Library learning spaces in the digital age

Students describe the Library as being central to their learning, offering focus and inspiration, enabling access to information and technologies, and collaboration with peers. Deakin University Library’s building redevelopment program has been integral to the Library’s re-imagined value proposition for students learning in the digital age. The introduction of new generation library and learning spaces strengthens the University’s offer to students for a brilliant education where you are and where you want to go through premium cloud and located learning experiences that are personal, engaging and relevant.

The Library’s building projects are distinctive in terms of location and the built environment, as well as the characteristics of the university campus communities. Each progressive project has brought new aspirations and challenges. Through joint research with Deakin University’s School of Architecture and Built Environment, the Library has developed a quality framework for planning and assessing library and learning spaces.

This paper will discuss the research findings to date on the quality framework and the need to continually review and assess indicators of quality in a highly dynamic digital environment. The Library’s experiences in introducing high-end multimedia provide some insights into planning for and delivering enduring value.

The next steps in exploring the question of how library spaces assist students in achieving their learning goals are introduced.

Back to the future: Warlpiri encounters with drawings, country and others in the digital age

Since the early 1900s, Warlpiri people living in the central desert region of Australia have experienced an intense process of adaption to the changing circumstances of postcolonial life. From the earliest days, their encounters with kardiya, non-Aboriginal people, have been mediated by diverse visual technologies that have, over time, become integral to the ways Warlpiri orient themselves to each other and their wider world. In this paper I trace the key elements of the complex visual environment that has emerged from this history of mediation. The central part of the paper considers events around the repatriation to Warlpiri communities in 2011 of a collection of drawings made in the 1950s by their forebears.In responses to a medium that once was new but now is old, several points of interest emerge, among them a clear sense of a hierarchy of value Warlpiri apply to modes of visual communication. In the context of the return of the drawings, the significance Warlpiri ascribe to other visual media comes to the fore. I consider some of the ways visual forms are deployed in support of public projections of cultural identity on the one hand and everyday modes of expression and address on the other. The paper’s central argument is that contemporary Warlpiri attitudes to images – whether they be drawn, painted or broadcast – reveal the complex postcolonial workings of mimetic desire.

English in the digital age: making english digital

Despite the emphasis in the press and elsewhere on the print-based nature of English curriculum, opportunities to develop digital English, with attention to web-based and multimodal forms of text, literacy, location, and activity, are present in the draft national (Australian) curriculum for English, alongside more traditional forms. This paper examines the place of digital and multimodal texts and literacies within the draft paper for the Australian English curriculum, and the possibilities offered by a national curriculum, for exploring and imagining an English for the Digital Age.

Preservation challenges in the digital age

The digital preservation field is evolving rapidly. Focal areas are changing and best practices are still under debate. Preservation efforts must address not just preservation of the technologies of the past, but also those of the future. The rapidly increasing volume of data requiring preservation makes other digital preservation challenges inherently larger and more complex. The shorter lifespan of digital materials also makes the need for timely and effective preservation action more urgent. This article describes what the author sees as the current major challenges in digital preservation, and covers a range of technical, administrative, legal and logistical aspects.

Imaging identity: media, memory and portraiture in the digital age

Imaging Identity presents potent reflections on the human condition through the prism of portraiture. Taking digital imaging technologies and the dynamic and precarious dimensions of contemporary identity as critical reference points, these essays consider why portraits continue to have such galvanising appeal and perform fundamental work across so many social settings. This multidisciplinary enquiry brings together artists, art historians, art theorists and anthropologists working with a variety of media. Authors look beyond conventional ideas of the portrait to the wider cultural contexts, governmental practices and intimate experiences that shape relationships between persons and pictures. Their shared purpose centres on a commitment to understanding the power of images to draw people into their worlds. Imaging Identity tracks a fundamental symbiosis — to grapple with the workings of images is to understand something vital of what it is to be human.

