Assurance of learning – are academics and senior management singing from the same hymn sheet?

Assurance of learning (AoL) is an important process in quality education, designed to measure the accomplishment of educational aims at the core of an institution’s programs, whilst encouraging faculty to continuously develop and improve the programs and courses. This paper reports on a study of Australian business schools to investigate current AoL practices through semi structured interviews with senior faculty leaders followed by focus group interviews with groups of senior program leaders and groups of academic teaching staff. Initial findings indicate there are significant challenges in encouraging academic staff to commit to the process and recognise the benefits of assuring learning. The differences in understanding between the various leaders and the academics were highlighted through the different focus groups. Leaders’ stressed strategic issues such as staff engagement and change, while academics focussed on process issues such as teaching graduate attributes and external accreditation. Understanding the differences in the perspectives of leaders and faculty is important, as without a shared understanding between the two groups, there is likely to be limited engagement, which creates difficulties in developing effective assurance of learning processes. Findings indicate that successful strategies developed to foster shared values on assurance of learning include: strong senior leaders’ commitment; developing champions among program and unit level staff; providing professional development opportunities; promoting and celebrating success and effectiveness; and ensuring an inclusive process with academics of all levels collaborating in the development and implementation of the process.

As trajetorias de carreiras tradicionais estao dando passegem as proteanas? Um estudo com gereentes no setor public Australiano com foco em diferencas quanto ao genero ( Have traditional career paths given way to protean ones?: Evidence from senior managers in the Australian public sector)

Purpose – This mixed-method study aims to determine the extent to which the career paths of senior managers conform with the traditional versus protean elements described in the careers literature and whether these paths vary by gender. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 15 senior managers (seven women and eight men) in a large public sector agency in Australia were interviewed about their career trajectories to date. Data were coded according to four major areas which characterise and distinguish between traditional and protean careers: development, orientation of the employee, definition of success, and organisational environment. A total of 81 managers (34 women and 47 men) from the same organisation were also surveyed. Variables of interest were those that could be triangulated with qualitative data such as the availability of career opportunities. Findings – Results suggest that, contrary to much existing literature which proposes that all careers have been fundamentally altered, the traditional career which relies on length of service, geographic mobility and a steady climb up the corporate ladder, is still the dominant model in some organisations. However, the trend towards protean careers is evident and is more pronounced for women than for men. Research limitations/implications – The specific nature of the organisation (large, male-dominated, public sector) may limit the generalisability of results. Practical implications – The framework used to explore career paths according to traditional/ protean elements in this study may assist human resource practitioners to develop appropriate strategies which maximise the professional development of employees. Originality/value – The results of this research challenge the universality of change in the nature of careers, particularly in public sector environments.

Blogs, Twitter, and breaking news : the produsage of citizen journalism

Debates over the role and relevance of what has been described as citizen journalism have existed at least since the late 1990s; positions have ranged from the fulsome dismissal of such bottom-up journalism activities (and indeed, almost all user-led content creation) as being part of a new "cult ofthe amateur" (Keen, 2007) to nearly equally simplistic perspectives which predicted citizen journalists would replace the mainstream journalism industry within a short timeframe. A more considered, more realistic perspective would take a somewhat more moderate view. Aided by circumstances including the long-term financial crisis enveloping journalism industries in many developed nations, the creeping corporatization and politicization of journalistic activities in democratic and non-democratic countries alike, and the largely unmet challenge of new, Internet-based media fonns, citizen journalism (as well as other parajournalistic media, including TV comedy such as The Daily Show) has been able to make credible inroads into what used to be the domain of journalism proper.

Film review : Citizen Murdoch?

It hasn’t been a good year for media barons. Actually, it’s not been a great century. In 2007 Baron Conrad Black was sent to jail in the US for embezzling his shareholders. Silvio Berlusconi’s grip on the Italian media hasn’t prevented a steady flow of allegations of sleaze and scandal since 2009, which have reduced him to a global laughing stock. And since July 2011, we have seen the dizzying fall of Rupert Murdoch and his son, James, from their positions of unquestioned (and unquestionable) authority at the helm of the world’s most powerful media empire.

