Schools' guide : How to select providers of road safety education programs for senior school students

Road safety education is not just about safe driving. Best practice road safety education seeks to improve knowledge and change attitudes relating to being safe, and making sure others are safe on the road. Typical topics might include: • Strengthening attitudes toward safe road use behaviours and avoiding risks • Supporting behaviours to ensure others are safe • Promoting knowledge of traffic rules.

Citizen journalism and everyday life : A case study of Germany’s myHeimat.de

Much recent research into citizen journalism has focussed on its role in political debate and deliberation. Such research examines important questions about citizen participation in democratic processes – however, it perhaps places undue focus on only one area of journalistic coverage, and presents a challenge which only a small number of citizen journalism projects can realistically hope to meet. A greater opportunity for broad-based citizen involvement in journalistic activities may lie outside of politics, in the coverage of everyday community life. A leading exponent of this approach is the German-based citizen journalism Website myHeimat.de, which provides a nationwide platform for participants to contribute reports about events in their community. myHeimat takes a hyperlocal approach but also allows for content aggregation on specific topics across multiple local communities; Hannover-based newspaper publishing house Madsack has recently acquired a stake in the project. Drawing on extensive interviews with myHeimat CEO Martin Huber and Madsack newspaper editors Peter Taubald and Clemens Wlokas during October 2008, this paper analyses the myHeimat project and examines its applicability beyond rural and regional areas in Germany; it investigates the question of what role citizen journalism may play beyond the political realm.

Citizen journalism and political participation : the youdecide project and the 2007 Australian Federal Election

The 2007 Australian Federal election not only saw the election of a Labor government after 11 years of John Howard’s conservative Coalition government. It also saw new levels of political engagement through the Internet, including the rise of citizen journalism as an alternative outlet and mode of reporting on the election. This paper reports on the You Decide 2007 project, an initiative undertaken by a QUT-based research team to facilitate online news reporting on the election on a ‘hyper-local’, electorate-based model. We evaluate the You Decide initiative on the basis of: promoting greater citizen participation in Australian politics; new ways of engaging citizens and key stakeholders in policy deliberation; establishing new links between mainstream media and independent online media; and broadening the base of political participation to include a wider range of citizen and groups.

Citizen Consultation from Above and Below : The Australian Perspective

In Australia, a range of Federal Government services have been provided online for some time, but direct, online citizen consultation and involvement in processes of governance is relatively new. Moves towards more extensive citizen involvement in legislative processes are now being driven in a “top-down” fashion by government agencies, or in a “bottom-up” manner by individuals and third-sector organisations. This chapter focusses on one example from each of these categories, as well as discussing the presence of individual politicians in online social networking spaces. It argues that only a combination of these approaches can achieve effective consultation between citizens and policymakers. Existing at a remove from government sites and the frameworks for public communication which govern them, bottom-up consultation tools may provide a better chance for functioning, self-organising user communities to emerge, but they are also more easily ignored by governments not directly involved in their running. Top-down consultation tools, on the other hand, may seem to provide a more direct line of communication to relevant government officials, but for that reason are also more likely to be swamped by users who wish simply to register their dissent rather than engage in discussion. The challenge for governments, politicians, and user communities alike is to develop spaces in which productive and undisrupted exchanges between citizens and policymakers can take place.

Transitioning students to work through authentic employment-based training in an Australian senior secondary VET program.

A common challenge among OECD countries has been the development of education and training pathways that accommodate student needs and interests at the upper secondary level (OECD, 2000). The introduction of trade-focussed Australian Technical Colleges (ATCs) has met with mixed response. The ATCs aim to create a supported transition from school to work through dual pathway programs enabling students to follow a trade career while completing their upper secondary studies. There has been little explicit examination of the effectiveness of such senior secondary school arrangements. Using one such Australian Technical College as a case-study, this paper investigates the perceptions of the employers and students who were associated with the college. Using mixed-methods consisting of quantitative perception surveys and focus interviews, the results of this study show that students and employers are very satisfied with the College and illustrate that students have made significant gains in relating their learning to the workplace and everyday life.

Citizen journalism as social networking : reporting the 2007 Australian Federal Election

