Overview of the 2015 ALTA shared task: Identifying French cognates in English text

This paper presents an overview of the 6th ALTA shared task that ran in 2015. The task was to identify in English texts all the potential cognates from the perspective of the French language. In other words, identify all the words in the English text that would acceptably translate into a similar word in French. We present the motivations for the task, the description of the data and the results of the 4 participating teams. We discuss the results against a baseline and prior work.

Interactive lounge : an interdisciplinary approach to the design of a gestural interaction device

Among the many new opportunities that digital technologies are enabling are an increased capacity for viewers to interact not only with the program content, but with an increasingly wide array of other digital applications. Within this context this project has developed a new interaction device (incorporating gestural platform technology) and user interfaces to facilitate interactive access to digital media in a lounge room setting. This paper provides an overview of an interdisciplinary design process applied by Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) researchers—in order to develop the device and present in detail its unique features.

The internet of services and USDL

A prominent research focus, especially in the context of EU public funding, has been the systematic use of the Internet for new ways of value creation in the services sector. This idea of service networks in the Internet, frequently dubbed the Internet of Services or Web service ecosystems, wants to make services tradable in digital media. In order to enable communication and trade between providers and consumers of services, the Internet of Services requires a standard that creates a "commercial envelope" around a service. This is where the Unified Service Description Language (USDL) comes into play as a normative and balanced unification of service information. The unified description established by USDL is machine-processable, considers technical and business aspects of a service as well as functional and non-functional attributes.

CUOL – "See You Online" : teaching strategies for digital literacy practices in the English curriculum

Literacy educator Kathy Mills, observes that creating multimodal and digital texts is an essential part of the national English curriculum in Australia. Here, she presents five practical and engaging ways to transform conventional writing tasks in a digital world.

Digital literacies: Understanding the literate practices of refugee kids in an Afterschool Media Club

Since the 2000s, teachers in an increasing number of Australian schools have been learning how to support students with refugee backgrounds. For some of these students, entry into the Australian school system is not easy. English literacy is integral to some of the challenges confronting the students. In response, educators have been developing and researching ways of engaging with the students’ language and literacy learning. Much of the focus has been on traditional print-based school literacies. In contrast, I look here at student engagement in digital literacies in an after-school media club. Several concepts from the theory of French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu are useful for understanding the position of students of refugee background in the Australian school system. Like other conflict theories, Bourdieusian theory has sometimes been criticised as ‘pessimistic’, that is, for suggesting that schools necessarily reproduce social disadvantage. However, others have used Bourdieusian theory to analyse and critique the reproductive work of schooling for groups of students who experience educational disadvantage. I align myself with this latter tradition. Specifically, I use Bourdieu’s triad of concepts to explain aspects of the literacy education experiences of some young people of refugee background: field, capital and habitus. In particular, I look at questions of the legitimation of students’ competences as capital in literate fields within and beyond the school context. Data are drawn from an Australian Research Council-funded project, Digital Learning and Print Literacy: A design experiment for the reform of low socio-economic, culturally diverse schools (2009-14). The data analysed in this chapter include interviews and observations relating to the participation of two Congolese girls in an after school media club. Implications are drawn for teachers of literacy in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts. Consideration is made of early childhood, primary and secondary settings.

"I’m making it different to the book” : transmediation in young children’s print and digital texts

Young children shift meanings across multiple modes long before they have mastered formal writing skills. In a digital age, children are socialised into a wide range of new digital media conventions in the home, at school, and in community-based settings. This article draws on longitudinal classroom research with a culturally diverse cohort of eight-year old children, to advance new understandings about children’s engagement in transmediation in the context of digital media creation. The author illuminates three key principles of transmediation using multimodal snapshots of storyboard images, digital movie frames, and online comics. Insights about transmediation are developed through dialogue with the children about their thought processes and intentions for their multimedia creations.

Media classification : Content regulation in an age of convergent media

This article outlines the key recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission’s review of the National Classification Scheme, as outlined in its report Classification – Content Regulation and Convergent Media (ALRC, 2012). It identifies key contextual factors that underpin the need for reform of media classification laws and policies, including the fragmentation of regulatory responsibilities and the convergence of media platforms, content and services, as well as discussing the ALRC’s approach to law reform.

Media Literacy through Arts Education in Australia

Media arts has been included as one of five Arts subjects for the new Australian Curriculum and will become mandatory learning for all Australian children from pre-school to year six, and elective for children in years seven to twelve. While media education has historically been associated with English curriculum in Australia, it has also occurred through the Arts since at least the 1960s and creative practice has almost always been included as an aspect of official media curricula. This chapter investigates the possibilities for creative and critical learning enabled through media arts by discussing the media learning of one primary school student. This chapter investigates the possibilities for creative and critical learning enabled through the inclusion of media arts in the curriculum. Media arts has been included as one of five Arts subjects for the new Australian Curriculum and will become mandatory learning for all Australian children from pre-school to year six, and elective for children in years seven to twelve. Media education has historically been associated with English curriculum in Australia due to its development through the critical reading tradition. However, media literacy education in secondary schools has also occurred through the Arts since at least the 1960s and creative practice has almost always been included as an aspect of official media curricula. This chapter investigates the media learning of one primary school student, to consider the nature of creative learning and how this relates to the ‘critical’ aspects of media arts curriculum. We undertook this work as part of a large research project that has been investigating the relationship between digital media and traditional literacy outcomes in a primary school.

