A collaborative model for learning and assessment of legal placements

This paper will report on the evaluation of a new undergraduate legal workplace unit, LWB421 Learning in Professional Practice. LWB421 was developed in response to the QUT’s strategic planning and a growing view that work experience is essential to developing the skills that law graduates need in order to be effective legal practitioners (Stuckey, 2007). Work integrated learning provides a context for students to develop their skills, to see the link between theory and practice and support students in making the transition from university to practice (Shirley, 2006). The literature in Australian legal education has given little consideration to the design of legal internship subjects (as distinct from legal clinic programs). Accordingly the design of placement subjects needs to be carefully considered to ensure alignment of learning objectives, learning tasks and assessment. Legal placements offer students the opportunity to develop their professional skills in practice, reflect on their own learning and job performance and take responsibility for their career development and planning. This paper will examine the literature relating to the design of placement subjects, particularly in a legal context. It will propose a collaborative model to facilitate learning and assessment of legal work placement subjects. The basis of the model is a negotiated learning contract between the student, workplace supervisor and academic supervisor. Finally the paper will evaluate the model in the context of LWB421. The evaluation will be based on data from surveys of students and supervisors and focus group sessions.

Comparing international television news : the case of violence presentation in Germany, Great Britain and Russia -- [in German : Gewalt in internationalen Fernsehnachrichten - eine komparative Analyse medialer Gewaltpräsentation in Deutschland, Großbritannien und Russland]

This is an important book that ought to launch a debate about how we research our understanding of the world, it is an innovative intervention in a vital public issue, and it is an elegant and scholarly hard look at what is actually happening. Jean Seaton, Prof of Media History, U of Westminster, UK & Official Historian of the BBC -- Summary: This book investigates the question of how comparative studies of international TV news (here: on violence presentation) can best be conceptualized in a way that allows for crossnational, comparative conclusions on an empirically validated basis. This book shows that such a conceptualization is necessary in order to overcome existing restrictions in the comparability of international analysis on violence presentation. Investigated examples include the most watched news bulletins in Great Britain (10o'clock news on the BBC), Germany (Tagesschau on ARD) and Russia (Vremja on Channel 1). This book highlights a substantial cross-national violence news flow as well as a cross-national visual violence flow (key visuals) as distinct transnational components. In addition, event-related textual analysis reveals how the historical rootedness of nations and its symbols of power are still manifested in televisual mediations of violence. In conclusion, this study lobbies for a conscientious use of comparative data/analysis both in journalism research and practice in order to understand what it may convey in the different arenas of today’s newsmaking.

Maltreated children in the early years : international perspectives on the teacher’s role

Child abuse and neglect is a significant health and social problem with serious consequences for children, families and communities. This chapter provides students, early childhood teachers, and administrators with an evidence base for understanding their role in relation to child abuse and neglect. The chapter draws from international and interdisciplinary research to address four key areas of responsibility: i) recognising signs of child abuse and neglect; ii) reporting child abuse and neglect; iii) supporting children in the classroom; and iv) teaching children to protect themselves (Watts, 1997).

Multi-level order, friction and contradiction : the evolution of Australian film industry policy

Cultural policy studies have previously highlighted the importance of multiple logics, friction and contradiction in cultural policy. Recent developments in institutional theory provide a framework for analysing change in cultural policy which explores movement between these multiple and sometimes contradictory logics. This paper analyses the role of friction in the evolution of Australian film industry policy and in particular the tension between competing logics regarding nationalism, commercialism and the state. The paper is suggestive of the relevance of institutional theory as a framework for understanding cultural policy evolution.

Legal Issues Relating to the Notification of Australian Data Breaches

Advances in information and communications technologies during the last two decades have allowed organisations to capture and utilise data on a vast scale, thus heightening the importance of adequate measures for protecting unauthorised disclosure of personal information. In this respect, data breach notification has emerged as an issue of increasing importance throughout the world. It has been the subject of law reform in the United States and in other international jurisdictions. Following the Australian Law Reform Commission’s review of privacy, data breach notification will soon be addressed in Australia. This article provides a review of US and Australian legal initiatives regarding the notification of data breaches. The authors highlight areas of concern based on the extant US literature that require specific consideration in Australia regarding the development of an Australian legal framework for the notification of data breaches.

