Graduate students lend their voices : reflections on the 10th seminar in health and environmental education research

Graduate students were invited by their faculty advisors to attend the 10
th Seminar in Health and Environmental Education Research. Afterward, they were encouraged to comment on their experiences, involvement, and positioning. Two main authors developed survey questions and retrieved, analyzed, and synthesized the responses of four other graduate students. The overall experience of attending an invitational research seminar evoked various ideas about graduate students’ present and future roles in research communities.

The Centre of Clinical Research Excellence in Aboriginal Health : an operational rationale and some reflections on progress so far

The Centre of Clinical Research Excellence (CCRE) in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health was established in late 2003 through a major National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grant involving collaboration between the Aboriginal Health Council of South Australia (AHCSA), Flinders University, and Aboriginal Health Services. Our foundation research communities are the Aboriginal communities served by these Aboriginal Health Services in the Spencer Gulf / Eyre Peninsula region. In recent years a number of collaborative research programs involving chronic illness management, self-management and coordinated care have been implemented in these communities and this work is the basis of the initial CCRE activities. Key objectives of the CCRE are to improve the health status of Indigenous people through conducting relevant and meaningful Aboriginal controlled health research, providing formal training for Indigenous health researchers and developing innovative approaches to health care that can be readily translated and applied to support communities. The inclusion, empowerment and engagement of Indigenous people in the process of managing community health represent tangible strategies for achieving more equitable health outcomes for Aboriginal people. This paper outlines the CCRE operational rationale and presents early activities and outcomes across the three strategic areas of CCRE operations: research, education and training, and translation. Some critical reflections are offered on the progress and experience of the CCRE thus far. A common obstacle this CCRE has encountered is that the limited (especially staff) resources available to the Aboriginal Health Services with which we are collaborating make it difficult for them to engage with and progress the projects we are pursuing.

Helping doctoral students write : pedagogies for supervision

Helping Doctoral Students Write offers a new approach to doctoral writing. By treating research as writing and writing as research, the authors offer pedagogical strategies for doctoral supervisors that will assist the production of well-argued and lively dissertations." "It is clear that many doctoral candidates find research writing complicated and difficult, but the advice they receive often glosses over the complexities of writing and/or locates the problem in the writer. Rejecting the DIY websites and manuals that promote a privatized, skills-based approach to writing research, Kamler and Thomson provide a new framework for scholarly work that is located in personal institutional and cultural contexts. Their discussion of the complexities of forming a scholarly identity is illustrated by stories and writings of actual doctoral students.

The pedagogical approach developed in the book is based on the notion of writing as a social practice. This approach allows supervisors to think of doctoral writers as novices who need to learn new ways with words as they enter the discursive practices of scholarly communities. This involves learning sophisticated writing practices with specific sets of conventions and textual characteristics. The authors offer supervisors practical advice on helping with commonly encountered writing tasks such as the proposal, the journal abstract, the literature review and constructing the dissertation argument." "In conclusion, they present a persuasive argument that universities must move away from simply auditing supervision to supporting the development of scholarly research communities. Any doctoral supervisor keen to help their students develop as academics will find the new ideas presented in this book fascinating and insightful reading.

The structure of academic prose : intercultural and interdisciplinry dimensions

In the contemporary world of increasing internationalisation of scholarship the ability to communicate in the “lingua franca” of global research communities and familiarity with relevant academic genres is crucial to attaining research visibility in the academy. Native English language competency does not guarantee the possession of knowledge and skills about how to manipulate the language structure of academic genres to produce the kind of scholarly prose acceptable in the community of readers. This task is even more challenging to Non-NESB academic writers, mainly because the purpose of academic writing is both informative and rhetorical, and the information packaging strategies are likely to be discipline and culture bound.
Communication in professional academic culture is carried out and codified by selected genre categories which function as the media for scholarly discussions. This presentation focuses on the structure of a research paper, the most widely established form of presenting academic research. With an increasing internationalisation of scholarship, the schema of a research paper faces two potentially conflicting sets of forces. At one end are the forces of established conventions of the rhetorical pattern of research papers which are modelled on the structure of an “Anglo” research paper. On the other are the forces of norms for text construction of the author’s culture of socialization.

I discuss analytical approaches to the examination of the relational organisation of this genre exploring both intercultural and interdisciplinary dimensions. I examine paratactic and hypotactic configurations of the structure of research paper, providing examples of relational strategies utilised by native and no-native English speaker writers representing Anglo and non-Anglo discourse communities.

Recommendation techniques based on off-line data processing: a multifaceted survey

Recommendations based on off-line data processing has attracted increasing attention from both research communities and IT industries. The recommendation techniques could be used to explore huge volumes of data, identify the items that users probably like, and translate the research results into real-world applications, etc. This paper surveys the recent progress in the research of recommendations based on off-line data processing, with emphasis on new techniques (such as context-based recommendation, temporal recommendation), and new features (such as serendipitous recommendation). Finally, we outline some existing challenges for future research.

