Situated event bootstrapping and capture guidance for automated home movie authoring

This paper describes a novel interactive media authoring framework, MediaTE, that enables amateurs to create videos of higher narrative or aesthetic quality with a completely mobile lifecycle. A novel event bootstrapping dialog is used to derive shot suggestions that yield both targetted footage and annotation enabling an automatic Computational Media Aesthetics-aware editing phase, the manual performance of which is typically a barrier to the amateur. This facilitates a move away from requiring a prior-conception of the events or locale being filmed, in the form of a template, to at-capture bootstrapping of this information. Metadata gathered as part of the critical path of media creation also has implications for the longevity and reuse of captured media assets. Results of an evaluation performed on both the usability and delivered media aspects of the system are discussed, which highlight the tenability of the proposed framework and the quality of the produced media.

The awkwardness of Australian engagement with Asia : the dilemmas of Australian idea of regionalism

Australia has experienced difficulties engaging with Asia-Pacific regional integration. Despite Australian attempts to punch above its weight in regional forums and to be a regional leader, it is still not regarded as a full member or as quite fitting into the region. It is an ‘awkward partner’ in the Asian context, and has experienced the ‘liminality’ of being neither here nor there. The former Rudd government’s proposal for an ‘Asia Pacific Community’ (APC) by the year 2020 was a substantive initiative in Australia’s ongoing engagement with Asia. It has, however, attracted a high level of criticism both at home and abroad. The main critical analysis of the proposal has focused on institutional building or architecture, or its relationship with existing regional institutions, but overlooks a host of often fraught questions about culture,
norms, identities, and international power relations. The APC concept needs to be scrutinized in terms of these questions with a critical eye. This paper examines the cultural, cognitive, and normative dimensions of Rudd’s proposal. It analyses four dilemmas or awkward problems that the APC faces.

An analysis of student engagement when taught in classes of different sizes in rural, regional and metropolitan campuses of an Australian university

This study investigates the impact of class size on student engagement and student performance. It is based on an analysis of student university enter scores, student grades and student evaluations in metropolitan, regional and rural campuses of an Australian universityduring trimester 1 of years 2008, 9 & 10. Past literature appears to support the predominant influence of the class size effect on learning, though some findings are mixed and inconclusive. Contrary to the accepted view that higher entry level scores result in higher grades and, conversely, lower entry level scores result in lower grades, the findings suggest that factorsother than entry level scores, contribute to student outcomes and student engagement. The study reveals that student satisfaction of teaching quality is higher in the rural and regional campuses where the cohorts are smaller than at the metropolitan campus. This may be an indication that class size seems to have a predominant influence on student engagement and learning outcomes.

Strong spiritual engagement and subjective well-being : a naturalistic investigation of the Thaipusam festival

The existence of a positive relationship between spiritual engagement and well-being is currently based on weak correlational evidence, generally in Western contexts. This study advances understanding through a naturalist, longitudinal study of 226 people, including Malays, Chinese, and Indians, experiencing the Hindu Thaipusam festival in Malaysia. We measured the subjective well-being of people with varying levels of engagement—from nonobservance or simply observing the festival to extreme engagement. Each person was assessed 3 months before, 2 weeks before, 2 weeks after, and 4 months after the festival. We found that the subjective well-being of those with the most extreme level of engagement was permanently higher than other groups. The well-being of those with a strong, but less extreme engagement rose at the time of the festival and remained elevated. The findings are discussed in relation to homeostatic theory of well-being and the potential benefits of spiritual engagement.

Extending the paramedic role in rural Australia : a story of flexibility and innovation

Introduction: This article identifies trends in the evolving practice of rural paramedics and describes key characteristics, roles and expected outcomes for a Rural Expanded Scope of Practice (RESP) model.

Methods: A multiple case study methodology was employed to examine the evolution of rural paramedic practice. Paramedics, volunteer ambulance officers and other health professionals were interviewed in four rural regions of south-eastern Australia where innovative models of rural paramedic practice were claimed to exist. The research team collected and thematically analysed the data using the filter of a sociological framework throughout 2005 and 2006.

Results: The study found that paramedics are increasingly becoming first line primary healthcare providers in small rural communities and developing additional professional responsibilities throughout the cycle of care.

Conclusions: Adoption of the RESP model would mean that paramedics undertake four broad activities as core components of their new role: (1) rural community engagement; (2) emergency response; (3) situated practice; and (4) primary health care. The model’s key feature is a capacity to integrate existing paramedic models with other health agencies and health professionals to ensure that paramedic care is part of a seamless system that provides patients with well-organized and high quality care. This expansion of paramedics’ scope of practice offers the potential to improve patient care and the general health of rural communities.

Designing online role plays with a focus on story development to support engagement and critical learning for higher education students

Online role plays, as they are designed for use in higher education in Australia and internationally, are active and authentic learning activities (Wills, Leigh & Ip, 2011). In online role plays, students take a character role in developing a story that serves as a metaphor for real-life experience in order to develop a potentially wide range of subject-related and generic learning outcomes. The characteristics of these stories are rarely considered as factors in the design―and success―of these activities. The unspoken cultural assumptions, norms and rules in the stories that impact on the meanings students make from their experiences are also rarely scrutinised in the online role play literature. This paper presents findings from a case study of an asynchronous text-based online role play involving politics and journalism students from three Australian universities. The findings highlight the centrality of students’ collaborative story-building activity to their engagement and learning, including their development of critical perspectives. The study underlines the importance of certain aspects of the role play's design to support students' story-building activity.

Engagement and learning through social software in finance : a retrospective on the Trading Room experience

The introduction of a social software blog space called the Trading Room in an undergraduate finance unit generated a great deal of activity to support student learning. A subsequent evaluation of this innovation, viewed through the lens of Activity Theory, demonstrated that students perceived high value in the opportunity it provided for them to reaffirm theories, obtain individualised feedback and benchmark their work against others. While assessment is generally seen as the carrot and the stick of learning; students in the study reported that they would still participate in reading and posting to the Trading Room even if there was no assessment requirement. Students did not see any value in the environment as a purely social space, reporting that they saw it primarily as a professional educational community. It would appear that just as there are different communities in the real world social space, there are also different types of communities in the online space.

Social media in disaster response : Queensland Police Service - public engagement during the 2011 floods

Social Media, particularly Microblogging services, are now being adopted as an additional tool for emergency service agencies to be able to interact with the community at all stages of a disaster. Unfortunately, no standard framework for Social Media adoption for disaster management exists and emergency service agencies are adopting Social Media in an ad-hoc fashion. This paper seeks to provide a general understanding of how Social Media is being used by emergency service agencies during disasters, to better understand how we might develop a standardised framework of adoption. In this study of the 2010/11 Queensland Flood event, Facebook broadcast messages from the Queensland Police Service to the general public, were analysed by genre. Findings show that these Microblogging activities were mostly about information distribution and warning broadcasts and that the strength of Social Media for two-way communication and collaboration with the general public, was under-utilised during this event.