Developing health literacy through school based health education : can reality match rhetoric

Recently in Australia, the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission (2009) and National Preventative Health Taskforce (2009) recommended that one way to strengthen consumer engagement within a health system is to ensure health literacy comprise a core element of the National Curriculum for primary and secondary schooling. However, whilst nationally and internationally schools are mandated to teach health education, there is considerable disjuncture between societies' broad expectations and schools' capacities to deliver programs that promote healthy Jiving (Marks, 2010; Basch, 2010). Given the centrality of literacy education in contemporary schooling (Snyder, 2008), 'health literacy' has been identified as a construct that offers the potential to close this perceived gap (McCuaig, Coore & Hay, 2012; Kickbusch, 2001). To date, there has been limited research asto what a health literacy focused, school based health education curriculum could look like.

Understanding expectations with multiple controllers in an augmented reality videogame

Player experiences and expectations are connected. The presumptions players have about how they control their gameplay interactions may shape the way they play and perceive videogames. A successfully engaging player experience might rest on the way controllers meet players' expectations. We studied player interaction with novel controllers on the Sony PlayStation Wonderbook, an augmented reality (AR) gaming system. Our goal was to understand player expectations regarding game controllers in AR game design. Based on this preliminary study, we propose several interaction guidelines for hybrid input from both augmented reality and physical game controllers

Love hurts: The costly reality of online romance fraud

Online dating and romance scams continue to lure in Australians with figures this week showing people have lost more than A$23 million this year alone, with average individual losses at A$21,000 – three times higher than other types of fraud. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) set up the Scam Disruption Project in August to help target those it believes have been caught in such scams. Over three months it sent 1,500 letters to potential victims in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. The figures released this week show that 50 people have been scammed, losing a total A$1.7 million – that’s an average of A$34,000 per victim. Almost three quarters of the scams were dating and romance related, which saw it evolve into the number one category of fraud victimisation. Romance scams continue to pose a problem – despite the efforts of the police and ACCC – so why is it that people continue to fall for them?

Improving access to housing for low-income communities in Dhaka: From rhetoric to reality in community participation

The research explores how community participation can address affordable housing problems of the poor in Dhaka. The research, based on extensive interviews, community focus groups and household surveys in different Dhaka slums, identifies the limiting factors to promote community participation in affordable housing creation. In Dhaka housing options for poor are currently limited to affordable shelters in informal settlements. Public housing programs have failed to reach the poor and meet affordability levels due to a number of factors including lack of beneficiary participation. Beneficiary participation, though widely recognized for success in housing initiatives, often deteriorates in process of implementation into mere involvement, not reflecting community needs and aspirations and thus failing to meet its core objectives. This research identified the most significant impediments as well as opportunities to advance participation in their own housing provisions in Dhaka city.

Communication and essentialism: Grounding the shared reality of a social category

Essentialism is an ontological belief that there exists an underlying essence to a category. This article advances and tests in three studies the hypothesis that communication about a social category, and expected or actual mutual validation, promotes essentialism about a social category. In Study 1, people who wrote communications about a social category to their ingroup audiences essentialized it more strongly than those who simply memorized about it. In Study 2, communicators whose messages about a novel social category were more elaborately discussed with a confederate showed a stronger tendency to essentialize it. In Study 3, communicators who elaborately talked about a social category with a naive conversant also essentialized the social category. A meta-analysis of the results supported the hypothesis that communication promotes essentialism. Although essentialism has been discussed primarily in perceptual and cognitive domains, the role of social processes as its antecedent deserves greater attention.

Professional spaces for pre-service teachers: sites of reality, imagination and resistance

Questions about the practicum within teacher education tend to focus on the amount of time allocated to it in programs. In this research, we were interested in the quality of the experience rather than assuming ‘more is better’. To understand what is going on and where, this study focussed on the school and specially the departmental office of room as a site for workplace learning. Using qualitative methods we constructed narratives from the data provided by a cohort of four-year bachelor degree pre-service teachers during and following their final major (10 week)practicum experience. Using theories of spatiality to make sense of the data, we found that the narratives revealed stories of spaces where compliance, disappointment were the key features of the practicum, and where resistance through absence (from the departmental office) was an important strategy to manage the experience. This research challenges the ‘more is better’ argument.