Reputation modelling in citizen science for environmental acoustic data analysis

Citizen Science projects are initiatives in which members of the general public participate in scientific research projects and perform or manage research-related tasks such as data collection and/or data annotation. Citizen Science is technologically possible and scientifically significant. However, as the gathered information is from the crowd, the data quality is always hard to manage. There are many ways to manage data quality, and reputation management is one of the common approaches. In recent year, many research teams have deployed many audio or image sensors in natural environment in order to monitor the status of animals or plants. The collected data will be analysed by ecologists. However, as the amount of collected data is exceedingly huge and the number of ecologists is very limited, it is impossible for scientists to manually analyse all these data. The functions of existing automated tools to process the data are still very limited and the results are still not very accurate. Therefore, researchers have turned to recruiting general citizens who are interested in helping scientific research to do the pre-processing tasks such as species tagging. Although research teams can save time and money by recruiting general citizens to volunteer their time and skills to help data analysis, the reliability of contributed data varies a lot. Therefore, this research aims to investigate techniques to enhance the reliability of data contributed by general citizens in scientific research projects especially for acoustic sensing projects. In particular, we aim to investigate how to use reputation management to enhance data reliability. Reputation systems have been used to solve the uncertainty and improve data quality in many marketing and E-Commerce domains. The commercial organizations which have chosen to embrace the reputation management and implement the technology have gained many benefits. Data quality issues are significant to the domain of Citizen Science due to the quantity and diversity of people and devices involved. However, research on reputation management in this area is relatively new. We therefore start our investigation by examining existing reputation systems in different domains. Then we design novel reputation management approaches for Citizen Science projects to categorise participants and data. We have investigated some critical elements which may influence data reliability in Citizen Science projects. These elements include personal information such as location and education and performance information such as the ability to recognise certain bird calls. The designed reputation framework is evaluated by a series of experiments involving many participants for collecting and interpreting data, in particular, environmental acoustic data. Our research in exploring the advantages of reputation management in Citizen Science (or crowdsourcing in general) will help increase awareness among organizations that are unacquainted with its potential benefits.

Forging the heteroglossic citizen : articulating local, national, regional and global horizons in the Australian Curriculum

This article offers a discourse analysis comparing selected articles in the national press over the consultative period for Phase 1 subjects in the new Australian Curriculum, with rationales prefacing official Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority documents. It traces how various versions of Australia, its ‘nation-ness’ and its future citizens have been taken up in the final product. The analysis uses Lemke's analytic elaboration of Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia and its derivative, intertextuality. It identifies a range of intertextual thematic formations around ‘nation’, ‘history’, ‘citizen’ and ‘curriculum’ circulating in the public debates, then traces their presence in official curriculum documents. Rather than concluding that these themes are contradictory and incoherent, the conclusion asks how these multiple dialogic facets of Australian nation-ness potentially offer a better response to complex times than any coherent monologic orthodoxy might.

Towards distributed citizen participation : lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland floods

This paper examines the rapid and ad hoc development and interactions of participative citizen communities during acute events, using the examples of the 2011 floods in Queensland, Australia, and the global controversy surrounding Wikileaks and its spokesman, Julian Assange. The self-organising community responses to such events which can be observed in these cases bypass or leapfrog, at least temporarily, most organisational or administrative hurdles which may otherwise frustrate the establishment of online communities; they fast-track the processes of community development and structuration. By understanding them as a form of rapid prototyping, e-democracy initiatives can draw important lessons from observing the community activities around such acute events.

The creative citizen : understanding the value of design education programs in the knowledge economy

The knowledge economy relies on the diffusion and use of knowledge as well as its creation (Houghton and Sheenan, 2000). The future success of economic activity will depend on the capacity of organisations to transform by increasing their flexibility. In particular, this transformation is dependant on a decentralised, networked and multi-skilled workforce. To help organisations transition, new strategies and structures for education are required. Education systems need to concentrate less on specialist skills and more on the development of people with broad-based problem solving skills that are adaptable, with social and inter-personal communication skills necessary for networking and communication. This paper presents the findings of a ‘Knowledge Economy Market Development Mapping Study’ conducted to identify the value of design education programs from primary through to tertiary level in Queensland, Australia. The relationship of these programs to the development of the capacities mentioned above is explored. The study includes the collection of qualitative and quantitative data consisting of a literature review, focus groups and survey. Recommendations for the future development of design education programs in Queensland, Australia are proposed, and future research opportunities are presented and discussed.

The social mechanism of political deliberation and citizen participation in Guangdong China

Many studies have focused on why deliberative institutions should be established in order to develop Chinese people’s citizenry skills; however few focus on the social conditions and public sentiments that shape the development of deliberative mechanisms. Skills and awareness of citizenry is not only brought into being by deliberative institutions that are set up by the government, but evolve through interplays between technologies and social changes. As a test-bed for economic reform Guangdong is increasingly identified by translocality and hybrid culture. This is framed by identity conflict and unrests, much of which is due to soaring wealth polarisation, high volumes of population movement, cultural collisions and ongoing linguistic contestations. These unrests show the region’s transformation goes beyond the economic front. Profound changes are occurring at what anthropologists and philosophers call the changing social conciseness or moral landscape (Ci, 1994; Yan, 2010). The changing social moralities are a reflection of the awareness of individuals’ rights and responsibilities, and their interdependencies from dominant ideologies. This paper discusses Guangdong’s social and cultural characteristics, and questions how existing social conditions allow the staging of political deliberation by facilitating political engagement and the formation of public opinion. The paper will investigate the tragedy of Xiao Yueyue in Foshan, Guangdong, where ‘right’ and ‘responsibility’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ define the public sentiments of deliberation and participation.

