The building blocks of digital media literacy: Socio-material participation and the production of media knowledge

This article outlines the knowledge and skills students develop when they engage in digital media production and analysis in school settings. The metaphor of ‘digital building blocks’ is used to describe the material practices, conceptual understandings and production of knowledge that lead to the development of digital media literacy. The article argues that the two established approaches to media literacy education, critical reading and media production, do not adequately explain how students develop media knowledge. It suggests there has been too little focus on material practices and how these relate to the development of conceptual understanding in media learning. The article explores empirical evidence from a four-year investigation in a primary school in Queensland, Australia using actor–network theory to explore ‘moments of translation’ as students deploy technologies and concepts to materially participate in digital culture. A generative model of media learning is presented with four categories of building blocks that isolate the specific skills and knowledge that can be taught and learnt to promote participation in digital media contexts: digital materials, conceptual understandings, media production and media analysis. The final section of the article makes initial comments on how the model might become the basis for curriculum development in schools and argues that further empirical research needs to occur to confirm the model’s utility.

Shifting from production to purpose : facilitating design-led change in a small family-owned enterprise

This research was embedded as a Design-led Innovation catalyst within a family-owned small business, to explore the application of a design program to achieve organizational change. Based on the findings two new models for increasing design integration within an organisation were proposed, establishing a range of pre-requisites needed for a firm to progress. Struggling firms may leverage their use of design and strategy by embedding a catalyst in a new cross-disciplinary role providing the necessary internal assistance. The study demonstrated that even non-design or strategy-inclined family-owned SMEs could benefit from embarking on a design-led journey to boost their competitive preparedness.

'Doing-things-with-music'-the newest arm of the industry

Even though revenues from recorded music have fallen dramatically over the past fifteen years, people across the world are not listening to less music. Actually, they listen to more recorded music than ever before. Recorded music permeates throughout almost every aspect of our daily lives...

North West Music Festival in Port Hedland, Western Australia

A travel article about a music festival in Port Hedland, Western Australia. At first, the crowd gathers in small groups, as though we’ve arrived at a picnic day. Girls in long skirts wearing bands in their hair call out across the wide lawn of the Turf Club, and run over to meet friends. They sit cross-legged in the sun, half swaying to the music, chatting. On stage, Thelma Plum, a girl with a voice from the 1960s, circles her lyrics with her hands. You wonder if she’s casting a spell, an appeal to the decade of revolutions...

God Bless come back : new experiments with nostalgia in Indonesian rock

This article discusses the production of an Indonesian rock past through a case study of the 1970s rock band God Bless, which has been gradually ‘coming back’ since the middle of the 2000s. In doing so, the article documents this comeback, analyses shifts in the band’s position vis-à-vis nationality, and places these shifts in the context of the industrial and aesthetic transformation of Indonesian popular music over the past decade or so. Furthermore, it considers how the range of nostalgic productions associated with the comeback might be understood not only in light of the scholarship on nostalgia, but also the political environment it inhabits.

Music for the Pria Dewasa : changes and continuities in class and pop music genres

This paper presents Rolling Stone Indonesia (RSI) and places it in an historical context to tease out some changes and continuities in Indonesian middle-class politics since the beginning of the New Order. Some political scientists have claimed that class interests were at the core of the transition from Guided Democracy to the New Order, and popular music scholars generally assert that class underlies pop genre distinctions. But few have paid attention to how class and genre were written into Indonesian pop in the New Order period; Indonesian pop has a fascinating political history that has so far been overlooked. Placing RSI in historical perspective can reveal much about the print media’s classing of pop under New Order era political constraints, and about the ways these modes of classing may or may not have endured in the post-authoritarian, globalised and liberalised media environment.

Development of a transient, high-level expression platform for protein production in plants

Plants are an attractive alternative to conventional expression systems for the production of recombinant proteins and useful biologics, however, the economic viability of plant made proteins is strongly yield dependent. This study aimed to improve transgene expression levels in the plant host Nicotiana benthamiana using the Agroinfiltration transient expression platform. Independent investigation of the physical, chemical and genetic features associated with Agroinfiltration identified factors that improved transformation frequencies, elevated transgene expression levels and ultimately improved protein yield. The major outcome of this research was a novel hyper-expression system for biofarming recombinant proteins in plants.

