Rates of change : online distribution as disruptive technology in the film industry

Much debate in media and communication studies is based on exaggerated opposition between the digital sublime and the digital abject: overly enthusiastic optimism versus determined pessimism over the potential of new technologies. This inhibits the discipline's claims to provide rigorous insight into industry and social change which is, after all, continuous. Instead of having to decide one way or the other, we need to ask how we study the process of change.This article examines the impact of online distribution in the film industry, particularly addressing the question of rates of change. Are there genuinely new players disrupting the established oligopoly, and if so with what effect? Is there evidence of disruption to, and innovation in, business models? Has cultural change been forced on the incumbents? Outside mainstream Hollywood, where are the new opportunities and the new players? What is the situation in Australia?

Developing reflective practitioners online: The business of blogs in work integrated learning

Reflective practice is widely considered across discussions around educational psychology, professional identity, employability of graduates, and generic or graduate capabilities. Critical reflection is essential for providing a bridge between the university and the workplace, and for ultimately preparing work ready graduates (Patrick et al, 2008). Work integrated learning, particularly through internships and work placements for students, is viewed as a valuable approach for students developing skills in reflective practice. Reflective journals are one of the tools often used to encourage and develop student reflection. Shifting the reflective journal to an online interface as a reflective blog presents opportunities for more meaningful, frequent and richer interaction between the key players in a work integrated learning experience. This paper examines the adoption, implementation and refinement of the use of reflective blogs in a work integrated learning unit for business students majoring in advertising, marketing and public relations disciplines. The reflective blog is discussed as a learning and assessment tool, including the approaches taken to integrate and scaffold the blog as part of the work integrated learning experience. Graduate capabilities were used as cornerstones for students to frame students’ thinking, experiences and reflection. These capabilities emphasise the value of coherent theoretical and practical knowledge, coupled with critical, creative and analytical thinking, problem solving skills, self reliance and resilience. Underlying these graduate capabilities is a focus on assessment for learning matched with assessment of learning. Using specific triggers and prompts as part of the reflective process, and incorporating ongoing feedback from academic supervisors, students moved from descriptive levels of reflection, to more meaningful and critical reflection. Students’ blogs are analysed to identify key themes, challenges and achievements in the work integrated learning experience. Suggestions for further development and improvement, together with a model of best practice, are proposed.

Preparing library staff for research support services at QUT

INTRODUCTION: Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library is partnering with High Performance Computing (HPC) services and the Division of Research and Commercialisation to develop and deliver a range of integrated research support services and systems designed to enhance the research capabilities of the University. Existing and developing research support services include - support for publishing strategies including open access, bibliographic citation and ranking services, research data management, use of online collaboration tools, online survey tools, quantitative and qualitative data analysis, content management and storage solutions. In order to deliver timely and effective research referral and support services, it is imperative that library staff maintain their awareness of, and develop expertise in new eResearch methods and technologies. ---------- METHODS: In 2009/10 QUT Library initiated an online survey for support staff and researchers and a series of focus groups for researchers aimed at gaining a better understanding of current and future eresearch practices and skills. These would better inform the development of a research skills training program and the development of new research support services. The Library and HPC also implemented a program of seminars and workshops designed to introduce key library staff to a broad range of eresearch concepts and technologies. Feedback was obtained after each training session. A number of new services were implemented throughout 2009 and 2010. ---------- RESULTS: Key findings of the survey and focus groups are related to the development of the staff development program. Feedback from program attendees is provided and evaluated. The staff development program is assessed in terms of its success to support the implementation of new research support services. --------- CONCLUSIONS QUT Library has embarked on an ambitious awareness and skills development program to assist Library staff transition a period of rapid change and broadening scope for the Library. Successes and challenges of the program are discussed. A number of recommendations are made in retrospect and also looking forward to the future training needs of Library staff to support the University’s future research goals.

Promoting student learning with online videos : a research agenda

Gen Y students are digital natives (Prensky 2001) who learn in complex and diverse ways, with a variety of learning styles apparent in any given course. This paper proposes a web 2.0 conceptual learning solution–online student videos–to respond to different learning styles that exist in the classroom.

A comparative study of marketing student engagement in online social networks and virtual worlds : Facebook versus second life

The study evaluated two student online contemporary learning environments; Second Life and Facebook, student learning experiences and student knowledge outcomes. A case study methodology was used to gain rich exploratory knowledge of student learning when integrating online social networks (OSN) and virtual worlds (VW) platforms. Findings indicated students must perceive relevance in the activities when using such platforms, even though online environments create an interesting learning space for students and educators, the novelty can diminish quickly and these online environments dilute traditional authority boundaries.

Rethinking public service media and citizenship: digital strategies for news and current affairs at Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service

This article considers the concept of media citizenship in relation to the digital strategies of the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). At SBS, Australia’s multicultural public broadcaster, there is a critical appraisal of its strategies to harness user-created content (UCC) and social media to promote greater audience participation through its news and current affairs Web sites. The article looks at the opportunities and challenges that user-created content presents for public service media organizations as they consolidate multiplatform service delivery. Also analyzed are the implications of radio and television broadcasters’ moves to develop online services. It is proposed that case study methodologies enable an understanding of media citizenship to be developed that maintains a focus on the interaction between delivery technologies, organizational structures and cultures, and program content that is essential for understanding the changing focus of 21st-century public service media.

Enhancing pathways for ACE learners : Building the capacity of Adult and Community Education (ACE) providers to offer non-accredited courses and VET modules with pathways into VET programs.

