Navigating technological contexts and experience design in music education

For some time we have jokingly referred to our network jamming research with jam2jam as ‘Switched on Orff’ (Brown, Sorensen and Dillon 2002; Dillon 2003; Dillon 2006; Dillon 2006; Brown and Dillon 2007). The connection with electronic music and Wendy Carlos’ classic work ‘Switched on Bach’ was obvious; we were using electronic music in schools and with children. The deeper connection with Orff however was about recognising that electronic music and instruments could have cultural values and knowledge embedded in their design and practice in same way as what has come to be known as the Orff method (Orff and Keetman 1958-66). However whilst the Orff method focuses upon Western art music perceptual framework electronic instruments have the potential to have more fluid musical environments and even to move to interdisciplinary study by including visual media. Whilst the Orff method focused on making sense of Western art music through experience electronic environments potentially can make sense of the world of multi media that pervades our lives.

Access to meaningful relationships through virtual instruments and ensembles

This workshop focuses upon research about the qualities of community in music and of music in community facilitated by technologically supported relationships. Generative media systems present an opportunity for users to leverage computational systems to form new relationships through interactive and collaborative experiences. Generative music and art are a relatively new phenomenon that use procedural invention as a creative technique to produce music and visual media. Early systems have demonstrated the potential to provide access to collaborative ensemble experiences for users with little formal musical or artistic expertise. This workshop examines the relational affordances of these systems evidenced by selected field data drawn from the Network Jamming Project. These generative performance systems enable access to unique ensembles with very little musical knowledge or skill and offer the possibility of interactive relationships with artists and musical knowledge through collaborative performance. In this workshop we will focus on data that highlights how these simulated experiences might lead to understandings that may be of social benefit. Conference participants will be invited to jam in real time using virtual interfaces and to evaluate purposively selected video artifacts that demonstrate different kinds of interactive relationship with artists, peers, and community and that enrich the sense of expressive self. Theoretical insights about meaningful engagement drawn from the longitudinal and cross cultural experiences will underpin the discussion and practical presentation.

Cultural Science and Methodological Challenge!

The processes of digitization and deregulation have transformed the production, distribution and consumption of information and entertainment media over the past three decades. Today, researchers are confronted with profoundly different landscapes of domestic and personal media than the pioneers of qualitative audience research that came to form much of the conceptual basis of Cultural Studies first in Britain and North America and subsequently across all global regions. The process of media convergence, as a consequence of the dual forces of digitisation and deregulation, thus constitutes a central concept in the analysis of popular mass media. From the study of the internationalisation and globalisation of media content, changing regimes of media production, via the social shaping and communication technologies and conversely the impact of communication technology on social, cultural and political realities, to the emergence of transmedia storytelling, the interplay of intertextuality and genre and the formation of mediated social networks, convergence informs and shapes contemporary conceptual debates in the field of popular communication and beyond. However, media convergence challenges not only the conceptual canon of (popular) communication research, but poses profound methodological challenges. As boundaries between producers and consumers are increasingly fluent, formerly stable fields and categories of research such as industries, texts and audiences intersect and overlap, requiring combined and new research strategies. This preconference aims to offer a forum to present and discuss methodological innovations in the study of contemporary media and the analysis of the social, cultural,and political impact and challenges arising through media convergence. The preconference thus aims to focus on the following methodological questions and challenges: *New strategies of audience research responding to the increasing individualisation of popular media consumption. *Methods of data triangulation in and through the integrated study of media production, distribution and consumption. *Bridging the methodological and often associated conceptual gap between qualitative and quantitative research in the study of popular media. *The future of ethnographic audience and production research in light of blurring boundaries between media producers and consumers. *A critical re-examination of which textual configurations can be meaningfully described and studied as text. *Methodological innovations aimed at assessing the macro social, cultural and political impact of mediatization (including, but not limited to, "creative methods"). *Methodological responses to the globalisation of popular media and practicalities of international and transnational comparative research. *An exploration of new methods required in the study of media flow and intertextuality.

Research for Action : Networking University and Community for Social Responsibility (Workshop)

This workshop brings together people from a diverse range of disciplines to discuss how academic researchers and community practitioners and activists can work together to explore the use of information and communication technologies, social media, augmented reality, and other forms of network technologies for research and action in pursuit of social responsibility. The aim is to connect people with ideas, ideas with research projects, and harness new media to further inquiry into socially just outcomes in our community.

Toothless tiger, sleeping dragon : implied freedoms, internet filters and the growing culture of internet censorship in Australia

The internet by its very nature challenges an individual’s notions of propriety, moral acuity and social correctness. A tension will always exist between the censorship of obscene and sensitive information and the freedom to publish and/or access such information. Freedom of expression and communication on the internet is not a static concept: ‘Its continual regeneration is the product of particular combinations of political, legal, cultural and philosophical conditions’.

