Pocket books of engagement : a 'just-in- time' framework for a high quality first year student experience

This paper describes a 'just-in-time' engagement framework for a high quality first year experience ('FYE'). The concept 'just-in-time' refers to a student-centered timeline for a managed learning environment based on the week-to-week experiences faced by a first year student in an Australian University semester. The engagement framework detailed in this paper consists of a series of teaching strategies embedded as part of a designed, integrated and co-ordinated first year program, expanding on the transition blueprint of Nelson, Kift, Humphreys & Harper (2006), working within a transition pedagogy (Kift, 2008) and implementing an institutional-wide program of collaborative engagement. This paper discusses the application of this framework to a first year foundational unit in the Bachelor of Laws degree at Deakin University, Victoria, Australia, implemented as part of an embedded institutional-wide transition program.

Making difference SUPER : a critical approach to the politics of celebrity-authored children's books

Recent years have seen a flood of celebrity-authored children’s books enter the children’s literature marketplace. This paper tracks the evolution of this phenomenon as it pertains to contemporary celebrity culture, and responds to the question: what are the embedded messages about identity at play in such texts? The key contention here is that these works endorse celebrity as the most desirable identity category for the children of the new millennium, going so far as to position difference as a commodity to be traded in the quest for fame. Using critical theory around celebrity culture, and through a close reading of a short celebrity-authored picture book, this paper demonstrates that far from being innocuous pieces of popular culture, such books beckon children into a world that increasingly values visibility and stardom above all else.

Dual audiences, double pedagogies : representing family literacy as parental work in picture books

Narrative for a dual audience of children and adults is a field of expanding interest among children’s literature scholars. A great deal of the extant research is implicitly or explicitly informed by longstanding anxieties about the status of children’s fiction, a context that shifts the parameters of the analysis to questions of literary sophistication. Whilst some attention is paid to the readersubject position of the child reader, rather less is given to the positioning of the adult reader in relation to the pedagogical agendas of such texts. This article examines picture books featuring parents reading to preschool children. In the context of family literacy, it is an instance in which the pedagogical address to the adult reader is as significant as the address to the child. Drawing on distinctions between double and dual address, the article examines the ways in which representations of parents.

Sacred rules, secular revelations : the conceptions of rights in pre-modern Europe

This paper is an attempt to reflect on the methodological approaches that I bring to ‘reading law’ in my current project on understandings of individual rights in the legal and theological texts of the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Middle Ages, entitled ‘Sacred Rules, Secular Revelations: The Conceptions of Rights in Pre-Modern Europe’

A naïve, salience-based method for speaker identification in fiction books

This paper presents a salience-based technique for the annotation of directly quoted speech from fiction text. In particular, this paper determines to what extent a naïve (without the use of complex machine learning or knowledge-based techniques) scoring technique can be used for the identification of the speaker of speech quotes. The presented technique makes use of a scoring technique, similar to that commonly found in knowledge-poor anaphora resolution research, as well as a set of hand-coded rules for the final identification of the speaker of each quote in the text. Speaker identification is shown to be achieved using three tasks: the identification of a speech-verb associated with a quote with a recall of 94.41%; the identification of the actor associated with a quote with a recall of 88.22%; and the selection of a speaker with an accuracy of 79.40%.

Hierarchical rule generalisation for speaker identification in fiction books

This paper presents a hierarchical pattern matching and generalisation technique which is applied to the problem of locating the correct speaker of quoted speech found in fiction books. Patterns from a training set are generalised to create a small number of rules, which can be used to identify items of interest within the text. The pattern matching technique is applied to finding the Speech-Verb, Actor and Speaker of quotes found in ction books. The technique performs well over the training data, resulting in rule-sets many times smaller than the training set, but providing very high accuracy. While the rule-set generalised from one book is less effective when applied to different books than an approach based on hand coded heuristics, performance is comparable when testing on data closely related to the training set.

Emotional connections to books and technological innovations : an e-book perspective

E-book devices are a technological innovation that has been mass marketed to consumers as a revolution in the way that books will be read and stored. This paper extends previous research on technology adoption behaviour of individuals by focusing on the role of emotional connections people have towards e-books. A number of technology adoption models can explain the adoption of e-book devices such as the technology acceptance model, theory of planned action, theory of reasoned action and social cognitive theory. Due to the increased importance of social learning on a person’s behaviour, social cognitive theory is identified in this paper as being the most appropriate theoretical lens to understand the emotional connections a person has towards e-books. The findings from this paper may help to fill the gaps in academic discussion about what theory best explains a person’s behavioural intention towards technological innovations and the impact of marketing on this behaviour. In addition, the paper has a number of managerial implications including identifying the importance of an emotional connection to a technological innovation that influences the adoption process. The emphasis on emotional connection as mediating the way a person receives information about e-book devices may help to influence future marketing efforts of new technologies.

Sacred time after emigration : a study of the Holy Mother Festival in Zavoj

In Zavoj, a mountainous village in the Republic of Macedonia, the Day of the Holy Mother is the most significant day in the village's ritual calendar. The Day of the Holy Mother, like other holy days associated with saints, is a religious festival in the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar; and Zavoj, like other villages, identifies with a particular holy day, in this case that of the Holy Mother. Festival is historically and etymologically linked to feast, a celebration in honour of gods, and the Day of the Holy Mother, like the two principal feasts in the Christian calendar, the Feast of Nativity of our Lord (Christmas) and the Feast of Resurrection (Easter), is a religious celebration that includes a feast in honour of the saint, traditionally as a breaking of a fast. Importantly, many Zavoj emigrants return to the village for the festival on the Day of the Holy Mother. Over recent years both village and the festival have been transformed, due to large and continuing emigration and the demise of the resident peasant generation. This chapter will examine the changes in the festival, comparing that of 1988, when the village was inhabited, with that of 2007, when there were only a few people resident and by which time many of the peasant generation had passed on. As a result of emigration the village is emptied of its inhabitants, yet it remains the site of, and destination for, the continuity of the annual festival.