Assessment of the influence of cultural barriers to HDR supervision of non-English speaking background (NESD) students in engineering and information technology (IT) disciplines

The paper details the results of the first phase of an on-going research into the sociocultural factors that influence the supervision of higher degrees research (HDR) engineering students in the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering (BEE) and Faculty of Science and Technology (FaST) at Queensland University of Technology. A quantitative analysis was performed on the results from an online survey that was administered to 179 engineering students. The study reveals that cultural barriers impact their progression and developing confidence in their research programs. We argue that in order to assist international and non-English speaking background (NESB) research students to triumph over such culturally embedded challenges in engineering research, it is important for supervisors to understand this cohort's unique pedagogical needs and develop intercultural sensitivity in their pedagogical practice in postgraduate research supervision. To facilitate this, the governing body (Office of Research) can play a vital role in not only creating the required support structures but also their uniform implementation across the board.

Genetic Diversity of Rice Tungro Spherical Virus in Tungro-Endemic Provinces of the Philippines and Indonesia

The two adjacent genes of coat protein 1 and 2 of rice tungro spherical virus (RTSV) were amplified from total RNA extracts of serologically indistinguishable field isolates from the Philippines and Indonesia, using reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Digestion with HindIII and BstYI restriction endonucleases differentiated the amplified DNA products into eight distinct coat protein genotypes. These genotypes were then used as indicators of virus diversity in the field. Inter- and intra-site diversities were determined over three cropping seasons. At each of the sites surveyed, one or two main genotypes prevailed together with other related minor or mixed genotypes that did not replace the main genotype over the sampling time. The cluster of genotypes found at the Philippines sites was significantly different from the one at the Indonesia sites, suggesting geographic isolation for virus populations. Phylogenetic studies based on the nucleotide sequences of 38 selected isolates confirm the spatial distribution of RTSV virus populations but show that gene flow may occur between populations. Under the present conditions, rice varieties do not seem to exert selective pressure on the virus populations. Based on the selective constraints in the coat protein amino acid sequences and the virus genetic composition per site, a negative selection model followed by random-sampling events due to vector transmissions is proposed to explain the inter-site diversity observed

Inter-and Intra-Site Genetic Diversity of Natural Field Populations of Rice Tungro Bacilliform Virus in the Philippines

The genetic structure of rice tungro bacilliform virus (RTBV) populations within and between growing sites was analyzed in a collection of natural field isolates from different rice varieties grown in eight tungro-endemic sites of the Philippines. Total DNA extracts from 345 isolates were digested with EcoRV restriction enzyme and hybridized with a full-length probe of RTBV, a procedure shown in preliminary experiments capable of revealing high levels of polymorphism in RTBV field isolates. In the total population, 17 distinct EcoRV-based genome profiles (genotypes) were identified and used as indicators for virus diversity. Distinct sets of genotypes occurred in Isabela and North Cotabato provinces suggesting a geographic isolation of virus populations. However, among the sites in each province, there were few significant differences in the genotype compositions of virus populations. The number of genotypes detected at a site varied from two to nine with a few genotypes dominating. In general the isolates at a site persisted from season to season indicating a genetic stability for the local virus population. Over the sampling time, IRRI rice varieties, which have green leafhopper resistance genes, supported similar virus populations to those supported by other varieties, indicating that the variety of the host exerted no apparent selection pressures. Insect transmission experiments on selected RTBV field isolates showed that dramatic shifts in genotype and phenotype distributions can occur in response to host /environmental shifts.

The effects of content presentation format and user characteristics on novice developers’ understanding of process models

Process models are used by information professionals to convey semantics about the business operations in a real world domain intended to be supported by an information system. The understandability of these models is vital to them being used for information systems development. In this paper, we examine two factors that we predict will influence the understanding of a business process that novice developers obtain from a corresponding process model: the content presentation form chosen to articulate the business domain, and the user characteristics of the novice developers working with the model. Our experimental study provides evidence that novice developers obtain similar levels of understanding when confronted with an unfamiliar or a familiar process model. However, previous modeling experience, the use of English as a second language, and previous work experience in BPM are important influencing factors of model understanding. Our findings suggest that education and research in process modeling should increase the focus on human factors and how they relate to content and content presentation formats for different modeling tasks. We discuss implications for practice and research.

