Enabling authentic collaborative education in an online environment : the QUT Virtual Law Placement

This paper explores an innovative model for work-integrated learning using a virtual paradigm – The Virtual Law Placement Unit at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Australia. It builds upon the conceptual model previously explored at WACE 2007 and provides an account of the lessons learned from the pilot offering of the unit which was conducted and evaluated in 2008. ----- The Virtual Placement Unit offers students the opportunity to complete an authentic workplace task under the guidance of a real-life workplace supervisor, where student-student communication and student-supervisor communication is all conducted virtually (and potentially asynchronously) to create an engaging but flexible learning environment using a combination of Blackboard and SharePoint technologies. This virtual experience is pioneering in the sense that it enables law students to access an unprecedented range of law graduate destination workplaces and projects, including international and social justice placements, absent the constraints traditionally associated with arranging physical placements. ----- All aspects of this unit have been designed in conjunction with community partners with a view to balancing student learning objectives with community needs through co-operative education. This paper will also explore how the implementation of the project is serving to strengthen those partnerships with the wider community, simultaneously addressing the community engagement agenda of the University and enabling students to engage meaningfully with local, national and international community partners in the real world of work.

Evaluating the Java Virtual Machine as a Target for Languages Other Than Java

The portability and runtime safety of programs which are executed on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) makes the JVM an attractive target for compilers of languages other than Java. Unfortunately, the JVM was designed with language Java in mind, and lacks many of the primitives required for a straighforward implementation of other languages. Here, we discuss how the JVM may be used to implement other object-oriented languages. As a practical example of the possibilities, we report on a comprehensive case study. The open source Gardens Point Component Pascal compiler compiles the entire Component Pascal language, a dialect of Oberon-2, to JVM bytecodes. This compiler achieves runtime efficiencies which are comparable to native-code implementations of procedural languages.

Implementing languages other than Java on the Java Virtual Machine

The portability and runtime safety of programs which are executed on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) makes the JVM an attractive target for compilers of languages other than Java. Unfortunately, the JVM was designed with language Java in mind, and lacks many of the primitives required for a straight forward implementation of other languages. Here, we discuss how the JVM may be used to implement other object oriented languages. As a practical example of the possibilities, we report on a comprehensive case study. The open source Gardens Point Component Pascal compiler compiles the entire Component Pascal language, a dialect of Oberon 2, to JVM bytecodes. This compiler achieves runtime efficiencies which are comparable to native code implementations of procedural languages.

A brush with the real world : the future of inertial motion capture in live performance

3D Motion capture is a medium that plots motion, typically human motion, converting it into a form that can be represented digitally. It is a fast evolving field and recent inertial technology may provide new artistic possibilities for its use in live performance. Although not often used in this context, motion capture has a combination of attributes that can provide unique forms of collaboration with performance arts. The inertial motion capture suit used for this study has orientation sensors placed at strategic points on the body to map body motion. Its portability, real-time performance, ease of use, and its immunity from line-of-sight problems inherent in optical systems suggest it would work well as a live performance technology. Many animation techniques can be used in real-time. This research examines a broad cross-section of these techniques using four practice-led cases to assess the suitability of inertial motion capture to live performance. Although each case explores different visual possibilities, all make use of the performativity of the medium, using either an improvisational format or interactivity among stage, audience and screen that would be difficult to emulate any other way. A real-time environment is not capable of reproducing the depth and sophistication of animation people have come to expect through media. These environments take many hours to render. In time the combination of what can be produced in real-time and the tools available in a 3D environment will no doubt create their own tree of aesthetic directions in live performance. The case study looks at the potential of interactivity that this technology offers.

Virtual mooting : using technology to enhance the mooting experience

While a range of benefits to students participating in mooting have been identified by the legal education literature, there are impediments to students participating in mooting that have been revealed by recent surveys of law students at QUT. These impediments include time, geographical location and a failure to perceive the benefits of mooting. This paper will explore the benefits of using technology to overcome these impediments, evaluate technological options to facilitate distance mooting, such as the use of Second Life, Elluminate and video conferencing, and will recommend a trial of these options.

