneers of the Korean ‘broadband miracle’ (Hazlett, 2004). The study draws upon transdisciplinary research data including interviews, questionnaires, diaries, and Shared Visual Ethnography (SVE) to render the everyday urban social networking of young Seoulites with and through which they interact to constantly (re)create the city and the self.

Life cycle modelling and design knowledge development in 3D virtual environments : final report

Experience plays an important role in building management. “How often will this asset need repair?” or “How much time is this repair going to take?” are types of questions that project and facility managers face daily in planning activities. Failure or success in developing good schedules, budgets and other project management tasks depend on the project manager's ability to obtain reliable information to be able to answer these types of questions. Young practitioners tend to rely on information that is based on regional averages and provided by publishing companies. This is in contrast to experienced project managers who tend to rely heavily on personal experience. Another aspect of building management is that many practitioners are seeking to improve available scheduling algorithms, estimating spreadsheets and other project management tools. Such “micro-scale” levels of research are important in providing the required tools for the project manager's tasks. However, even with such tools, low quality input information will produce inaccurate schedules and budgets as output. Thus, it is also important to have a broad approach to research at a more “macro-scale.” Recent trends show that the Architectural, Engineering, Construction (AEC) industry is experiencing explosive growth in its capabilities to generate and collect data. There is a great deal of valuable knowledge that can be obtained from the appropriate use of this data and therefore the need has arisen to analyse this increasing amount of available data. Data Mining can be applied as a powerful tool to extract relevant and useful information from this sea of data. Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) and Data Mining (DM) are tools that allow identification of valid, useful, and previously unknown patterns so large amounts of project data may be analysed. These technologies combine techniques from machine learning, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, statistics, databases, and visualization to automatically extract concepts, interrelationships, and patterns of interest from large databases. The project involves the development of a prototype tool to support facility managers, building owners and designers. This final report presents the AIMMTM prototype system and documents how and what data mining techniques can be applied, the results of their application and the benefits gained from the system. The AIMMTM system is capable of searching for useful patterns of knowledge and correlations within the existing building maintenance data to support decision making about future maintenance operations. The application of the AIMMTM prototype system on building models and their maintenance data (supplied by industry partners) utilises various data mining algorithms and the maintenance data is analysed using interactive visual tools. The application of the AIMMTM prototype system to help in improving maintenance management and building life cycle includes: (i) data preparation and cleaning, (ii) integrating meaningful domain attributes, (iii) performing extensive data mining experiments in which visual analysis (using stacked histograms), classification and clustering techniques, associative rule mining algorithm such as “Apriori” and (iv) filtering and refining data mining results, including the potential implications of these results for improving maintenance management. Maintenance data of a variety of asset types were selected for demonstration with the aim of discovering meaningful patterns to assist facility managers in strategic planning and provide a knowledge base to help shape future requirements and design briefing. Utilising the prototype system developed here, positive and interesting results regarding patterns and structures of data have been obtained.

Haunting the knowledge economy

Review of Haunting the Knowledge Economy by Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen, Johannah Fahey with Simon Robb. London: Routledge, 2006; for the journal of the Higher Education Research & Development Society of Australia.

The influences of conceptions of learning and learner self-concept on high school students' approaches to learning

This study investigated the mediating effect of learner selfconcept between conceptions of learning and students' approaches to learning using structural equation modelling. Data were collected using a modified version of Biggs' Learning Process Questionnaire, together with the recently developed 'What is Learning Survey' and 'Learner Self-Concept Scale'. A sample of 355 high school students participated in the study. Results indicate that learner self-concept does mediate between conceptions of meaning and approaches to learning. Students who adopted a deep approach liked learning new things and indirectly viewed learning as experiential, involving social interaction and directly viewed learning as personal development. Implications for teachers are discussed, with consideration given to appropriate classroom practice.

Public knowledge beyond journalism : infotainment, satire and Australian television

This thesis examines the changing relationships between television, politics, audiences and the public sphere. Premised on the notion that mediated politics is now understood “in new ways by new voices” (Jones, 2005: 4), and appropriating what McNair (2003) calls a “chaos theory” of journalism sociology, this thesis explores how two different contemporary Australian political television programs (Sunrise and The Chaser’s War on Everything) are viewed, understood, and used by audiences. In analysing these programs from textual, industry and audience perspectives, this thesis argues that journalism has been largely thought about in overly simplistic binary terms which have failed to reflect the reality of audiences’ news consumption patterns. The findings of this thesis suggest that both ‘soft’ infotainment (Sunrise) and ‘frivolous’ satire (The Chaser’s War on Everything) are used by audiences in intricate ways as sources of political information, and thus these TV programs (and those like them) should be seen as legitimate and valuable forms of public knowledge production. It therefore might be more worthwhile for scholars to think about, research and teach journalism in the plural: as a series of complementary or antagonistic journalisms, rather than as a single coherent entity.