Enhancing students' experience in music composition through music notation software

A project was undertaken in a Hong Kong primary school to investigate the role of music notation software in leaching music composition. The project was divided into three stages. During the first stage, appropriate hardware equipment and software applications were installed in the school music room, and four teaching plans were developed on the models and strategies derived from findings in the local and international literature. During the second stage, these teaching plans were implemented in Grade One, Grade Three, Grade Five and Grade Six classes of the school. During the third stage, the effectiveness of these teaching activities was evaluated by comparing the experiences from the second stage to the corresponding findings from similar projects undertaken in other Hong Kong primary schools, as well as to findings from the international literature. The results demonstrated that tile visual and audio stimulation created by computer"based technology can motivate students to successfully engage in music composition. Moreover, computer"based technology provides an opportunity for students to compose music in an atonal idiom. However, a large number of students were unable to demonstrate the concept of structural design in their musical products, and one of the findings from this investigation was that teachers need to be more purposeful in their teaching by directing students to employ the technique of repetition of interesting musical fragments or phrases in order to achieve a sense of unity in their pieces.

Time and Girmit

Chronicles the history of "girmit," an idiom of Indian workers transported to Fiji. History of indentured labor; Origin of the term; System of indenture adopted in 1838 by India's imperial rulers.

'Skeleton budget', 'intranet', 'dole', and other strange Words: Bridging the cultural divide in a multicultural classroom

This paper examines the experiences of two academics who had been international students themselves and currently teaching in multicultural settings at tertiary level, with regards to the issues of the teacher using culture specific slang and idiom with otherwise keen and bright groups of students, in Australia. Using the research method of auto-ethnography, it examines and categorises the themes of issues most often faced by the staff members and students-such as the use of different vocabulary and keywords and the prior knowledge required of both the teacher and the students in reaching a shared understanding or inter-subjectivity. These will be discussed in terms of the various realities experienced by the students coming from a diversity of countries and cultures. The paper discusses how these challenges can be identified and addressed and how to prepare for future situations more effectively and in advance. They will be examined within the contexts of culturally responsive teaching, communication competence, the hidden curriculum, instructional scaffolding, understanding and being open to other cultures and acknowledgement of the richness and relevance of the multicultural students’ varied experiences and social realities, from the point of view of the academic discipline of communication studies.

Building a national image : the architecture of John Smith Murdoch, Australia's first Commonwealth Government architect

Presents John Smith Murdoch and examines his significant contribution as an architect and public servant in Australia between 1885 and 1929. Murdoch's greatest achievement was the development of his modern Renaissance idiom of which Provisional Parliament House, Canberra is the finest example.

Eventscapes : visualizing events over time with emotive facets

The scale and dynamicity of social media, and interaction between traditional news sources and online communities, has created challenges to information retrieval approaches. Users may have no clear information need or be unable to express it in the appropriate idiom, requiring instead to be oriented in an unfamiliar domain, to explore and learn. We present a novel data-driven visualization, termed Eventscape, that combines time, visual media, mood, and controversy. Formative evaluation highlights the value of emotive facets for rapid evaluation of mixed news and social media topics, and a role for such visualizations as pre-cursors to deeper search. Copyright 2011 ACM.

Komunikasi budaya silang, kompetensi, pengajaran dan pembelajaran : satu analisis

This paper examines several issues related to intercultural communication competence and shared reality or inter-subjectivity when teaching in multicultural classrooms in Australia. Using the research method of personal narratives and autoethnography, it examines the challenges faced by lecturers and students in the classroom such as the use of different vocabulary, slang, idiom and keywords and the prior culture-specific knowledge required of both the lecturers and students. The paper also discusses how these challenges can be identified and addressed and how to prepare for future situations more effectively and in advance. It will be examined within the contexts of culturally responsive teaching, communicaiton competence, the hidden curriculum, instructional scaffolding, understanding and being open to other cultures and acknowledgement of the richness and relevance of multicultural students' varied experiences and social realities, from the point of view of the academic discipline of communication studies.

WORK: hybridity and endurance within solo dance practice and performance

Under western eyes again : rights vernacular and the gender culture 'clash'

Gender features prominently in debates about the clash between human rights and culture, where ‘culture’ is often portrayed as a supreme obstacle to the realisation of women’s rights. Sometimes framed as an ethical conundrum between universalism and cultural relativism, the clash between culture and rights recites one as always and inevitably undercutting the other — culture undermines rights, and the imposition of human rights damages culture. An innovative attempt at recasting this clash has been a focus less on abstract philosophical debates and more on the cultural politics of rights — in particular, how they are made relevant to everyday life. Anthropologists Merry (2006; 2008a) and Levitt and Merry (2009; 2011) propose the analytical and ethnographic study of vernacularisation by demonstrating how, in local contexts, women’s human rights are remade in the vernacular. This approach has yielded rich knowledge about the myriad ways in which expectations of female inferiority and masculine entitlement to violence are contested — not through the import of Western ideas of human rights, but through the local idiom. This article considers the productive contribution of vernacularisation to this contested terrain, while also pointing to the limits that issue from its dependence on distinguishing the global from the local. Today, these two spaces are not so clearly discerned — particularly in multicultural settings where the local and the global are fused, and where human rights are translated into a vernacular of current political anxieties to do with racial and cultural difference. This is a vernacular that disguises or disavows racism through the language of human rights. These themes are illustrated and explored through the case study of a small community event in an outer suburb of Melbourne, where gender, culture and religion play out through both local and international rights vernacular.