The work of Media Arts in the age of digital production

This chapter uses as a beginning point Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The work of art in the age of technological reproducibility’(1935/2008) to discuss Media Arts education. It locates ‘Media Arts’ at the intersection of three key ideas: 1) media arts products as objects for popular and everyday consumption and intervention by individuals and broader audiences; 2) materiality and how individuals use their bodies and technologies to produce, combine and share digital materials and; 3) the construction of aesthetic knowledge and how this relates to critical and conceptual thinking. These ideas are discussed in the context of the development of curriculum for students at all ages of schooling, with specific attention given to the knowledge and skills students might develop within Media Arts education in primary schools. Examples from a Media Arts project in a primary school in Australia – where a new Media Arts national curriculum has been developed –are provided to illustrate the key ideas discussed in the chapter.

It’s my site, and I’ll do what I want: Performing female identity through digital identity curation in online spaces

This chapter is based on a qualitative case study that researched the perceptions of nine male and female pre-service English teachers’ in regards to their preparedness to mentor positive digital conduct in Social network sites (SNS). These sites enable individuals to perform public representations of identity, consumed by virtual audiences, with various degrees of perceived privacy. The chapter frames what we call “identity curation” through three theoretical lenses; of performativity, customisation and critical literacy. This chapter discusses one of the themes that emerged from the research, which is the way in which “normalised” and naturalised representations of femineity on SNS were judged more harshly than masculine representations.

Re-theorizing the “digital divide”: Identifying dimensions of social exclusion in contemporary media technologies

The digital divide is the disparancy in access to information, in the ability to communicate, and in the capacity to make information and communication serve full participation in the information society. Indeed, the conversation about the digital divide has developed over the last decade from a focus on connectivity and access to information and communication technologies, to a conversation that encompasses the ability to use them and to the utility that usage provides (Wei et al., 2011). However, this conversation, while transitioning from technology to the skills of the people that use them and to the fruits of their use is limited in its ability to take into account the social role of information and communication technologies (ICTs). One successful attempt in conceptualizing the social impact of the differences in access to and utilization of digital communication technologies, was developed by van Dijk (2005) whose sequential model for analyzing the divide states that: 1. Categorical inequalities in society produce an unequal distribution of resources; 2. An unequal distribution of resources causes unequal access to digital technologies; 3. Unequal access to digital technologies also depends on the characteristics of these technologies; 4. Unequal access to digital technologies brings about unequal participation in society; 5. Unequal participation in society reinforces categorical inequalities and unequal distributions of resources.” (p. 15) As van Dijk’s model demonstrates, the divide’s impact is the exclusion of individuals from participation. Still left to be defined are the “categorical inequalities,” the “resources,” the “characteristics of digital technologies,” and the different levels of “access” that result in differentiated levels of participation, as these change over time due to the evolving nature of technology and the dynamics of society. And most importantly, the meaning of “participation” in contemporary society needs to be determined as it is differentiated levels of participation that are the result of the divide and the engine of the ever-growing disparities. Our argument is structured in the following manner: We first claim that contemporary digital media differ from the previous generation of ICTs along four dimensions: They offer an abundance of information resources and communication channels when compared to the relative paucity of both in the past; they offer mobility as opposed to the stationary nature of their predecessors; they are interactive in that they provide users with the capability to design their own media environments in contrast to the dictated environs of previous architectures; and, they allow users to communicate utilizing multi forms of mediation, unlike the uniformity of sound or word that limited users in the past. We then submit that involvement in the information society calls for egalitarian access to all four dimensions of the user experience that make contemporary media different from their predecessors and that the ability to experience all four affects the levels in which humans partake in the shaping of society. The model being cyclical, we then discuss how lower levels of participation contribute to the enhancement of social inequalities. Finally, we discuss why participation is needed in order to achieve full membership in the information society and what political philosophy should govern policy solutions targeting the re-inclusion of those digitally excluded.

Co-creative media : theorising digital storytelling as a platform for researching and developing participatory culture

This paper considers the question, ‘what is co-creative media, and why is it a useful idea in social media research’? The term ‘co-creative media’ is now used by Creative Industries researchers at QUT to describe their digital storytelling practices. Digital storytelling is a set of collaborative digital media production techniques that have been used to facilitate social participation in numerous Australian and international contexts. Digital storytelling has been adapted by Creative Industries researchers at QUT as a platform for researching the potential of vernacular creativity in a variety of contexts, including social inclusion of marginalized and disadvantaged groups; inclusion in public histories of narratives that might be overlooked; and articulation of voices that otherwise remain silent in the formulation of social and economic development strategies. The adaption of digital storytelling to different contexts has been shaped by the reflexive, recursive, and pragmatic requirements of action research. Amongst other things, this activity draws attention to the agency of researchers in facilitating these kinds of participatory media processes and outcomes. This discussion serves to problematise concepts of participatory media by introducing the term ‘co-creative media’ and differentiating these from other social media production practices.

Digital storytelling as participatory public history in Australia

This chapter discusses digital storytelling as a methodology for participatory public history through a detailed reflection on an applied research project that integrated both public history and digital storytelling in the context of a new master-planned urban development: the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project.