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.

The role of the press in Iraq's long struggle for democratic reform

The toppling of Saddam in 2003 has seen Iraq shift from only a handful of state organs that served as propaganda machines, to a wealth of over 200 Iraqi-owned newspapers which are being fervently produced and avidly read on the streets of the nation. This paper traces the introduction of the printing press to Iraq by the Ottomans and details both the periods where Iraq’s press was truly free and fostered the emergence of a civil society and democratic reforms and those where the Iraqi media was most restricted and did little else than praise the regime at hand. Following on, this paper reviews the developments since the fall of Saddam Hussein and, despite the extensive interference in Iraq’s media sector from the occupying forces, it concludes by arguing that these papers have been central to the re-emergence of an Iraqi public sphere which has openly debated and discussed the issues surrounding the nation’s shift from despotism to democracy.