Young children's understandings about "square" in 3D virtual reality microworlds

This paper reports an investigation of primary school children’s understandings about "square". 12 students participated in a small group teaching experiment session, where they were interviewed and guided to construct a square in a 3D virtual reality learning environment (VRLE). Main findings include mixed levels of "quasi" geometrical understandings, misconceptions about length and angles, and ambiguous uses of geometrical language for location, direction, and movement. These have implications for future teaching and learning about 2D shapes with particular reference to VRLE.

Ethical review in creative industries and other practice-based research

The processes used in Australian universities for reviewing the ethics of research projects are based on the traditions of research and practice from the medical and health sciences. The national guidelines for ethical conduct in research are heavily based on presumptions that the researcher–participant relationship is similar to a doctor–patient relationship. The National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council and Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee have made a laudable effort to fix this problem by releasing the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research in 2007, to replace the 1999 National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans. The new statement better encompasses the needs of the humanities, social sciences and creative industries. However, this paper argues that the revised National Statement and ethical review processes within universities still do not fully encompass the definitions of ‘research’ and the requirements, traditions, codes of practice and standards of the humanities, social sciences and creative industries. The paper argues that scholars within these disciplines often lack the language to articulate their modes of practice and risk management strategies to university-level ethics committees. As a consequence, scholars from these disciplines may find their research is delayed or stymied. The paper focuses on creative industries researchers, and explores the issues that they face in managing the ethical review process, particularly when engaging in practice-based research. Although the focus is on the creative industries, the issues are relevant to most fields in the humanities and social sciences.

Andrzej Zielinski : pulp digital fictions

This is a review of painter Andrzej Zielinski's exhibition at gallery 9 in Sydney. It highlights the artist's expressionistic style and strong colour sense as well as his association with American painterly traditions. The artist application of acrylic modelling paste and his paintings also gives them a sculptural and architectural dimension, and on a conceptual level play with notions of mimesis and material form.

Watching football in marvellous Melbourne : spectators, barrackers and working class rituals

A study of crowds drawn to Australian football matches in colonial Victoria illuminates key aspects of the code's genesis, development and popularity. Australian football was codified by a middle-class elite that, as in Britain, created forms of mass entertainment that were consistent with the kind of industrial capitalist society they were attempting to organise. But the 'lower orders' were inculcated with traditional British folkways in matters of popular amusement, and introduced a style of 'barracking' for this new code that resisted the hegemony of the elite football administrators. By the end of the colonial period Australian football was firmly entrenched as a site of contestation between plebeian and bourgeois codes of spectating that reflected the social and ethnic diversity of the clubs making up the Victorian competition. Australian football thereby offers a classic vignette in the larger history of 'resistance through ritual'.

Extending client-centered support : counselors’ proposals to shift from email to telephone counseling

The availability and use of online counseling approaches has increased rapidly over the last decade. While research has suggested a range of potential affordances and limitations of online counseling modalities, very few studies have offered detailed examinations of how counselors and clients manage asynchronous email counseling exchanges. In this paper we examine email exchanges involving clients and counselors through Kids Helpline, a national Australian counseling service that offers free online, email and telephone counseling for young people up to the age of 25. We employ tools from the traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to analyze the ways in which counselors from Kids Helpline request that their clients call them, and hence change the modality of their counseling relationship, from email to telephone counseling. This paper shows the counselors’ three multi-layered approaches in these emails as they negotiate the potentially delicate task of requesting and persuading a client to change the trajectory of their counseling relationship from text to talk without placing that relationship in jeopardy.

Community planning : integrating social and physical environments

This key planning textbook on designing healthy and sustainable communities informs planners about community life and the processes of planning and equips them with the essential knowledge and skills they need to organise change and improve the quality of urban living. The author examines the impacts of social and economic change on community life and organization and explores ways in which these changes can be planned and managed. Community planning is presented as a means to balance and integrate beneficial change with the maintenance of valued cultural traditions and life styles. This involves bringing together fields of study and practice including urban and regional planning, design, communication, housing, community organization, employment, transport, and governance. Links drawn between personal values, human activities, physical spaces and societal governance assist this process of synthesis. Establishing a common vocabulary to discuss planning - for urban and regional planners, including health planners; and open space planners - enables both students and practitioners to work with each other and with those for whom they provide services to create stronger, healthier and more sustainable communities. The aims and roles of community planning are explored and the key planning operations are explained, including the phases and applications of community planning method; the planning and location of community facilities; the roles of design in shaping responsive community spaces; and the capacity of different types of community governance to improve the relations between citizens and societies. The book is organized into two main parts: after the first three chapters have established the interests and scope of community planning, the next six each moves from an account of issues and theoretical concerns, through a review of case studies, to summaries of leading practice. This positive approach is intended to encourage readers to develop their own capacities for effective participation and action. The concluding chapter draws together the contributions of preceding ones to demonstrate the integrity of the community planning process