Discovering implicit criteria preferences reflected in tourism journal ranking lists using the Choquet Integral

Variations between journal rankings may cause confusion. As such, prior attempts were made to compare and evaluate journal ranking criteria for obtaining insightful knowledge on how different research communities have ranked journals. However, existing approaches are unable to model the journal ranking process closely enough as they are incapable of considering the relationship between multiple criteria simultaneously. In this paper, we address the challenges by introducing the Choquet Integral (CI) for evaluating journal ranking criteria. The new approach is able to account for interactions between criteria in relation to overall ranking score, using a fuzzy measure in its computation. Its properties, the Shapley value and the Interaction index, allow for good representations of importance and interactions between criteria. We demonstrate the efficiency of the CI through a case study of journal ranking lists in tourism and service journals.

A survey of recommendation techniques based on offline data processing

Recommendations based on offline data processing has attracted increasing attention from both research communities and IT industries. The recommendation techniques could be used to explore huge volumes of data, identify the items that users probably like, translate the research results into real-world applications and so on. This paper surveys the recent progress in the research of recommendations based on offline data processing, with emphasis on new techniques (such as temporal recommendation, graph-based recommendation and trust-based recommendation), new features (such as serendipitous recommendation) and new research issues (such as tag recommendation and group recommendation). We also provide an extensive review of evaluation measurements, benchmark data sets and available open source tools. Finally, we outline some existing challenges for future research.

Planning research and educational partnerships with Indigenous communities : practice, realities and lessons

Increasingly planning practice and research are having to engage with Indigenous communities in Australia to empower and position their knowledge in planning strategies and arguments. But also to act as articulators of their cultural knowledge, landscape aspirations and responsibilities and the need to ensure that they are directly consulted in projects that impact upon their ‘country’ generally and specifically. This need has changed rapidly over the last 25 years because of land title claim legal precedents, state and Commonwealth legislative changes, and policy shifts to address reconciliation and the consequences of the fore-going precedents and enactments. While planning instruments and their policies have shifted, as well as research grant expectations and obligations, many of these Western protocols do not recognise and sympathetically deal with the cultural and practical realities of Indigenous community management dynamics, consultation practices and procedures, and cultural events much of which are placing considerable strain upon communities who do not have the human and financial resources to manage, respond, co-operate and inform in the same manner expected of non-Indigenous communities in Australia. This paper reviews several planning formal research, contract research and educational engagements and case studies between the authors and various Indigenous communities, and highlights key issues, myths and flaws in the way Western planning and research expectations are imposed upon Indigenous communities that often thwart the quality and uncertainty of planning outcomes for which the clients, research agencies, and government entities were seeking to create.

Communities of memory? The Jewish holocaust museum and research centre, Melbourne

The Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (JHC), Melbourne, opened in 1984. Through the support of large numbers of Jewish people, it has become an impmiant part of their lives as they age, a place of solace and memorialisation. It is a second home for some, providing networking support within and between the different Jewish ethnic communities. This paper will draw on the JHC's ever growing videotestimony collection as well as oral interviews on the roles played by Melbourne survivor volunteers and others in developing the Centre. The survivors have experienced many different aspects of the Holocaust, have come from all over Europe and elsewhere, and 1 are sometimes culturally very different. It will discuss the role played by the various social and cultural communities in creating and responding to the JHC and the success they have had in establishing 'communities of memory' or, alternatively, representing and 1 contextualising the various social and cultural communities.

Knowledge exchange in the Pacific : The TROPIC (translational research into obesity prevention policies for communities) project

Background
Policies targeting obesogenic environments and behaviours are critical to counter rising obesity rates and lifestyle-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Policies are likely to be most effective and enduring when they are based on the best available evidence. Evidence-informed policy making is especially challenging in countries with limited resources. The Pacific TROPIC (Translational Research for Obesity Prevention in Communities) project aims to implement and evaluate a tailored knowledge-brokering approach to evidence-informed policy making to address obesity in Fiji, a Pacific nation challenged by increasingly high rates of obesity and concomitant NCDs.
Methods
The TROPIC project draws on the concept of ‘knowledge exchange’ between policy developers (individuals; organisations) and researchers to deliver a knowledge broking programme that maps policy environments, conducts workshops on evidence-informed policy making, supports the development of evidence-informed policy briefs, and embeds evidence-informed policy making into organisational culture. Recruitment of government and nongovernment organisational representatives will be based on potential to: develop policies relevant to obesity, reach broad audiences, and commit to resourcing staff and building a culture that supports evidence-informed policy development. Workshops will increase awareness of both obesity and policy cycles, as well as develop participants’ skills in accessing, assessing and applying relevant evidence to policy briefs. The knowledge-broking team will then support participants to: 1) develop evidence-informed policy briefs that are both commensurate with national and organisational plans and also informed by evidence from the Pacific Obesity Prevention in Communities project and elsewhere; and 2) collaborate with participating organisations to embed evidence-informed policy making structures and processes. This knowledge broking initiative will be evaluated via data from semi-structured interviews, a validated self-assessment tool, process diaries and outputs.
Discussion
Public health interventions have rarely targeted evidence-informed policy making structures and processes to reduce obesity and NCDs. This study will empirically advance understanding of knowledge broking processes to extend evidence-informed policy making skills and develop a suite of national obesity-related policies that can potentially improve population health outcomes.