Casual indifference : why does media ignore indigenous health?

The way mainstream media reports indigenous health influences how policies are developed, communicated and implemented, participants at the University of Canberra’s Media and Indigenous Policy symposium heard last week. Research presented at the symposium confirmed what those working in the indigenous health field already know  — the dominant feature of mainstream media attention to indigenous health is a lack of interest.

The simple yet complex development of social and participatory media for classroom learning : building a hybrid learning environment through action research

This paper reports on part of a teacher/researcher’s PhD action research study. It explains the complexity of features that social media brings to the teaching and learning process while discussing the simplicity and power of its use. Through the action research cycle, learning programs were designed to take advantage of the unique communicative methods offered by social media and web 2.0 whilst maintaining the value of face-to-face learning. Students used social media spaces such as blogs, groups and discussion forums as well as developing their own profiles and avatars to communicate online by making friends, leaving comments and uploading content which included publishing, peer reviewing and self assessment. The author argues that, by designing learning that valued and combined the attributes of social media, Web 2.0 and face-to-face teaching she was able to produce a more student-centred approach; hence, developing a ‘Hybrid’ learning environment which supported many 21st Century skills.

Mood sensing from social media texts and its applications

We present a large-scale mood analysis in social media texts. We organise the paper in three parts: (1) addressing the problem of feature selection and classification of mood in blogosphere, (2) we extract global mood patterns at different level of aggregation from a large-scale data set of approximately 18 millions documents (3) and finally, we extract mood trajectory for an egocentric user and study how it can be used to detect subtle emotion signals in a user-centric manner, supporting discovery of hyper-groups of communities based on sentiment information. For mood classification, two feature sets proposed in psychology are used, showing that these features are efficient, do not require a training phase and yield classification results comparable to state of the art, supervised feature selection schemes, on mood patterns, empirical results for mood organisation in the blogosphere are provided, analogous to the structure of human emotion proposed independently in the psychology literature, and on community structure discovery, sentiment-based approach can yield useful insights into community formation.

Hiding in plain sight: street artists online

Identity and privacy concerns related to social media are the subject of widespread academic enquiry and mass media reporting. Although in most circumstances academic research tends to present identity play and online self-presentation as positive, media reporting in Australia makes much of the risks of identity theft, privacy breaches and online predators. This research explores the phenomenological experience of creating an online persona, focusing particularly on street artists. For street artists, the threat of unwanted exposure has to be balanced with the positive implications of sharing their creative work outside its geographical and temporal constraints. I argue that street artists use complex persona-creation strategies in order to both protect and promote themselves. The two street artists discussed in this article experience their engagement with social media and digital networks in ways that offer new insight into the opportunities and problems associated with the presentation of a persona online.

Violence and xenophobia as means of social control in times of collapse: the soviet occupation of post-war Germany, 1945-1947

This article explores an overlooked aspect of the Soviet occupation of post-war Germany, namely, the influence of wartime violence on German behavioural patterns during the post-war period. Whilst many historians have noted that violent Soviet conduct in Germany merely encouraged the intensification of existing anti-Soviet attitudes therein, few have attempted to thoroughly investigate its influence on German behaviour. The conclusions made by those few historians who have done so are unsupported by the Soviet archival evidence drawn upon in the article. Using this evidence, the article highlights the tentative links between the violent repression of an occupation force and the muted responses of its subjects. It concludes that the nature of the repression and of the broader occupation landscape in which it developed, was integral in ensuring that the characteristically docile behaviour of the German population toward the Soviet occupier continued unabated throughout much of the occupation period.

Models, services and security in modern online social networks

Modern online social networks have revolutionized the world the same way the radio and the plane did, crossing geographical and time boundaries, not without problems, more can be learned, they can still change our world and that their true worth is still a question for the future.

Contested Publics: Racist rants, bystander action and social media acts of citizenship

While social media tools enable new kinds of creativity, cultural expression and forms of public, civic and political participation, we often hear more about the harms that arise from instances of trolling and 'aberrant' online participation, including racist provocation. In media and communications research, these issues have been framed in a number of ways, usually focusing on new tools for civic engagement, political participation and digital inclusion. Government policy has been shifting steadily towards potential regulation of social media 'misuse' in relation to appropriate forms of 'digital citizenship'. It is in this evolving context that we consider several instances of cultural or nationalistic provocation and conflict in which social media platforms (YouTube and Facebook in particular) have been central to the social dynamic that has unfolded. We examine the recording and uploading of racist rants and associated bystander actions on public transport in Australia and elsewhere around the world. In this article, we contend that while racism remains an issue in uses of social media platforms such as YouTube, this focus often overshadows these platforms' productive potential, including their capacity to support agonistic publics from which productive expressions of cultural citizenship and solidarity might emerge.

Social media as a learning environment : how, why, where and when people learn

This paper reports on an 18-month high school action research study and how this could be used to inform course designers and educators in other sectors of education. The high school study focused on the integration of social media into the face-to-face classroom. It used action research in a Victorian public high school in a total of 13 of the author’s classes. Data collection was in three phases over an eighteen month period. This involved the teacher creating one online social network and sharing this dynamic environment with up to seven classes in a semester. Blogs, groups, chats, discussion forums, Web 2.0 tools and a wide range of student-generated content were shared online, within a class and between classes. Students were encouraged to interact and to share their thoughts and ideas about planning as well as using their out-of-school skills and knowledge. Each topic, within each class, was one action research cycle. A number of the findings from this high school study were integrated into post-secondary education subjects at Deakin University. In an era of social media, this high school study has provided insight into how, why, where and when students learn, and by blending many of the findings into Deakin University courses, this study offers a new way of approaching teaching and learning in the broader notion of tertiary education and training.

Redesigning learning through social media, Web 2.0 and F2F teaching : an action research study

The focus of this research was to explore how social and participatory media could be used to enhance the face-to-face teaching and learning process. Action research was used to design learning that valued the students’ own experiences and to encourage students to create, connect and form a partnership in the learning process: hence supporting students' strengths and abilities. To monitor and participate in the use of social media required an increase in the teacher's work time. As a partial counter-balance, it was found that the teacher/researcher successfully reduced her time spent on correction by implementing peer and self-assessment and by making more effective use of classroom observations. This led to a valuable triangulation of assessment data. Reviewing many of the screen clips collected in this study, one can see the diversity of roles and activities in which the students were engaged, and their development over time through the action research cycle. Combining Web 2.0, face-to-face teaching and social media, where students made online friends and used pseudonyms, provided students with more choices and flexibility when working, communicating and learning. This research may help curriculum developers interweave new technologies, new literacies and multimodal learning methods into day-to-day learning programs. The developed methods of learning and designs should also be transferable to other educational learning environments.

The Vulture Club: international newsgathering via Facebook

Facebook is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2014. Like its social media cousin, Twitter, Facebook has transformed how journalists gather and disseminate international news. On Facebook, freelance journalists work together in open and closed communities to share information about news production in the latest crisis news datelines. One such community is the Vulture Club. This 'secret' site is being used to garner resources that previously were available only to mainstream staff correspondents. The majority of the posts on this site seek advice on good fixers, visas, safety gear, hotels and contacts. This article uses content analysis to examine posts on the VC site. It concentrates in particular on requests by freelance journalists for help with finding fixers in different countries. The study compares this model to a previous research study on staff correspondents and fixers. The findings are theorised by employing the work of Pierre Bourdieu on the acquisition of social and cultural capital.