Effects of different practice task constraints on fluctuations of player heart rate in small-sided football games

This paper analyzes effects of different practice task constraints on heart rate (HR) variability during 4v4 smallsided football games. Participants were sixteen football players divided into two age groups (U13, Mean age: 12.4±0.5 yrs; U15: 14.6±0.5). The task consisted of a 4v4 sub-phase without goalkeepers, on a 25x15 m field, of 15 minutes duration with an active recovery period of 6 minutes between each condition. We recorded players’ heart rates using heart rate monitors (Polar Team System, Polar Electro, Kempele, Finland) as scoring mode was manipulated (line goal: scoring by dribbling past an extended line; double goal: scoring in either of two lateral goals; and central goal: scoring only in one goal). Subsequently, %HR reserve was calculated with the Karvonen formula. We performed a time-series analysis of HR for each individual in each condition. Mean data for intra-participant variability showed that autocorrelation function was associated with more short-range dependence processes in the “line goal” condition, compared to other conditions, demonstrating that the “line goal” constraint induced more randomness in HR response. Relative to inter-individual variability, line goal constraints demonstrated lower %CV and %RMSD (U13: 9% and 19%; U15: 10% and 19%) compared with double goal (U13: 12% and 21%; U15: 12% and 21%) and central goal (U13: 14% and 24%; U15: 13% and 24%) task constraints, respectively. Results suggested that line goal constraints imposed more randomness on cardiovascular stimulation of each individual and lower inter-individual variability than double goal and central goal constraints.

High-challenge teaching for senior English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners in times of change

This paper will present a brief overview of the recent shifts within English and EAL/D (English as an additional language/dialect) curriculum documents and their focus on critical literacy, using the Queensland context as a case in point. The English syllabus landscape in Queensland has continued to morph in recent years. From 2002 to 2009, teachers of senior English and English as an Additional Language (EAL/D) have witnessed no less than four separate syllabus documents that impact on their daily work. The Australian Curriculum, when finally implemented, will also require teachers to navigate and grapple with its particular obligations and affordances. The combined effect of the shifts and tensions between recent policy documents has led to confusion about exactly how to cater for EAL/D learners in mainstream English. We discuss the possible effects of this on teachers as the agents of policy implementation and argue that in spite of such contradictions, EAL/D teachers can productively use syllabus frameworks to craft pedagogy to cater for their EAL/D learners’ language and literacy needs. Following this, we present aspects of the teaching practice of four teachers of senior EAL/D, who provide intellectually-engaging, critical literacy pedagogy that takes into account the language proficiency level of their learners, within the required curriculum. Such practice provides teachers with valuable pedagogic possibilities to meet EAL/D learners’ needs within continually varying policy terrain.

The 3D model of l(IT)eracy and the English curriculum

The field of literacy studies has always been challenged by the changing technologies that humans have used to express, represent and communicate their feelings, ideas, understandings and knowledge. However, while the written word has remained central to literacy processes over a long period, it is generally accepted that there have been significant changes to what constitutes ‘literate’ practice. In particular, the status of the printed word has been challenged by the increasing dominance of the image, along with the multimodal meaning-making systems facilitated by digital media. For example, Gunther Kress and other members of the New London Group have argued that the second half of the twentieth century saw a significant cultural shift from the linguistic to the visual as the dominant semiotic mode. This in turn, they suggest, was accompanied by a cultural shift ‘from page to screen’ as a dominant space of representation (e.g. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress, 2003; New London Group, 1996). In a similar vein, Bill Green has noted that we have witnessed a shift from the regime of the print apparatus to a regime of the digital electronic apparatus (Lankshear, Snyder and Green, 2000). For these reasons, the field of literacy education has been challenged to find new ways to conceptualise what is meant by ‘literacy’ in the twenty first century and to rethink the conditions under which children might best be taught to be fully literate so that they can operate with agency in today’s world.

Assembling dynamic repertoires of literate practices : teaching that makes a difference

This chapter considers how teachers can make a difference to the kinds of literacy young people take up. Increasingly, researchers and policy-makers see literacy as an ensemble of socio-cultural situated practices rather than as a unitary skill. Accordingly, the differences in what young people come to do with literacy, in and out of school, confront us more directly. If literacy development involves assembling dynamic repertoires of practices, it is crucial to consider what different groups of children growing up and going to school in different places have access to and make investments in over time; the kinds of literate communities from which some are excluded or included; and how educators make a difference to the kinds of literate trajectories and identities young people put together.

Sustaining the next generation of teacher-researchers to work for social justice

This chapter explores a research project involving teachers working with some of the most disadvantaged young people in South Australia, children growing up in poverty, in families struggling with homelessness and ill-health, in the outer southern suburbs. Additionally, there were particular children were struggling with intellectual, emotional and social difficulties which were extreme enough for them not be included in a mainstream class. The research project made two crucial interrelated moves to support teachers to tackle this tough work. First, the project had an explicit social justice agenda. We were not simply researching literacy outcomes, but literacy pedagogies for the students teachers were most worried about. And we wanted to understand how the material conditions of students’ everyday lifeworlds impacted on the working conditions of teachers’ schoolworlds. We sought to open up a discursive space where teachers could talk about poverty, violence, racism and classism in ways that would take them beyond despair and into new imaginings and positive action. Second, the project was designed to start from the urgent questions of early career teachers and to draw on the accumulated practice wisdom of their chosen mentors. Hence we designed not only a teacher-researcher community, but cross-generational networks. Our aim was to build the capacities of both generations to address long-standing educational problems in new ways that drew overtly on their different and complementary resources.