This report presents findings from a project that considered a) the current capacity of Adult and Community Education (ACE) providers to offer non-accredited courses and single modules of accredited learning that provide pathways into full scale accredited VET programs, and b) the factors that aid and inhibit this from occurring. Based on the findings, suggestions are made as to what needs to be done to extend this capacity and thereby to achieve the goals outlined in the 2008 Ministerial Declaration on Adult Community Education.

Reading nineteenth century schoolbooks online : user behavior in a digitized special collection

Special collections, because of the issues associated with conservation and use, a feature they share with archives, tend to be the most digitized areas in libraries. The Nineteenth Century Schoolbooks collection is a collection of 9000 rarely held nineteenth-century schoolbooks that were painstakingly collected over a lifetime of work by Prof. John A. Nietz, and donated to the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh in 1958, which has since grown to 15,000. About 140 of these texts are completely digitized and showcased in a publicly accessible website through the University of Pittsburgh’s Library, along with a searchable bibliography of the entire collection, which expanded the awareness of this collection and its user base to beyond the academic community. The URL for the website is http://digital.library.pitt.edu/nietz/. The collection is a rich resource for researchers studying the intellectual, educational, and textbook publishing history of the United States. In this study, we examined several existing records collected by the Digital Research Library at the University of Pittsburgh in order to determine the identity and searching behaviors of the users of this collection. Some of the records examined include: 1) The results of a 3-month long user survey, 2) User access statistics including search queries for a period of one year, a year after the digitized collection became publicly available in 2001, and 3) E-mail input received by the website over 4 years from 2000-2004. The results of the study demonstrate the differences in online retrieval strategies used by academic researchers and historians, archivists, avocationists, and the general public, and the importance of facilitating the discovery of digitized special collections through the use of electronic finding aids and an interactive interface with detailed metadata.

Networked robotic sensor platform deployments for use in coastal environmental assessment in southern California

Mobile sensor platforms such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and robotic surface vessels, combined with static moored sensors compose a diverse sensor network that is able to provide macroscopic environmental analysis tool for ocean researchers. Working as a cohesive networked unit, the static buoys are always online, and provide insight as to the time and locations where a federated, mobile robot team should be deployed to effectively perform large scale spatiotemporal sampling on demand. Such a system can provide pertinent in situ measurements to marine biologists whom can then advise policy makers on critical environmental issues. This poster presents recent field deployment activity of AUVs demonstrating the effectiveness of our embedded communication network infrastructure throughout southern California coastal waters. We also report on progress towards real-time, web-streaming data from the multiple sampling locations and mobile sensor platforms. Static monitoring sites included in this presentation detail the network nodes positioned at Redondo Beach and Marina Del Ray. One of the deployed mobile sensors highlighted here are autonomous Slocum gliders. These nodes operate in the open ocean for periods as long as one month. The gliders are connected to the network via a Freewave radio modem network composed of multiple coastal base-stations. This increases the efficiency of deployment missions by reducing operational expenses via reduced reliability on satellite phones for communication, as well as increasing the rate and amount of data that can be transferred. Another mobile sensor platform presented in this study are the autonomous robotic boats. These platforms are utilized for harbor and littoral zone studies, and are capable of performing multi-robot coordination while observing known communication constraints. All of these pieces fit together to present an overview of ongoing collaborative work to develop an autonomous, region-wide, coastal environmental observation and monitoring sensor network.

Creating global networks through an online engineering graduate program

Internationally the railway industry is facing a severe shortage of engineers with high level, relevant, profession and technical knowledge and abilities, in particular amongst engineers involved in the design, construction and maintenance of railway infrastructure. A unique graduate level program has been created to meet that global need via a fully online, distance education format. The development and operation of this Master of Engineering degree is proposed as a model of the process needed for the industry-relevance, flexible delivery, international networking, and professional development required for a successful graduate engineering program in the 21st century. In particular, the paper demonstrates how a mix of new and more familiar technologies are utilised through a variety of tasks to overcome the huge distances and multiple time zones that separate the participants across a growing number of countries, successfully achieving close and sustained interaction amongst the participants and railway experts.

A social matching system for an online dating network : a preliminary study

Due to the change in attitudes and lifestyles, people expect to find new partners and friends via various ways now-a-days. Online dating networks create a network for people to meet each other and allow making contact with different objectives of developing a personal, romantic or sexual relationship. Due to the higher expectation of users, online matching companies are trying to adopt recommender systems. However, the existing recommendation techniques such as content-based, collaborative filtering or hybrid techniques focus on users explicit contact behaviors but ignore the implicit relationship among users in the network. This paper proposes a social matching system that uses past relations and user similarities in finding potential matches. The proposed system is evaluated on the dataset collected from an online dating network. Empirical analysis shows that the recommendation success rate has increased to 31% as compared to the baseline success rate of 19%.

Planning online : a community-based interactive decision-making model

The first use of computing technologies and the development of land use models in order to support decision-making processes in urban planning date back to as early as mid 20th century. The main thrust of computing applications in urban planning is their contribution to sound decision-making and planning practices. During the last couple of decades many new computing tools and technologies, including geospatial technologies, are designed to enhance planners' capability in dealing with complex urban environments and planning for prosperous and healthy communities. This chapter, therefore, examines the role of information technologies, particularly internet-based geographic information systems, as decision support systems to aid public participatory planning. The chapter discusses challenges and opportunities for the use of internet-based mapping application and tools in collaborative decision-making, and introduces a prototype internet-based geographic information system that is developed to integrate public-oriented interactive decision mechanisms into urban planning practice. This system, referred as the 'Community-based Internet GIS' model, incorporates advanced information technologies, distance learning, sustainable urban development principles and community involvement techniques in decision-making processes, and piloted in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan.