Marketing aboriginal art: an intellectual property fiction?

This paper argues that legality is not enough in seeking to solve the problems caused by charlatans and carpet baggers in the Australian Aboriginal art market. It examines the role of social marketing initially posited for the health sector and seeks to apply its strategies to the Aboriginal art market. The author draws comparisons between successes in health and the need for successes in the Aboriginal art market. It suggests that social marketing has been overlooked as a way forward for the Aboriginal art market. The paper concludes by stating that conditions will not change with quick-fix legal solutions sought for complex problems. They are an intellectual property fiction.

Designing contemporary e-supported professional development environments to enhance tertiary teaching and learning

National and organsational imperatives in Australian higher education are demanding systematic and cost-effective approaches to the professional development of staff in their teaching in order to enhance the quality of student learning. Many universities are geographically distributed, multi- campus, multi-city and multi-modal in nature, and highly dependent for their effective operation on information and communications technologies (ICT). Deakin University is one such university operating in Australian higher education. Consistent with the progressive principles and practices of the learning organisation, new approaches and environments are required to support the professional development of staff for enhanced teaching and learning in higher education. These environments now require substantial use of e-learning for both learning about teaching online and the development of teaching capacities in the world of the modern-day, technologically-supported physical classroom. This article outlines the imperatives to establish and operate cost-effective e-supported environments for professional development for excellence in teaching and learning. The key principles underlying these emergent environments are outlined, along with the major tools, resources and features of such environments. A contemporary online teaching case site is highlighted as indicative of new approaches to supporting professional development of staff for excellence in online teaching and learning.

An evaluation of contemporary hidden Markov model genefinders with a predicted exon taxonomy

We present an independent evaluation of six recent hidden Markov model (HMM) genefinders. Each was tested on the new dataset (FSH298), the results of which showed no dramatic improvement over the genefinders tested five years ago. In addition, we introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of predicted exons and classify each resulting exon accordingly. These results are useful in measuring (with finer granularity) the effects of changes in a genefinder. We present an analysis of these results and identify four patterns of inaccuracy common in all HMM-based results.

Animating grandma : the indices of age and agency in contemporary children

Analysis of three animated children's films, each with heroic grandmothers motivating their plotlines, suggests a shift in the representational politics mediating older women to child audiences. The films function as critiques, reflections, and mechanisms of contemporary capitalism's available sociocultural locations for older women, modelled through varying degrees of subversive performance. Interrogating the agency potential of housework, nurture and extreme sports, this article assesses the role and function of the “Granny trope” in contemporary children's media.

Exclusions and inclusions: multiculturalism in contemporary Taiwanese and Australian picturebooks

In a 1990 essay on multiculturalism and Australian children's literature, John Stephens points out that in texts of the 1970s and 1980s, examinations of multicultural issues are conducted within a relatively conservative set of paradigms where views of cultures other than Anglo-Celtic are filtered through the perspectives of Anglo-Celtic, middle-class characters, and multiculturalism is valued only in so far as it is seen to contribute to the wellbeing (economic and psychological) of the dominant culture. In Taiwan, as social groups previously marginalised seek justice through the practices and policies of multiculturalism, long-standing resentment at the authoritarian conduct of the Nationalists has manifested in texts which examine the political conflicts and cultural clashes of the past: the silenced truth is uncovered and the stigmatisation of certain ethnic groups is gradually removed.\n But these texts typically address ideas of cultural difference obliquely and by way of analogies, rather than through the realist representations of WhoeverYou Are and Fang Fang's Chinese NewYear.

Contemporary poetry and the sacred: Vincent Buckley, Les Murray and Samuel Wagan Watson

VINCENT Buckley's Golden Builders and Other Poems (1976) is an important poetic experiment in its direct and exulted address to the city and to the sacred. The city is Melbourne in which Buckley lived, worked and wrote for forty years. In the original volume, the epigraph to the twenty-seven part sequence 'Golden Builders' is from William Blake's Jerusalem, a profound and idiosyncratic yoking together of the corporeal and the sacred

Professional identity and the contemporary university: a culture of control, accountability and virtuality?

In recent years many changes to the funding and management of universities have taken place. In the current climate of academia in Australia professional academics find themselves immersed in the culture of the managed university that uses the rhetoric of commitment to flexible delivery to put in place systems designed to increase accountability, surveillance and control. At the same time some argue that the focus on research, quality teaching and effective pedagogy has lessened. The empirical research base for this paper has enabled me to better understand some of the emerging trends my university. It looks at how changes to the experience of being academic impact on the work of academics as the power relations of the university continuously reposition them, and how academics in turn display resistance technologies. Changes to the technologies of management/administration of the university have resulted in what some academics have described as a loss of valuing of their knowledge and expertise and which may be seen by some as a threat to their opportunities to conduct productive educational inquiry.