Reterritorializing multimodal design in the classroom through a socially mediated Indigenous heritage

National or International Significance Flows of cultural heritage in textual practices are vital to sustaining Indigenous communities - a national and international priority (Commonwealth of Australia, 2011). Indigenous heritage, whether passed on by oral tradition or ubiquitous social media, can be seen as a "conversation between the past and the future" (Fairclough, 2012, p. xv). Indigenous heritage involves appropriating memories within a cultural flow to pass on a spiritual legacy. This presentation reports ethnographic research of social media practices in a small independent Aboriginal school in Southeast Queensland, Australia that is resided over by the Yuggera elders and an Aboriginal principal. Quality of Research The purpose was to rupture existing notions of white literacies in schools, and to deterritorialize the uses of digital media by dominant cultures in the public sphere. Examples of learning experiences included the following: i. Integrating Indigenous language and knowledge into media text production; ii. Classroom visits from Indigenous elders; and iii. Publishing oral histories through digital scrapbooking. The program aligned with the Australian National Curriculum English (ACARA, 2014), which mandates the teaching of multimodal text creation. Data sources included a class set of digital scrapbooks collaboratively created in a preparatory-one primary classroom. The digital scrapbooks combined digitally encoded words, images of material artifacts, and digital music files. A key feature of the writing and digital design task was to retell and digitally display and archive a cultural narrative of significance to the Indigenous Australian community and its memories and material traces of the past for the future. Data analysis of the students' digital stories involved the application of key themes of negotiated, material, and digitally mediated forms of heritage practice. It drew on Australian Indigenous research by Keddie et al. (2013) to guard against the homogenizing of culture that can arise from a focus on a static view of culture. The interpretation of findings located Indigenous appropriation of social media within broader racialized politics that enables Indigenous literacy to be understood as a dynamic, negotiated, and transgenerational flows of practice. It demonstrates that Indigenous children's use of media production reflects "shifting and negotiated identities" in response to changing media environments that can function to sustain Indigenous cultural heritages (Appadurai, 1696, p. xv). Impact on practice, policy or theory The findings are important for teachers at a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures is a cross-curricular policy priority in the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2014). The findings show how curriculum policies can be applied to classroom practice in ways that are epistemologically consistent with Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Theoretically, it demonstrates how the children's experiences of culture are layered over time, as successive generations inherit, interweave, and hear others' cultural stories or maps. Practically, recommendations are provided for an approach to appropriating social media in schools that explicitly attends to the dynamic nature of Indigenous practices, negotiated through intercultural constructions and flows, and opening space for a critical anti-racist approach to multimodal text production. Timeliness The research is timely in the context of the accessibility and role of digital and multimodal forms of communication, including for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

An open pit multistage mine production scheduling model for drilling, blasting and excavating operations

This paper proposes a new multi-resource multi-stage scheduling problem for optimising the open-pit drilling, blasting and excavating operations under equipment capacity constraints. The flow process is analysed based on the real-life data from an Australian iron ore mine site. The objective of the model is to maximise the throughput and minimise the total idle times of equipment at each stage. The following comprehensive mining attributes and constraints have been considered: types of equipment; operating capacities of equipment; ready times of equipment; speeds of equipment; block-sequence-dependent movement times of equipment; equipment-assignment-dependent operation times of blocks; distances between each pair of blocks; due windows of blocks; material properties of blocks; swell factors of blocks; and slope requirements of blocks. It is formulated by mixed integer programming and solved by ILOG-CPLEX optimiser. The proposed model is validated with extensive computational experiments to improve mine production efficiency at the operational level. The model also provides an intelligent decision support tool to account for the availability and usage of equipment units for drilling, blasting and excavating stages.