Education and the relation to the outside: A little real reality

One of the aims of Deleuze. Guattari. Schizoanalysis. Education. is to focus on the radical reconfiguration that education is undergoing, impacting educator, administrator, institution and ‘sector’ alike. More to the point, it is the responses to that process of reconfiguration - this newly emerging assemblage - that are a key focal point in this issue. Essential to these responses, we propose, is Deleuze and Guattari’s method of schizonalysis, which offers a way to not only understand the rules of this new game, but also, hopefully, some escape from the promise of a brave new world of continuous education and motivation. A brave new world of digitised courses, impersonal and corporate expertise, updatable performance metrics, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), learning analytics, transformative teaching and learning, online high-stakes testing in the name of transforming and augmenting human capital overlays the corporeal practices of institutional surveillance, examination and categorical sorting. A brave new world, importantly, where people’s continuous education is instituted less, or not simply, through disciplinary practices, and increasingly through a constant and continuous sampling and profiling of not simply performance but their activity, measured against the profiled activity of a ‘like’ age group, person, or an institution. This continuous education, including the sampling that accompanies it, we are all informed through various information and marketing campaigns, is in our best interest. An interest that is driven and governed by an ever-increasing corporatisation and monetisation of ‘the knowledge sector’, as well as an interest that is sustained through an ever-increasing, as well as continuous, debt.

Reality bites: When copyright law and reality cooking meet, only the lawyers win

There’s nothing new about this recipe for success: toss in high-stress scenarios, flavour generously with competitive chefs, and garnish with a panel of celebrity judges. With all major broadcasters in the country now dishing up some form of reality cooking programme, Australians could be forgiven for having lost any expectation of original TV material. But that didn’t stop Channel Seven from taking Channel Nine to court last week, arguing its copyright in My Kitchen Rules had been infringed with Nine’s latest prime-time effort, The Hotplate. After the first few episodes went to air, Seven asked for an injunction to stop Nine from broadcasting any more episodes of the reality show. So let’s look at some common confusions about copyright law and how it relates to reality television. Because in this context, copyright infringement isn’t about shows sharing major similarities, or about protecting ideas, but rather the expression of these ideas in the final product. Still, stretching copyright law to protect the “vibe” of a work isn’t good for artists, TV producers or viewers: copyright was designed to nurture creativity, not stifle it.

Single nucleotide polymorphisms in clinics: Fantasy or reality for cancer?

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been classically used for dissecting various human complex disorders using candidate gene studies. During the last decade, large scale SNP analysis i.e. genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have provided an agnostic approach to identify possible genetic loci associated with heterogeneous disease such as cancer susceptibility, prognosis of survival or drug response. Further, the advent of new technologies, including microarray based genotyping as well as high throughput next generation sequencing has opened new avenues for SNPs to be used in clinical practice. It is speculated that the utility of SNPs to understand the mechanisms, biology of variable drug response and ultimately treatment individualization based on the individual’s genome composition will be indispensable in the near future. In the current review, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the clinical utility of genetic variants in disease risk-prediction, prognosis, clinical outcome and pharmacogenomics. The lessons and challenges for the utility of SNP based biomarkers are also discussed, including the need for additional functional validation studies.