Managing hostile environments : journalists and media workers : learning to survive the world's difficult, remote and hostile environments

The aim of this research is to examine the changing nature of risks that face journalists and media workers in the world's difficult, remote and hostile environments, and consider the 'adequacy' of managing hostile environment safety courses that some media organizations require prior to foreign assignments. The study utilizes several creative works and contributions to this area of analysis, which includes a documentary film production, course contributions, an emergency reference handbook, security and incident management reviews and a template for evacuation and contingency planning. The research acknowledges that employers have a 'duty of care' to personnel working in these environments, identifies the necessity for pre-deployment training and support, and provides a solution for organizations that wish to initiate a comprehensive framework to advise, monitor, protect and respond to incidents. Finally, it explores the possible development of a unique and holistic service to facilitate proactive and responsive support, in the form of a new profession of 'Editorial Logistics Officer' or 'Editorial Safety Officer' within media organizations. This area of research is vitally important to the profession, and the intended contribution is to introduce a simple and cost-efficient framework for media organizations that desire to implement pre-deployment training and field-support – as these programs save lives. The complete proactive and responsive services may be several years from implementation. However, this study demonstrates that the facilitation of Managing Hostile Environment (MHE) courses should be the minimum professional standard. These courses have saved lives in the past and they provide journalists with the tools to "cover the story, and not become the story."

The Special Broadcasting Service after 30 years : public service media and new ways of thinking about media and citizenship

This article considers the distinctive ways in which the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) has evolved over its history since 1980, and how it has managed competing claims to being a multicultural yet broad-appeal broadcaster, and a comprehensive yet low-cost media service. It draws attention to the challenges presented by a global rethinking of the nature of citizenship and its relationship to media, for which SBS is well placed as a leader, and the challenges of online media for traditional public service media models, where SBS has arguably been a laggard, particularly when compared with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It notes recent work that has been undertaken by the author with others into user-created content strategies at SBS and how its online news and current affairs services have been evolving in recent years.

The league of men : masculinity, the media and rugby league football

The rhetoric of masculinity is at melting point in Australian culture. In the nineties, Australian television news and sporting programs have constructed a particularly shrill and insistent form of brash, heterosexual sporting masculinity in football reporting. Against this norm of rippling 'muscularity' and aggressive competition, all so-called aberrant forms of humanity such as women, homosexuals, and men who do not fit into Connell's 'hegemonic masculinity' paradigm have been effectively marginalised and silenced. Class and ethnicity discourses are at best muted, and at worst, ignored in much of the writing about sporting masculinity. While acknowledging the significance of class and ethnicity, this paper explores the nexus between gender, sexuality, the media and League football.

A novella of ideas : how interactive new media art can effectively communicate an indigenous philosophical concept

How interactive new media art can effectively communicate an indigenous philosophical concept. The sophistication and complexity of the philosophical concept concerning relationships between land and people and between people, intrinsic to the laws and customs of Australian Indigenous society, has begun to be communicated and accessed beyond the realm of anthropological and ethnological domains of Western scholarship. The exciting scope and rapid development of new media arts presents an innovative means of creating an interactive relationship with the general Australian public, addressing the urgent need for an understanding of Indigenous Australian concepts of relationship to land, and to each other, absent from Western narratives. The study is framed by an Indigenous concept of place, and relationships between land and people and between people; and explores how this concept can be clearly communicated through interactive new media arts. It involves: a creative project, the development of an interactive new media art project, a website work-in-progress titled site\sight\cite; and an exegesis, a Novella of Ideas, on the origins, influences, objectives, and potential of creative practices and processes engaged in the creative project. Research undertaken for the creative project and exegesis extended my creative practice into the use of interdisciplinary arts, expressly for the expression of philosophical concepts, consolidating 23 years experience in Indigenous community arts development. The creative project and exegesis contributes to an existing body of Indigenous work in a range of areas - including education, the arts and humanities - which bridges old and new society in Australia. In this study, old and new society is defined by the time of the initial production of art and foundations of knowledge, in the country of its origins, in Indigenous Australia dating back at least 40,000 years.

Digital kids, analogue students : a mixed methods study of students' engagement with a school-based Web 2.0 learning innovation