The English Channel Tunnel project - an overview

This paper provides an overview of the A$11 billion English Channel Tunnel Project. The author's experiences are based on his recent work experience with a British Consulting Engineer involved with this unique project. After providing an historical background, the project is considered in terms of the project structure and funding, the cross Channel transport market and the planned integrated transport system in terms of both design and construction.

Unpacking Japan's 21st century "National Conversation" : images of the future beyond the iron cage of the "Catch Up" model

How does the image of the future operate upon history, and upon national and individual identities? To what extent are possible futures colonized by the image? What are the un-said futurecratic discourses that underlie the image of the future? Such questions inspired the examination of Japan’s futures images in this thesis. The theoretical point of departure for this examination is Polak’s (1973) seminal research into the theory of the ‘image of the future’ and seven contemporary Japanese texts which offer various alternative images for Japan’s futures, selected as representative of a ‘national conversation’ about the futures of that nation. These seven images of the future are: 1. Report of the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century—The Frontier Within: Individual Empowerment and Better Governance in the New Millennium, compiled by a committee headed by Japan’s preeminent Jungian psychologist Kawai Hayao (1928-2007); 2. Slow Is Beautiful—a publication by Tsuji Shinichi, in which he re-images Japan as a culture represented by the metaphor of the sloth, concerned with slow and quality-oriented livingry as a preferred image of the future to Japan’s current post-bubble cult of speed and economic efficiency; 3. MuRatopia is an image of the future in the form of a microcosmic prototype community and on-going project based on the historically significant island of Awaji, and established by Japanese economist and futures thinker Yamaguchi Kaoru; 4. F.U.C.K, I Love Japan, by author Tanja Yujiro provides this seven text image of the future line-up with a youth oriented sub-culture perspective on that nation’s futures; 5. IMAGINATION / CREATION—a compilation of round table discussions about Japan’s futures seen from the point of view of Japan’s creative vanguard; 6. Visionary People in a Visionless Country: 21 Earth Connecting Human Stories is a collection of twenty one essays compiled by Denmark born Tokyo resident Peter David Pedersen; and, 7. EXODUS to the Land of Hope, authored by Murakami Ryu, one of Japan’s most prolific and influential writers, this novel suggests a future scenario portraying a massive exodus of Japan’s youth, who, literate with state-of-the-art information and communication technologies (ICTs) move en masse to Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido to launch a cyber-revolution from the peripheries. The thesis employs a Futures Triangle Analysis (FTA) as the macro organizing framework and as such examines both pushes of the present and weights from the past before moving to focus on the pulls to the future represented by the seven texts mentioned above. Inayatullah’s (1999) Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) is the analytical framework used in examining the texts. Poststructuralist concepts derived primarily from the work of Michel Foucault are a particular (but not exclusive) reference point for the analytical approach it encompasses. The research questions which reflect the triangulated analytic matrix are: 1. What are the pushes—in terms of current trends—that are affecting Japan’s futures? 2. What are the historical and cultural weights that influence Japan’s futures? 3. What are the emerging transformative Japanese images of the future discourses, as embodied in actual texts, and what potential do they offer for transformative change in Japan? Research questions one and two are discussed in Chapter five and research question three is discussed in Chapter six. The first two research questions should be considered preliminary. The weights outlined in Chapter five indicate that the forces working against change in Japan are formidable, structurally deep-rooted, wide-spread, and under-recognized as change-adverse. Findings and analyses of the push dimension reveal strong forces towards a potentially very different type of Japan. However it is the seven contemporary Japanese images of the future, from which there is hope for transformative potential, which form the analytical heart of the thesis. In analyzing these texts the thesis establishes the richness of Japan’s images of the future and, as such, demonstrates the robustness of Japan’s stance vis-à-vis the problem of a perceived map-less and model-less future for Japan. Frontier is a useful image of the future, whose hybrid textuality, consisting of government, business, academia, and creative minority perspectives, demonstrates the earnestness of Japan’s leaders in favour of the creation of innovative futures for that nation. Slow is powerful in its aim to reconceptualize Japan’s philosophies of temporality, and build a new kind of nation founded on the principles of a human-oriented and expanded vision of economy based around the core metaphor of slowness culture. However its viability in Japan, with its post-Meiji historical pushes to an increasingly speed-obsessed social construction of reality, could render it impotent. MuRatopia is compelling in its creative hybridity indicative of an advanced IT society, set in a modern day utopian space based upon principles of a high communicative social paradigm, and sustainability. IMAGINATION / CREATION is less the plan than the platform for a new discussion on Japan’s transformation from an econo-centric social framework to a new Creative Age. It accords with emerging discourses from the Creative Industries, which would re-conceive of Japan as a leading maker of meaning, rather than as the so-called guzu, a term referred to in the book meaning ‘laggard’. In total, Love Japan is still the most idiosyncratic of all the images of the future discussed. Its communication style, which appeals to Japan’s youth cohort, establishes it as a potentially formidable change agent in a competitive market of futures images. Visionary People is a compelling image for its revolutionary and subversive stance against Japan’s vision-less political leadership, showing that it is the people, not the futures-making elite or aristocracy who must take the lead and create a new vanguard for the nation. Finally, Murakami’s Exodus cannot be ruled out as a compelling image of the future. Sharing the appeal of Tanja’s Love Japan to an increasingly disenfranchised youth, Exodus portrays a near-term future that is achievable in the here and now, by Japan’s teenagers, using information and communications technologies (ICTs) to subvert leadership, and create utopianist communities based on alternative social principles. The principal contribution from this investigation in terms of theory belongs to that of developing the Japanese image of the future. In this respect, the literature reviews represent a significant compilation, specifically about Japanese futures thinking, the Japanese image of the future, and the Japanese utopia. Though not exhaustive, this compilation will hopefully serve as a useful starting point for future research, not only for the Japanese image of the future, but also for all image of the future research. Many of the sources are in Japanese and their English summations are an added reason to respect this achievement. Secondly, the seven images of the future analysed in Chapter six represent the first time that Japanese image of the future texts have been systematically organized and analysed. Their translation from Japanese to English can be claimed as a significant secondary contribution. What is more, they have been analysed according to current futures methodologies that reveal a layeredness, depth, and overall richness existing in Japanese futures images. Revealing this image-richness has been one of the most significant findings of this investigation, suggesting that there is fertile research to be found from this still under-explored field, whose implications go beyond domestic Japanese concerns, and may offer fertile material for futures thinkers and researchers, Japanologists, social planners, and policy makers.