One of the perceived Achilles heels of online citizen journalism is its perceived inability to conduct investigative and first-hand reporting. A number of projects have recently addressed this problem, with varying success: the U.S.-based Assignment Zero was described as "a highly satisfying failure" (Howe 2007), while the German MyHeimat.de appears to have been thoroughly successful in attracting a strong community of contributors, even to the point of being able to generate print versions of its content, distributed free of charge to households in selected German cities. In Australia, citizen journalism played a prominent part in covering the federal elections held on 24 November 2007; news bloggers and public opinion Websites provided a strong counterpoint to the mainstream media coverage of the election campaign (Bruns et al., 2007). Youdecide2007.org, a collaboration between researchers at Queensland University of Technology and media practitioners at the public service broadcaster SBS, the public opinion site On Line Opinion, and technology company Cisco Systems, was developed as a dedicated space for a specifically hyperlocal coverage of the election campaign in each of Australia's 150 electorates from the urban sprawls of Sydney and Brisbane to the sparsely populated remote regions of outback Australia. YD07 provided training materials for would-be citizen journalists and encouraged them to contribute electorate profiles, interview candidates, and conduct vox-pops with citizens in their local area. The site developed a strong following especially in its home state of Queensland, and its interviewers influenced national public debate by uncovering the sometimes controversial personal views of mainstream and fringe candidates. At the same time, the success of YD07 was limited by external constraints determined by campaign timing and institutional frameworks. As part of a continuing action research cycle, lessons learnt from Youdecide2007.org are going to be translated into further iterations of the project, which will cover the local government elections in the Australian state of Queensland, to be held in March 2008, and developments subsequent to these elections. This paper will present research outcomes from the Youdecide2007.org project. In particular, it will examine the roles of staff contributors and citizen journalists in attracting members, providing information, promoting discussion, and fostering community on the site: early indications from a study of interaction data on the site indicate notably different contribution patterns and effects for staff and citizen participants, which may point towards the possibility of developing more explicit pro-am collaboration models in line with the Pro-Am phenomenon outlined by Leadbeater & Miller (2004). The paper will outline strengths and weaknesses of the Youdecide model and highlight requirements for the successful development of active citizen journalism communities. In doing so, it will also evaluate the feasibility of hyperlocal citizen journalism approaches, and their interrelationship with broader regional, state, and national journalism in both its citizen and industrial forms.

Senior management teams in schools : understanding their dynamics, enhancing their effectiveness

Increasingly it has been argued that senior management teams (SMTs), comprising principals, deputy heads and other personnel, play a critical role in the governance of schools. In recent years, many researchers have drawn upon the tools of micropolitics to illuminate the relationships, dynamics and power plays between and amongst members of SMTs. The paper has two foci. Firstly, it overviews some of the seminal literature in the field of SMTs and micropolitics in an attempt to identify the working practices of and challenges facing members of SMTs. Secondly, it discusses an instrument, the TEAM Development Questionnaire, that emerged from a synthesis of this writing and research. The questionnaire presented here was especially devised to use with members of SMTs to help them (i) identify the dynamics amongst team members; and (ii) identify areas for the team to improve. A set of procedures for implementing the TEAM Development Questionnaire is provided to demonstrate its application to the field.

From social butterfly to urban citizen workshop

Web applications such as blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing sites, and social networking systems have been termed ‘Web 2.0’ to highlight an arguably more open, collaborative, personalisable, and therefore more participatory internet experience than what had previously been possible. Giving rise to a culture of participation, an increasing number of these social applications are now available on mobile phones where they take advantage of device-specific features such as sensors, location and context awareness. This workshop made a contribution towards exploring and better understanding the opportunities and challenges provided by tools, interfaces, methods and practices of social and mobile technology that enable participation and engagement. It brought together a group of academics and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplines such as computing and engineering, social sciences, digital media and human-computer interaction to critically examine a range of applications of social and mobile technology, such as social networking, mobile interaction, wikis (eg., futuremelbourne.com.au), twitter, blogging, virtual worlds (eg, hub2.org), and their impact to foster community activism, civic engagement and cultural citizenship.

The awareness and explication of disciplinarity across four senior-secondary subject areas

This paper issues a challenge to the notion of domain-general teaching and learning, positing that different subject areas require distinct approaches to developing student knowledge and understanding. The aim has been to observe and compare awareness and explication of disciplinarity in four senior secondary school subjects: Biology, History, Music and Physics. Specifically, we were interested in: (1) teachers’ concepts of what it means to ‘know the discipline’, to ‘think like a disciplinary expert’ and to ‘teach and learn the discipline’; and (2) how teachers draw these concepts together to build student knowledge in the classroom. The research informs educational practice and policy, in particular curricular initiatives involving interdisciplinary curricula.

News blogs and citizen journalism : new directions for e-journalism

Even for a casual observer of the journalistic industry it is becoming difficult to escape the conclusion that journalism is entering a time of crisis. At the same time that revenues and readerships for traditional publications from newspapers to broadcast news are declining, journalistic content is being overtaken by a flotilla of alternative options ranging from the news satire of The Daily Show in the United States to the citizen journalism of South Korea’s OhmyNews and a myriad of other news blogs and citizen journalism Websites. Worse still, such new competitors with the products of the journalism industry frequently take professional journalists themselves to task where their standards have appeared to have slipped, and are beginning to match the news industry’s incumbents in terms of insight and informational value: recent studies have shown, for example, that avid Daily Show viewers are as if not better informed about the U.S. political process as those who continue to follow mainstream print or television news (see e.g. Fox et al., 2007). The show’s host Jon Stewart – who has consistently maintained his self-description as a comedian, not a journalist – even took the fight directly to the mainstream with his appearance on CNN’s belligerent talk show Crossfire, repeatedly making the point that the show’s polarised and polarising ‘left vs. right’ format was “hurting” politics in America (the show disappeared from CNN’s line-up a few months after Stewart’s appearance; Stewart, 2004). Similarly, news bloggers and citizen journalists have shown persistence and determination both in uncovering political and other scandals, and in highlighting the shortcomings of professional journalism as it investigates and reports on such scandals.