A 'deleterious' effect? : Australian legal education and the production of the legal identity

A body of critical legal scholarship argues that, by the time they have completed their studies, students who enter legal education holding social ideals and intending to use their legal education to achieve social change, have become cynical about the ability of the law to do so and no longer possess such ideals. This is explained by critical scholars to be the result of a process of ideological indoctrination, aimed at ensuring that graduates uphold the narrow and conservative interests of the legal profession and capitalist society, being exercised by law schools acting as adjuncts of the legal profession, and exercised upon the passive body of the law student. By using Foucault’s work on knowledge, power, and the subject to interrogate the assumptions upon which this narrative is based, this thesis intends to suggest a way of thinking differently to the approach taken by many critical legal scholars. It then uses an analytics of government (based on Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’) to consider the construction of the legal identity differently. It examines the ways in which the governance of the legal identity is rationalised, programmed, and implemented, in three Queensland law schools. It also looks at the way that five prescriptive texts to ‘surviving’ law school suggest students establish and practise a relation to themselves in order to construct their own legal identities. Overall, this analysis shows that governance is not simply conducted in the profession’s interests, but occurs due to a complex arrangement of different practices, which can lead to the construction of skilled legal professional identities as well as ethical lawyer-citizens that hold an interest in justice. The implications of such an analytics provide the basis for original ways of understanding legal education, and legal education scholarship.

Departing from the virtual community : a discussion of the ways and means to uncover localised order in online games

This paper is part one of a three part study into the collective regulation processes of players in massive multiplayer online games (MMOG). Traditionally game playing has not been classed as problematic, however with introduction of new media technologies and new ways to play games, certain contexts have become obscure, namely the localised order of ‘playing online’ or how players manage and maintain order between each other as opposed to ‘following the rules’. Principally this paper will examine concepts of ‘virtual community’. These will be illustrated as particularly unhelpful when considering how people conduct themselves in these spaces. Thus, ‘virtual community’ will be seen as critical in implicating various online behaviours as superior to other online behaviours causing obscurity and blurring actions. This obscurity is grounded by strong associations in the virtual community as logic of practise in and of itself; behaviours that fall outside this category become common sense and as such are made invisible for investigation. This paper will draw upon the theories of Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu to produce a distinction between online behaviours and ultimately make them visible for further investigation. In doing so this paper seeks to form a basis for future research where interaction in these spaces can be identified as belonging to a certain framework to inform the design of online games and applications more effectively.

Higher Order Thinking through ICT: What do middle years teachers think really matters?

The middle years of schooling has emerged as an important focus in Australian education. Student disengagement and alienation, the negative effects of non-completion of the senior years of schooling and underachievement have raised concerns about the quality of education during the middle years. For many schools, reshaping the middle years has involved incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to motivate students. However, simultaneously there is a need to ensure that programs are academically rigorous. There is little doubt that there are potential benefits to integrating ICT into programs for middle years’ students. However, little is known about how middle years’ teachers perceive higher order thinking, which is a component of academic rigour. This paper investigates the question of What are teachers’ perceptions of higher order thinking in an ICT environment? The study is underpinned by socio-cultural theory which is based on the belief that learning occurs through social interaction and that individuals are shaped by the social and cultural tools and instruments they engage with. This investigation used a collective case study design. Two methods were used for data collection. These methods are semi-structured interviews with individual teachers and a class and a focus group discussion with teachers. Findings indicate that teachers hold various perceptions of higher order thinking that lead to productive approaches to integrating ICT in middle years’ classrooms. The paper highlights that there may be a continuum of perceptions of higher order thinking with ICT. This continuum may inform professional developers who are guiding and supporting teachers to integrate ICT into middle years’ classrooms.

Internationalisation and international students : creating an internationalised learning context for international students’ study preparation via CMC

Australian universities have been phenomenally internationalised because of significant numbers of international students in their student cohorts. The international students make up 17.3 percent (OECD 2007) of all the university enrolment, and some universities have much more international student enrolments than the average. From a truly internationalisation perspective, however, there is far more demand of integration with Australian students and international students, the internationalising learning content and context. There have not been much discussion and effort of understanding and practicing of internationalising the learning context from international students’ cultural background and internationalised learning environment. There are many factors which interfere with internationalisation in the learning context such as English proficiency, culture difference and academic staff unawareness. This paper argues the concepts of cultural dimensions and the characteristics of CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication) in a multicultural learning context of Australian higher education. This paper aims to develop a framework of international students’ preparation program for their Western university study based on technology-driven learning models, especially targeting those students who have an Asian cultural background. The program is expected to help international students bridge the gap of cultural differences and better preparation for their active participation and engagement in a new learning environment in order to realise truly internationalisation in Australian higher education

Biometric template security using higher order spectra

A method of improving the security of biometric templates which satisfies desirable properties such as (a) irreversibility of the template, (b) revocability and assignment of a new template to the same biometric input, (c) matching in the secure transformed domain is presented. It makes use of an iterative procedure based on the bispectrum that serves as an irreversible transformation for biometric features because signal phase is discarded each iteration. Unlike the usual hash function, this transformation preserves closeness in the transformed domain for similar biometric inputs. A number of such templates can be generated from the same input. These properties are illustrated using synthetic data and applied to images from the FRGC 3D database with Gabor features. Verification can be successfully performed using these secure templates with an EER of 5.85%