Technology in the lives and schools of adolescents

This chapter advocates a pedagogy where relationships form the basis for developing curricular and pedagogical ways of being with students. A relational pedagogy begins through considering the broad questions of: Where are music and technology in the lives the teacher and student? Where do adolescents make meaning through music and technology? How can teachers develop a community with their students through music and technology? We argue that relationships should be placed at the center of pedagogical and curricular decision-making. Through this approach, music educators are better equipped to make space for and honor student agency and learning through harnessing the ways adolescents intuitively engage with music and technology.

Semantic oscillations : encoding context and structure in complex valued holographic vectors

In computational linguistics, information retrieval and applied cognition, words and concepts are often represented as vectors in high dimensional spaces computed from a corpus of text. These high dimensional spaces are often referred to as Semantic Spaces. We describe a novel and efficient approach to computing these semantic spaces via the use of complex valued vector representations. We report on the practical implementation of the proposed method and some associated experiments. We also briefly discuss how the proposed system relates to previous theoretical work in Information Retrieval and Quantum Mechanics and how the notions of probability, logic and geometry are integrated within a single Hilbert space representation. In this sense the proposed system has more general application and gives rise to a variety of opportunities for future research.

Democracy, participation and convergent media : case studies in contemporary online news journalism in Australia

The shift from 20th century mass communications media towards convergent media and Web 2.0 has raised the possibility of a renaissance of the public sphere, based around citizen journalism and participatory media culture. This paper will evaluate such claims both conceptually and empirically. At a conceptual level, it is noted that the question of whether media democratization is occurring depends in part upon how democracy is understood, with some critical differences in understandings of democracy, the public sphere and media citizenship. The empirical work in this paper draws upon various case studies of new developments in Australian media, including online-only newspapers, developments in public service media, and the rise of commercially based online alternative media. It is argued that participatory media culture is being expanded if understood in terms of media pluralism, but that implications for the public sphere depend in part upon how media democratization is defined.

Improving governance : practical methods and an analytic framework for the enhancement of democracy

Seven endemic governance problems are shown to be currently present in governments around the globe and at any level of government as well (for example municipal, federal). These problems have their roots traced back through more than two thousand years of political, specifically ‘democratic’, history. The evidence shows that accountability, transparency, corruption, representation, campaigning methods, constitutionalism and long-term goals were problematic for the ancient Athenians as well as modern international democratisation efforts encompassing every major global region. Why then, given the extended time period humans have had to deal with these problems, are they still present? At least part of the answer to this question is that philosophers, academics and NGOs as well as MNOs have only approached these endemic problems in a piecemeal manner with a skewed perspective on democracy. Their works have also been subject to the ebbs and flows of human history which essentially started and stopped periods of thinking. In order to approach the investigation of endemic problems in relation to democracy (as the overall quest of this thesis was to generate prescriptive results for the improvement of democratic government), it was necessary to delineate what exactly is being written about when using the term ‘democracy’. It is common knowledge that democracy has no one specific definition or practice, even though scholars and philosophers have been attempting to create a definition for generations. What is currently evident, is that scholars are not approaching democracy in an overly simplified manner (that is, it is government for the people, by the people) but, rather, are seeking the commonalities that democracies share, in other words, those items which are common to all things democratic. Following that specific line of investigation, the major practiced and theoretical versions of democracy were thematically analysed. After that, their themes were collapsed into larger categories, at which point the larger categories were comparatively analysed with the practiced and theoretical versions of democracy. Four democratic ‘particles’ (selecting officials, law, equality and communication) were seen to be present in all practiced and theoretical democratic styles. The democratic particles fused with a unique investigative perspective and in-depth political study created a solid conceptualisation of democracy. As such, it is argued that democracy is an ever-present element of any state government, ‘democratic’ or not, and the particles are the bodies which comprise the democratic element. Frequency- and proximity-based analyses showed that democratic particles are related to endemic problems in international democratisation discourse. The linkages between democratic particles and endemic problems were also evident during the thematic analysis as well historical review. This ultimately led to the viewpoint that if endemic problems are mitigated the act may improve democratic particles which might strengthen the element of democracy in the governing apparatus of any state. Such may actively minimise or wholly displace inefficient forms of government, leading to a government specifically tailored to the population it orders. Once the theoretical and empirical goals were attained, this thesis provided some prescriptive measures which government, civil society, academics, professionals and/or active citizens can use to mitigate endemic problems (in any country and at any level of government) so as to improve the human condition via better democratic government.

Copyrights and creative commons licensing : pedagogical innovation in a higher education media literacy classroom

This article examines the role of copyrights in contemporary media literacies. It argues that, provided they are ethical, young people’s engagement with text should occur in environments that are as free from restriction as possible. Discussion of open culture ecologies and the emergent education commons is followed by a theorisation of both literacy and copyrights education as forms of epistemology: that is, as effects of knowledge producing discourses and practices. Because Creative Commons licenses respect and are based on existing copyright laws, a brief overview of traditional copyrights for educators is first provided. We then describe the voluntary Creative Commons copyright licensing framework (“some rights reserved”) as an alternative to conventional “all rights reserved” models. This is followed by an account of a series of workshop activities on copyrights and Creative Commons conducted by the authors in the media literacy classes of a preservice teacher education program in Queensland, Australia. It provides one example of a practical program on critical copyrights approaches, which may be adapted and used by other school and higher education institutions.