Technological disadvantage of the digital age

Debates continue about the relative benefits, costs and risks of the diffusion of computer-based technologies throughout society and schooling. One area that has received considerable attention is gender equity. Early work on gender and computers focused on differences between male and female access and use (e.g. Huff, Fleming & Cooper, 1992; Kirkman, 1993; Morritt, 1997; Nelson & Cooper, 1997; Sofia, 1993), with concerns focused on the potential for girls to be disadvantaged. In some respects, it is arguable that problems of gender equity in schools with respect to computers have been overcome. For example, in a small study I conducted in two New Zealand senior primary classrooms in 2003, I found that both boys and girls were motivated to use computers and appeared to have equal opportunities to access computers in the classroom. The students in my study expressed a belief in the importance of using computers, and this belief can also be discerned from educational policy and media coverage.
In this paper I argue that, although gender by itself no longer appears to be a source of disadvantage in terms of access to and use of computers in schools, many questions about technology, schooling and power relations still remain unanswered. I present two alternative viewpoints on the new digital age. First, I explore Melanie Stewart Millar’s (1998) analysis of digital discourse as one which reproduces the power of white, middle-class, educated, well-paid males, and excludes anything else it considers ‘Other’. Second, I review arguments that the digital age has provided sites for the transcendence of traditional hierarchies and inequalities (e.g. Spender, 1995). I conclude that, despite the discrepancies between these two viewpoints, both concur that technological disadvantage will exacerbate any existing inequality that might result from intersections of identity categories, such as, gender, ethnicity, age, and socio-economic status.

Gender and socio-economic issues in the use of digital technologies in mathematics

This paper has been prepared to address the issues and questions of the theme ‘access, equity and socio-cultural issues’. Findings from two studies are reported. In the first study gender issues in mathematical learning environments when computers were used were investigated. In the second effective practices for teaching disadvantaged or marginalised students with digital technology are canvassed. Teaching for equity and social justice in the digital age is complex. Teachers need to be aware that their beliefs and classroom practices may exacerbate gender and cultural inequalities in mathematics learning. Approaches that are consistent with social-constructivist and democratic theories need further investigation.

Power to the virtuous? Civic culture in the changing digital terrain

Much scholarship laments a decline in civic participation and community social capital in a changing media world. But the concept of “civicness” remains important to functioning societies across the globe. This research borrows from the cultural turn in studies of media, communication and citizenship to examine civic as culture, anchored in the practices and symbolic milieu of everyday life. As its theoretical entry point, this research paper positions civic as virtue. Drawing on scholars from Aristotle to Pierre Bourdieu, civic virtue may be understood as a perceived moral obligation to serve the common good, especially the interests of a “community” in which individuals and/or groups are connected. In particular, the research extends Bourdieu's ideas to consider news media as a powerful institution alongside the state that may claim monopoly over the manipulation of civic virtue under certain social conditions. Civic virtue offers much in discussions about media power in the digital age and its relationship to the future viability and legitimacy of news media. The research draws on exemplars from a study into digitally mediated civic participation in a rural/regional Australian context to position certain local media as “keepers” and “conferrers” of civic virtue in the social settings they serve.

eBusiness and information systems : academic programs in Australia and New Zealand in the e-Age

Universities are increasingly turning to ‘fashionable’ education programs to attract bright, high-quality students to both under-graduate and post-graduate degree programs. Traditional offerings in technology areas, such as Information Systems and Information Technology are being augmented by newer, more marketable degrees in areas such as eCommerce/eBusiness. This paper analyses the eCommerce/eBusiness and Information Systems (IS) / Information Technology (IT) academic programs in Australian and New Zealand universities on the basis of Kotler and Fox's service offering model of educational institutions; and considers what differences exist between these two apparently similar areas of academic endeavour. Finally we look at the trends of academic program delivery in the e-age and question whether universities need to take a more consumer-product approach to the issue of attracting appropriate students.