International labour standards and Queensland

Queensland’s legal labour disputes history does not exhibit the current trend seen in Canada and Switzerland (Gravel & Delpech, 2008) where cases citing International Labour Standards (ILS) are often successful (which is not presently the case in Queensland either). The two Queensland cases (Kuhler v. Inghams Enterprises P/L & Anor, 1997 and Bale v. Seltsam Pty Ltd, 1996) that have used ILSs were lost. Australia is a member state of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and a signatory of many ILSs. Yet, ILSs are not used in their legal capacity when compared to other international standards in other areas of law. It is important to recognize that ILSs are uniquely underutilized in labour law. Australian environmental, criminal, and industrial disputes consistently draw on international standards. Why not for the plight of workers? ILSs draw their power from supranational influence in that when a case cites an ILS the barrister or solicitor is going beyond legal precedence and into international peer pressure. An ILS can be appropriately used to highlight that Australian or Queensland legislation does not conform to a Convention or Recommendation. However, should the case deal with a breach of existing law based or modified by an ILS, citing the ILS is a good way to remind the court of its origin. It’s a new legal paradigm critically lacking in Queensland’s labour law practice. The following discusses the research methodology used in this paper. It is followed by a comparative discussion of results between the prevalence of ILSs and other international standards in Queensland case history. Finally, evidence showing the international trend of labour disputes using ILSs for victory is discussed.

Violence Profiles on International TV News

Journalism has achieved a crucial importance as a social institution linked with the notion of the public interest. It is still doing so but is nevertheless increasingly challenged by getting networked with the interested publics. This becomes more apparent in times when the media repertoires and audiences as such are changing, when the public relies on more than one news source for the transmission and formulation of world events, but when the importance of TV news nevertheless remains relatively stable. Against this backdrop we may ask what publics contribute to or take away from the new plethora of images and stories saturating the media? This article gives an approximate answer by drawing on a comparative analysis of the present-day presentations of violence on British, German, and Russian television news. Violence in the media is not a new phenomenon, as age-old literary masterpieces like Homer’s Odyssey show, but it is still a very popular one, especially in the news. This article highlights trans-national and national elements in the reporting of violence in three different news cultures. At first glance, both the substantial cross-national violence news flow and the cross-national visual violence flow (key visuals) may be interpreted as distinctly trans-national elements. Event-related textual analysis, however, reveals how the historical rootedness of nations and their specific symbols of power are still very much manifested in respective television mediations of violence. In conclusion, this study recommends the pursuit of conscientious comparisons in journalist research and practice in order to understand what violence news convey in the different arenas of present-day newsmaking.

The applicability of biased estimation in model and model order selection

Biased estimation has the advantage of reducing the mean squared error (MSE) of an estimator. The question of interest is how biased estimation affects model selection. In this paper, we introduce biased estimation to a range of model selection criteria. Specifically, we analyze the performance of the minimum description length (MDL) criterion based on biased and unbiased estimation and compare it against modern model selection criteria such as Kay's conditional model order estimator (CME), the bootstrap and the more recently proposed hook-and-loop resampling based model selection. The advantages and limitations of the considered techniques are discussed. The results indicate that, in some cases, biased estimators can slightly improve the selection of the correct model. We also give an example for which the CME with an unbiased estimator fails, but could regain its power when a biased estimator is used.

Post-colonial law : legal establishments from past empires are illegitimate

The extant literature covering the plights of indigenous people resident to the African continent consistently targets colonial law as an obstacle to the recognition of indigenous rights. Whereas colonial law is argued to be archaic and in need of review, which it is, this article argues the new perspective that colonial law is illegitimate for ordering the population it presides over – specifically in Africa. It is seen, in five case studies, that post-colonial legal structures have not considered the legitimacy of colonial law and have rather modified a variety of statutes as country contexts dictated. However, the modified statutes are based on an alien theoretical legality, something laden with connotations that hark to older and backward times. It is ultimately argued that the legal structures which underpin ex-colonies in Africa need considerable revision so as to base statutes on African theoretical legality, rather than imperialistic European ones, so as to maximise the law’s legitimacy.

In search of Chinese jurisprudence : does Chinese legal tradition have a place in China's future?

Questions the extent to which Westerrn commercial laws adopted by China, particularly in its Company Laws of 1993 and 1995, are comptaible with China's different cultural and legal traditions. Suggests that Western concepts of the rule of law and of corporate governance are alient to China. Outlines the development of the Western legal tradition. based on Judaeo-Christian beliefs and legal rationalism. Compares this with the deveopment of the Chinese legal tradtion, based on Confucianism and legalism. Proposes ways in which the two traditions could be reconciled more effectively.