Stars are made of glass : children as capable and creative communicators

This booklet is the third in the Research in Practice Series, designed to complement Belonging, being & becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (DEEWR, 2009). It focuses on Learning Outcome 5 of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF): Children are effective communicators (DEEWR, 2009).

Implementation of an embedded sensor network for the coordination of Slocum gliders for coastal monitoring and observation

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are revolutionizing oceanography through their versatility, autonomy and endurance. However, they are still an underutilized technology. For coastal operations, the ability to track a certain feature is of interest to ocean scientists. Adaptive and predictive path planning requires frequent communication with significant data transfer. Currently, most AUVs rely on satellite phones as their primary communication. This communication protocol is expensive and slow. To reduce communication costs and provide adequate data transfer rates, we present a hardware modification along with a software system that provides an alternative robust disruption- tolerant communications framework enabling cost-effective glider operation in coastal regions. The framework is specifically designed to address multi-sensor deployments. We provide a system overview and present testing and coverage data for the network. Additionally, we include an application of ocean-model driven trajectory design, which can benefit from the use of this network and communication system. Simulation and implementation results are presented for single and multiple vehicle deployments. The presented combination of infrastructure, software development and deployment experience brings us closer to the goal of providing a reliable and cost-effective data transfer framework to enable real-time, optimal trajectory design, based on ocean model predictions, to gather in situ measurements of interesting and evolving ocean features and phenomena.

Preface : sustainable urban and regional infrastructure development : technologies, applications and management

The concept of ‘sustainability’ has been pushed to the forefront of policy-making and politics as the world wakes up to the impacts of climate change and the effects of the modern urban lifestyle. Climate change has emerged to be one of the biggest challenges faced by our planet today, threatening both built and natural systems with long term consequences which may be irreversible. While there is a vast literature in the market on sustainable cities and urban development, there is currently none that bring together the vital issues of urban and regional development, and the planning, management and implementation of sustainable infrastructure. Large scale infrastructure plays an important part in modern society by not only promoting economic growth, but also by acting as a key indicator for it. More importantly, it supplies municipal/local amenity and services: water, electricity, social and communication facilities, waste removal, transport of people and goods, as well as numerous other services. For the most part, infrastructure has been built by teams lead by engineers who are more concerned about functionality than the concept of sustainability. However, it has been widely stated that current practices and lifestyle cannot continue if we are to leave a healthy living planet to not only the next generation, but also to the generations beyond. Therefore, in order to be sustainable, there are drastic measures that need to be taken. Current single purpose and design infrastructures that are open looped are not sustainable; they are too resource intensive, consume too much energy and support the consumption of natural resources at a rate that will exhaust their supply. Because of this, it is vital that modern society, policy-makers, developers, engineers and planners become pioneers in introducing and incorporating sustainable features into urban and regional infrastructure.

Ubiquitous eco cities : infrastructure, technology and management

Efficient and effective urban management systems for Ubiquitous Eco Cities require having intelligent and integrated management mechanisms. This integration includes bringing together economic, socio-cultural and urban development with a well orchestrated, transparent and open decision-making system and necessary infrastructure and technologies. In Ubiquitous Eco Cities telecommunication technologies play an important role in monitoring and managing activities via wired and wireless networks. Particularly, technology convergence creates new ways in which information and telecommunication technologies are used and formed the backbone of urban management. The 21st Century is an era where information has converged, in which people are able to access a variety of services, including internet and location based services, through multi-functional devices and provides new opportunities in the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities. This chapter discusses developments in telecommunication infrastructure and trends in convergence technologies and their implications on the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities.

Review of de Bruijn, M., F. Nyamnjoh and I. Brinkman (eds.). 2009. Mobile phones : the new talking drums of everyday Africa

Since the late 1990s, there has been great enthusiasm expressed about the positive impact that can be obtained for poor and disadvantaged people from information and communication technologies (ICTs). This school of thought among researchers and practitioners is identified as ICTs for development (ICT4D). By contrast, a growing number of researchers eschew the technologically deterministic nature of the claims being made for development progress and seek to understand the role of technology in people’s lives, primarily through ethnographic studies. This book, which focuses on mobile telephony on the African continent, fits into the latter body of literature, with several authors explicitly stating they are examining social and cultural settings and are not taking a technologically deterministic view. The book captures the diverse ways various communities are using this communication technology. It adds to the burgeoning field of mobile phone studies, in which an increasing number of studies is emerging from developing countries.