The enterprising artist and the arts entrepreneur : Emergent pedagogies for new disciplinary habits of mind

Traditional pedagogies in the arts in higher education focus largely on the studio experience in which a novice artist studies under one or more master teachers (e.g., Don, Garvey, & Sadeghpour, 2009). In more recent times, however, a shift in higher education curriculum and pedagogy in the arts has expanded this traditional conservatory model of training to include, among other components, career self-management and enterprise creation—in a word, entrepreneurship.This chapter examines the developing field of arts enterprise and arts entrepreneurship in higher education in a multinational context. The field is contextualized within the broader landscape of the creative industries and the consequential development of knowledge, skills, and the habits of mind necessary for artistic venture creation, sustainability, and success. Whereas the discourse about learning and teaching for business entrepreneurship is well established (e.g., Fiet, 2001), equivalent conversations about arts enterprise and entrepreneurship have only recently begun (Beckman, 2007, 2011; Essig, 2009). This chapter will address the contested definitions of key terms and concepts and also the question of how arts educators, although mindful of the pedagogic traditions of the arts school, are also drawing on the pedagogies of business entrepreneurship and cognitive theories of entrepreneurship to create innovative new transdisciplinary signature pedagogies for creative enterprise and entrepreneurship education in the arts.

Designing an immersive environment for public use

Bystander is a multi-user, immersive, interactive environment intended for public display in a museum or art gallery. It is designed to make available heritage collections in novel and culturally responsible ways. We use its development as a case study to examine the role played in that process by a range of tools and techniques from participatory design traditions. We describe how different tools were used within the design process, specifically: the ways in which the potential audience members were both included and represented; the prototypes that have been constructed as a way of envisioning how the final work might be experienced; and how these tools have been brought together in ongoing designing and evaluation. We close the paper with some reflections on the extension of participatory commitments into still-emerging areas of technology design that prioritise the design of spaces for human experience and reflective interaction.

Revolutionary self portrait

'Revolutionary Self Portrait' (2009) is a sculptural self-portrait. The work comprises a bust engulfed in hair and a scalloped pedestal stand. Historically, divine energy has frequently been depicted using fluid forms - drapery, clouds and occasionally hair. These forms and associations act as a departure point for this sculpture in which the figure is depicted in a state of inundation by billowing tufts hair. The work was also inspired by the tendency of great 19th century utopian thinkers - for example Marx, Bakunin and Kropotkin - to wear large beards. Within both traditions, the language of heroic subjectivity is amplified by a sculptural extension of the body. In 'Revolutionary Self Portrait' however, this extension threatens to suffocate the subject - a gesture made all the more ironic due to the fact that the artist himself is incapable of growing a beard. The work was selected for the National Artists' Self Portrait Prize, University of Queensland Art Museum, 2009.

Folk opera and theatre for development

The research field was intercultural theatre, specifically adapting indigenous performance forms for applied theatre purposes. The context was the rich performative traditions of Papua New Guinean cultures, which have remained largely untapped over several decades of "theatre for development" and "entertainment education". Papua New Guinean company Raun Raun Theatre developed Folk Opera from a similar concept in African theatre in the 1970s. The form incorporates elements of song, dance, ritual, chant, metaphor, music, and body adornment from traditional cultures. The form’s spectacular scope suited international touring in large theatrical venues, and the themes of emerging nationalism with which Raun Raun was concerned. The research team made three key innovations in the use of Folk Opera: adapting the form from theatres to community contexts, using the form to address issues of individual choice for health promotion, and emphasising experiential education over entertainment. Field-testing in Karkar Island showed community members gained clearer understandings of relevant health issues through participating in the folk opera form than through other educational approaches. The significance of the research was recognised by the members of the cross-cultural workshop team and the community of Karkar Island including the local Member of Parliament. The success of the Folk Opera form as an approach to sexual health promotion was recognised through the provision of AUD$74,000 funding by the National AIDS Council Secretariat of Papua New Guinea for a train-the-trainer program incorporating this innovative form of applied theatre. The research has been presented at a number of national and international conferences including the 6th International Research in Drama Education conference in 2009.

Evolution of life drama program

Life Drama is a program of drama-based experiential learning activities involving groups of community leaders and members. The three-year project evolved from a theatre-in-education approach to an intercultural theatre approach incorporating Papua New Guinean performance traditions. It involved Australian, English and Papua New Guinean researchers at four key sites: Tari, Southern Highlands Province; Port Moresby, National Capital District; Madang, Madang Province; and Karkar Island, Madang Province. The project was innovative in a number of ways, including: a Participatory Action Research approach, involving community leaders at various levels as co-researchers; a participatory theatre approach as opposed to a performance approach; emphasis on sexual health promotion and HIV prevention through an experiential learning paradigm; addressing the norms and realities of the community rather than targeting only individual behaviour; an International Theatre Research Laboratory to explore the fusion of traditional cultural elements with contemporary health promotion aims; and an innovative method-assemblage approach to collecting and triangulating quantitative, qualitative, and performative data. The project attracted over $350,000 in funding and support from the Australian Research Council, National AIDS Secretariat in PNG, and private sector and non-government partners. Findings were presented at various conferences and symposia including the annual Medical Symposium in Wewak (2010), the triennial Research in Drama Education conference in Exeter (2011), and the International Research in Drama Education conference (Sydney 2009 and Limerick 2012). A number of peer-reviewed journal articles have been published. Elements of the program have been incorporated into the University of Goroka's compulsory HIV awareness program for undergraduate students. A national dissemination strategy for Life Drama in Papua New Guinea is now underway, with seed funding of AUD$74,000 from the National AIDS Council Secretariat, PNG.