A national English curriculum far all Australian youth: Making it work for teacher and students everywhere

The authors draw on some powerful practitioner research they have been associated with recently to nvision ways in which a national curriculum might redress the inequities experienced by Australia's most disadvantaged young people.

English language study abroad program : an investigation of Hong Kong pre-service teachers’ experiences of a language immersion program

There has been minimal research focused on short-term study abroad language immersion programs, in particular, with home-stay families. The importance of authentic intercultural experience is increasingly clear and was acknowledged as central to the process of language learning (Liddicoat, 2004). In Hong Kong, education programs for pre-service language teachers have significantly emphasised language and intercultural training through short-term study abroad, and these short overseas language immersion courses have become a compulsory component for teacher training (Bodycott & Crew, 2001) in the last decade. This study aims to investigate eight Hong Kong pre-service teachers’ and their home-stay families’ experiences of a short-term (two months) language immersion program in Australia. The focus is on listening to commentaries concerning the development of communicative competence, intercultural competence and professional growth during the out-of-class study abroad experience. The conceptual framework adopted in this study views language and intercultural learning from social constructivist perspectives. Central to this framing is the notion that the internalisation of higher mental functions involves the transfer from the inter-psychological to the intra-psychological plane, that is, a progression process from the socially supported to individually controlled performance. From this perspective, language serves as a way to communicate about, and in relation to, actions and experience. Three research questions were addressed and studied through qualitative methodology. 1. How do the pre-service teachers and their home-stay families perceive the out-of-class component of the program in terms of opportunities for the development of language proficiency and communicative competence? 2. How do the pre-service teachers and their home-stay families perceive the out-of-class component of the program in terms of the development of intercultural competence? 3. How do the pre-service teachers and home-stay families perceive the outof- class component of the program in terms of teachers’ professional growth? Data were generated from multiple data collection methods and analysed through thematic analysis from both a “bottom up” and “top down” approach. The study showed that the pre-service teachers perceived that the immersion program influenced, to varying degrees, their language proficiency, communication and intercultural awareness, as well as their self-awareness and professional growth. These pre-service teachers believed that effective language learning centres on active engagement in the target language community. A mismatch between the views and evaluations of the two groups – the pre-service teachers and the home-stay family members – provides some evidence of misalignments in terms of expectations and perceptions of each other’s roles and responsibilities. The study has highlighted challenges encountered, and provided suggestions for ways of meeting these challenges. The inclusion in the study of the home-stay families’ perceptions and commentaries provided insights, which can inform program development. There is clearly further work to be done in terms of predeparture orientation and preparation, not only for the main participants themselves, the students, but also for the host families.