The inquiry documented in this thesis is located at the nexus of technological innovation and traditional schooling. As we enter the second decade of a new century, few would argue against the increasingly urgent need to integrate digital literacies with traditional academic knowledge. Yet, despite substantial investments from governments and businesses, the adoption and diffusion of contemporary digital tools in formal schooling remain sluggish. To date, research on technology adoption in schools tends to take a deficit perspective of schools and teachers, with the lack of resources and teacher ‘technophobia’ most commonly cited as barriers to digital uptake. Corresponding interventions that focus on increasing funding and upskilling teachers, however, have made little difference to adoption trends in the last decade. Empirical evidence that explicates the cultural and pedagogical complexities of innovation diffusion within long-established conventions of mainstream schooling, particularly from the standpoint of students, is wanting. To address this knowledge gap, this thesis inquires into how students evaluate and account for the constraints and affordances of contemporary digital tools when they engage with them as part of their conventional schooling. It documents the attempted integration of a student-led Web 2.0 learning initiative, known as the Student Media Centre (SMC), into the schooling practices of a long-established, high-performing independent senior boys’ school in urban Australia. The study employed an ‘explanatory’ two-phase research design (Creswell, 2003) that combined complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to achieve both breadth of measurement and richness of characterisation. In the initial quantitative phase, a self-reported questionnaire was administered to the senior school student population to determine adoption trends and predictors of SMC usage (N=481). Measurement constructs included individual learning dispositions (learning and performance goals, cognitive playfulness and personal innovativeness), as well as social and technological variables (peer support, perceived usefulness and ease of use). Incremental predictive models of SMC usage were conducted using Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modelling: (i) individual-level predictors, (ii) individual and social predictors, and (iii) individual, social and technological predictors. Peer support emerged as the best predictor of SMC usage. Other salient predictors include perceived ease of use and usefulness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals. On the whole, an overwhelming proportion of students reported low usage levels, low perceived usefulness and a lack of peer support for engaging with the digital learning initiative. The small minority of frequent users reported having high levels of peer support and robust learning goal orientations, rather than being predominantly driven by performance goals. These findings indicate that tensions around social validation, digital learning and academic performance pressures influence students’ engagement with the Web 2.0 learning initiative. The qualitative phase that followed provided insights into these tensions by shifting the analytics from individual attitudes and behaviours to shared social and cultural reasoning practices that explain students’ engagement with the innovation. Six indepth focus groups, comprising 60 students with different levels of SMC usage, were conducted, audio-recorded and transcribed. Textual data were analysed using Membership Categorisation Analysis. Students’ accounts converged around a key proposition. The Web 2.0 learning initiative was useful-in-principle but useless-in-practice. While students endorsed the usefulness of the SMC for enhancing multimodal engagement, extending peer-topeer networks and acquiring real-world skills, they also called attention to a number of constraints that obfuscated the realisation of these design affordances in practice. These constraints were cast in terms of three binary formulations of social and cultural imperatives at play within the school: (i) ‘cool/uncool’, (ii) ‘dominant staff/compliant student’, and (iii) ‘digital learning/academic performance’. The first formulation foregrounds the social stigma of the SMC among peers and its resultant lack of positive network benefits. The second relates to students’ perception of the school culture as authoritarian and punitive with adverse effects on the very student agency required to drive the innovation. The third points to academic performance pressures in a crowded curriculum with tight timelines. Taken together, findings from both phases of the study provide the following key insights. First, students endorsed the learning affordances of contemporary digital tools such as the SMC for enhancing their current schooling practices. For the majority of students, however, these learning affordances were overshadowed by the performative demands of schooling, both social and academic. The student participants saw engagement with the SMC in-school as distinct from, even oppositional to, the conventional social and academic performance indicators of schooling, namely (i) being ‘cool’ (or at least ‘not uncool’), (ii) sufficiently ‘compliant’, and (iii) achieving good academic grades. Their reasoned response therefore, was simply to resist engagement with the digital learning innovation. Second, a small minority of students seemed dispositionally inclined to negotiate the learning affordances and performance constraints of digital learning and traditional schooling more effectively than others. These students were able to engage more frequently and meaningfully with the SMC in school. Their ability to adapt and traverse seemingly incommensurate social and institutional identities and norms is theorised as cultural agility – a dispositional construct that comprises personal innovativeness, cognitive playfulness and learning goals orientation. The logic then is ‘both and’ rather than ‘either or’ for these individuals with a capacity to accommodate both learning and performance in school, whether in terms of digital engagement and academic excellence, or successful brokerage across multiple social identities and institutional affiliations within the school. In sum, this study takes us beyond the familiar terrain of deficit discourses that tend to blame institutional conservatism, lack of resourcing and teacher resistance for low uptake of digital technologies in schools. It does so by providing an empirical base for the development of a ‘third way’ of theorising technological and pedagogical innovation in schools, one which is more informed by students as critical stakeholders and thus more relevant to the lived culture within the school, and its complex relationship to students’ lives outside of school. It is in this relationship that we find an explanation for how these individuals can, at the one time, be digital kids and analogue students.