Tabernacle-Game world

Tabernacle is an experimental game world-building project which explores the relationship between the map and the 3-dimensional visualisation enabled by high-end game engines. The project is named after the 6th century tabernacle maps of Cosmas Indicopleustes in his Christian Topography. These maps articulate a cultural or metaphoric, rather than measured view of the world, contravening Alper's distinction which observes that “maps are measurement, art is experience”. The project builds on previous research into the use of game engines and 3D navigable representation to enable cultural experience, particularly non-Western cultural experiences and ways of seeing. Like the earlier research, Tabernacle highlights the problematic disjuncture between the modern Cartesian map structures of the engine and the mapping traditions of non-Western cultures. Tabernacle represents a practice-based research provocation. The project exposes assumptions about the maps which underpin 3D game worlds, and the autocratic tendencies of world construction software. This research is of critical importance as game engines and simulation technologies are becoming more popular in the recreation of culture and history. A key learning from the Tabernacle project was the ways in which available game engines – technologies with roots in the Enlightenment - constrained the team’s ability to represent a very different culture with a different conceptualisation of space and maps. Understanding the cultural legacies of the software itself is critical as we are tempted by the opportunities for representation of culture and history that they seem to offer. The project was presented at Perth Digital Arts and Culture in 2007 and reiterated using a different game engine in 2009. Further reflections were discussed in a conference paper presented at OZCHI 2009 and a peer-reviewed journal article, and insights gained from the experience continue to inform the author’s research.

Good and bad Sharia : Australia's mixed response to Islamic law

Reflecting on the legal consequences of globalisation in the 21st century, Twining predicted that societies in the West would have to 'wrestle with the extent to which the state should recognise, make concessions to, or even enforce norms and values embedded in different religions, cultures or traditions'. This is borne out as the direction across the common law world moves towards entrenching legal pluralism. The concessions each nation has made to minorities with different religions, cultures and traditions have varied. The special character of Islam, as a comprehensive blueprint for life in which law and religion unite, has meant that the negotiations for a special place for Muslims within each common law jurisdiction has been at the forefront of new legal ordering possibilities. This is the crux of the pluralism debate. Cautiously, Australians have watched the, at times histrionic, discourse in Canada and Great Britain on official recognition for Islamic law.

Outlook

This wall-mounted sculpture features eight photographic prints displayed on a computer monitor mounting system. The eight panels each swivel and articulate separately. Together, they combine to create an abstract landscape based on a desktop background image of an idyllic tropical setting. Recalling the workstation of a futures trader, logistics manager, or design guru, the screen armature draws out the simultaneously romantic and vacuous characteristics of the imagery. By combining the visual languages of both physical and on-screen desktop environments with the pictorial traditions of landscape and abstraction, this work questions how and where we deploy nature, desire and wonderment in our increasingly technologised lives.

Re-constructing Asianness in Australia : Yumi Umiumare, Owen Leong, and the remobilisation of monstrosity

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Australia’s relationship with its Asian neighbours has been the subject of ongoing aesthetic, cultural and political contestations. As Alison Richards has noted, Australia’s colonial legacy, its Asia-Pacific location, and its ‘white’ self-perception have always made Australia’s relations with Asia fraught. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the paradoxes inherent in Australia’s relationships with and within the Asian region became a dominant theme in debates about nation, nationhood and identity, and prompted a shift in the construction of ‘Asianness’ on Australian stages. On the one hand, anxiety about the multicultural policy of the 1970s and 1980s, and then Prime Minister Paul Keating’s push for greater economic, cultural and artistic exchange with Asia via policies such as the Creative Nation Cultural Policy (1994), saw large numbers of Australians latch on to the reactionary, racist politics of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. As Jacqueline Lo has argued, in this period Asian-Australians were frequently represented as an unassimilable Other, a threat to Australia’s ‘white’ identity, and to individual Australians’ jobs and opportunities. On the other hand, during the same period, a desire to counter the racism in Australian culture, and develop a ‘voice’ that would distinguish Australian cultural products from European theatrical traditions, combined with the new opportunities for cross-cultural exchange that came with the Creative Nation Cultural Policy to produce what Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo have characterised as an Asian turn in Australian theatre...