Regenerative sustainability for the built environment – from vision to reality: An introductory chapter

Regenerative sustainability is emerging as an alternative discourse around the transition from a ‘mechanistic’ to an ‘ecological’ or living systems worldview. This view helps us to re-conceptualize relationships among humans’ technological, ecological, economic, social and political systems. Through exploration of ‘net positive’ or ‘regenerative’ development lenses and the traditional sustainability literature, the conceptualization and approaches to achieve sustainable development and ecological modernization are expanded to articulate and to explore the evolving sustainability discourse, ‘regenerative sustainability’. This Special Volume of Journal of Cleaner Production (SV) is focused upon various dimensions of regenerative sustainability (e.g. regenerative design, regenerative development, and positive development) applied to the urban built environment at scales, which range from individual buildings, neighborhoods, and urban developments to integrated regional sustainable development. The main focus is on how these approaches and developments are evolving, how they can help us to prevent or adapt to climate change and how these approaches are likely to evolve in the next two to three decades. These approaches are addressed in four themes: (1) reviewing the theoretical development of the discourse of regenerative sustainability, its emerging principles and practices, (2) explaining how it can be measured and monitored, (3) providing encouraging practical pathways and examples of its implementation in multiple cultural and climatic contexts, and (4) mapping obstacles and enablers that must be addressed to help to ensure that more rapid progress is made in implementing the transitions towards an urban built environment that supports genuinely sustainable societies.

Mixed reality stories: How creative writers integrate virtual and physical realities

Mixed reality stories (MRS) unfold simultaneously in the physical and the virtual world. Advancements in digital technologies, which are now able to capture more contextual information about our physical environments, are enabling novel ways of blending the two worlds. To explore the process of creating stories from this perspective, we conducted a study with creative writers, in which we asked them to write a MRS script for outdoor running. While we saw instances of intentional connections between physical and virtual worlds in their work, we also observed the use of ambiguity or even deliberate contradiction with available contextual information. In this paper we discuss how these approaches can be beneficial for MRS and propose directions for future work.

Being chased by zombies!: Understanding the experience of mixed reality quests

Both researchers and practitioners show increasing interest in exploring mixed reality games: games, where physical environments blend together with digital technologies. In this paper we have extended earlier work by bringing attention to the role of narrative in mixed reality games. For our case study we chose a mobile phone application Zombies Run!, which is designed to support actual running. This application contains a fictional story about a zombie apocalypse and provides runners with various quests (in the form of missions) to complete during their run. We investigated different aspects of participants' experience with the application and how it changed their running. Our findings show how the app changed running in three major ways. Firstly, it changed the way runs were organised. Secondly, it shook up established running routines. And lastly, it shaped the meanings associated with running.

Intuitive interaction in a mixed reality system

Tangible physical systems are more intuitive than Intangible virtual Systems. Mixed reality systems are considered as an alternative to virtual systems, bringing advantages of tangible systems into an interaction. However, past research has mainly focussed on technical aspects of incorporating pervasive-ness and immersive-ness in the virtual systems. This paper reports on an empirical study of intuitive Interaction in a Mixed Reality game system for children and the design aspects that could facilitate intuitive Interaction in such systems. A related samples Friedman’s test showed that the Mixed Reality game system demonstrated more intuitive interactions than non-intuitive Interactions. A linear regression analysis further established that the variation in intuitive Interaction in the Mixed Reality system could be statistically significantly explained primarily by physical affordances offered by the Mixed Reality system and to a lesser extent by the perceived affordances in the system. Design guidelines to develop intuitive Mixed Reality systems are discussed. These guidelines should allow designers to exploit the wonders of advances in technology and at the same time allow users to directly interact with the physical real world. This will allow users to access maximal physical affordances, which are primary contributors to intuitive interaction in Tangible and Mixed Reality systems.

Autoethnography : critical appreciation of an emerging art

In this article, the author discusses how she applied autoethnography in a study of the design of hypermedia educational resources and shows how she addressed problematic issues related to autoethnographic legitimacy and representation. The study covered a 6-year period during which the practitioner’s perspective on the internal and external factors influencing the creation of three hypermedia CD-ROMs contributed to an emerging theory of design. The author highlights the interrelationship between perception and reality as vital to qualitative approaches and encourages researchers to investigate their reality more fully by practicing the art of autoethnography.