Solar Assisted Fast Pyrolysis: A Novel Approach of Renewable Energy Production

Biofuel produced by fast pyrolysis from biomass is a promising candidate. The heart of the system is a reactor which is directly or indirectly heated to approximately 500°C by exhaust gases from a combustor that burns pyrolysis gas and some of the by-product char. In most of the cases, external biomass heater is used as heating source of the system while internal electrical heating is recently implemented as source of reactor heating. However, this heating system causes biomass or other conventional forms of fuel consumption to produce renewable energy and contributes to environmental pollution. In order to overcome these, the feasibility of incorporating solar energy with fast pyrolysis has been investigated. The main advantages of solar reactor heating include renewable source of energy, comparatively simpler devices, and no environmental pollution. A lab scale pyrolysis setup has been examined along with 1.2 m diameter parabolic reflector concentrator that provides hot exhaust gas up to 162°C. The study shows that about 32.4% carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and almost one-third portion of fuel cost are reduced by incorporating solar heating system. Successful implementation of this proposed solar assisted pyrolysis would open a prospective window of renewable energy.

Echolocation call production during aerial and terrestrial locomotion by New Zealand's enigmatic lesser short-tailed bat, Mystacina tuberculata

Linkage of echolocation call production with contraction of flight muscles has been suggested to reduce the energetic cost of flight with echolocation, such that the overall cost is approximately equal to that of flight alone. However, the pattern of call production with limb movement in terrestrially agile bats has never been investigated. We used synchronised high-speed video and audio recordings to determine patterns of association between echolocation call production and limb motion by Mystacina tuberculata Gray 1843 as individuals walked and flew, respectively. Results showed that there was no apparent linkage between call production and limb motion when bats walked. When in flight, two calls were produced per wingbeat, late in the downstroke and early in the upstroke. When bats walked, calls were produced at a higher rate, but at a slightly lower intensity, compared with bats in flight. These results suggest that M. tuberculata do not attempt to reduce the cost of terrestrial locomotion and call production through biomechanical linkage. They also suggest that the pattern of linkage seen when bats are in flight is not universal and that energetic savings cannot necessarily be explained by contraction of muscles associated with the downstroke alone.

‘Pop Melayu vs. Pop Indonesia: Marketeers, producers and new interpretations of a genre into the 2000s’ in Sonic Modernities in Southeast Asia Leiden: Brill pp. 187- 215

Kangen Band, as an example of reclaiming of the derisive term kampungan. In it, I argue that this reclaiming represents an interesting case of genre manipulation, and consider what this can reveal about how Indonesian pop genres are constituted, what they ‘are’ and what they ‘do’. In so doing, I seek to rework existing scholarship relating to Indonesian pop genres and modernity, as well as interrogate some broader theories of genre. In this essay, I extend the argument that Indonesian pop genres are not purely technical categories, they touch on myths of class and nation (Wallach 2008; Weintraub 2010; Yampolsky 1989. As we shall see, in the New Order period, pop music genres reached out to these myths by positioning themselves variously vis-à-vis the capital city, Jakarta. Such positioning, achieved through use of the terms gedongan (a term that strives to infer refinement by stressing the non-masses’ central position in the urban environment) and kampungan (a term that strives to enforce subalterns’ marginal position in relation to the metropolis, see also the previous contribution by Weintraub), continues to haunt the constitution of genre in the post-New Order period, but in novel ways. These novel ways, I argue, may be seen to result from industrial transformation and new systems of knowledge production.

Opportunities and challenges in engaging citizens in the co-production of infrastructure-based public services in Australia

Research and practice have observed a shift towards service-oriented approaches that depend on input from citizens as co-producers of services. Yet in the delivery of public infrastructure the focus is still on managing assets rather than services. Using a Policy Delphi approach, we found that although experts advocate service-centric approaches guidelines and policies lack a service-centric perspective. Findings revealed a range of impediments to effective stakeholder involvement. The paper contributes to co-production and new public governance literature and offers directions for public infrastructure decision-makers to support and reconnect disengaged government–citizen relations, and determine ways of understanding optimal service outcomes.