Reputation modelling in Citizen Science for environmental acoustic data analysis

Citizen Science projects are initiatives in which members of the general public participate in scientific research projects and perform or manage research-related tasks such as data collection and/or data annotation. Citizen Science is technologically possible and scientifically significant. However, although research teams can save time and money by recruiting general citizens to volunteer their time and skills to help data analysis, the reliability of contributed data varies a lot. Data reliability issues are significant to the domain of Citizen Science due to the quantity and diversity of people and devices involved. Participants may submit low quality, misleading, inaccurate, or even malicious data. Therefore, finding a way to improve the data reliability has become an urgent demand. This study aims to investigate techniques to enhance the reliability of data contributed by general citizens in scientific research projects especially for acoustic sensing projects. In particular, we propose to design a reputation framework to enhance data reliability and also investigate some critical elements that should be aware of during developing and designing new reputation systems.

(Re)visioning the centre : education reform and the “ideal” citizen of the future

Discourses of public education reform, like that exemplified within the Queensland Government’s future vision document, Queensland State Education-2010 (QSE-2010), position schooling as a panacea to pervasive social instability and a means to achieve a new consensus. However, in unravelling the many conflicting statements that conjoin to form education policy and inform related literature (Ball, 1993), it becomes clear that education reform discourse is polyvalent (Foucault, 1977). Alongside visionary statements that speak of public education as a vehicle for social justice are the (re)visionary or those reflecting neoliberal individualism and a conservative politics. In this paper, it is argued that the latter coagulate to form strategic discursive practices which work to (re)secure dominant relations of power. Further, discussion of the characteristics needed by the “ideal” future citizen of Queensland reflect efforts to ‘tame change through the making of the child’ (Popkewitz, 2004, p.201). The casualties of this (re)vision and the refusal to investigate the pathologies of “traditional” schooling are the children who, for whatever reason, do not conform to the norm of the desired school child as an “ideal” citizen-in-the-making and who become relegated to alternative educational settings.

Incongruence between self-reported and observed senior physical education teaching styles : an analysis using Mosston and Ashworth’s spectrum

Pedagogical styles, methods, models, practices or strategies are valued for what they claim they can achieve. In recent times curriculum documents and governments have called for a range of teaching approaches to meet the variety of learner differences and allow students to make more independent decision making in physical education (Hardy and Mawer, 1999). One well known system of categorizing teaching styles is the Mosston and Ashworth’s Spectrum of Teaching Styles (2002). In Queensland, prior to 2005, no research had been conducted on the teaching styles used by teachers of Physical Education. However, many teachers self-reported that they employed a variety of teaching styles depending on the aims and content of the material to be taught (Cothran, et al., 2005). This research, for the first time, collected teacher’s self-reported use of teaching styles and through observations verify the styles that were being used to teach Senior Physical Education in Queensland. More specifically the aims of the research were to determine: a) What teaching styles teachers of Senior Physical Education in Queensland believe they use? i) Were they using a range of teaching styles? ii) Were teachers of Senior Physical Education in Queensland using teaching styles that the Queensland Senior Physical Education Syllabus (2004) required? b) If Mosston and Ashworth’s (2002) Spectrum of Teaching Styles were used to categorise styles observed during the teaching of Senior Physical Education did the styles being used provide opportunities for evaluating as described by the Queensland Senior Physical Education Syllabus (2004)? The research was conducted in two phases. Part A involved use of a questionnaire to determine the teaching styles Queensland teachers of Senior Physical Education reported using and how often they reported using them. The questionnaire was administered to 110 teachers throughout Queensland. The sample was determined from 346 schools teaching Senior Physical Education (in 2006) across the state of Queensland, Australia. 286 questionnaires were sent to 77 non-randomised schools. There were 66 male and 44 female respondents in the sample. A wide range of teaching styles were reportedly used by teachers of Senior Physical Education with Practice Style-Style B, Command Style-Style A and Divergent Discovery Style-Style H, the most reportedly used. The Self-Teaching Style-Style K was reportedly used the least by teachers involved in this study. From the respondents a group of teachers were identified to form the participants for Part B. Part B of the study involved observation of a group of volunteer participants (from those who had completed the questionnaire) who displayed many of the ‘typical’ characteristics, and a cross-section of backgrounds, of teachers of Senior Physical Education in Queensland. In the case of this study, the criteria used to select the group of teachers to be observed teaching were, teaching experience (number of years: 0-4, 5-10 and 11 years and over), gender, geographical location of schools (focused on Brisbane and near area for travel/access purposes), profile of the students at schools (girls, boys or co-educational), nature of school (Government or Private) and the physical activities being taught in a school (activities to reflect all the areas of physical activity outlined within the syllabus). A total of 27 questionnaire respondents from Part A indicated that they were willing to be observed teaching practical lessons. The respondents who volunteered to be involved in Part B of the study came from different regions across the state of Queensland and was not confined to the Brisbane metropolitan area or large cities. From the group of people who volunteered for Part B four came from outside Brisbane and 23 from the Brisbane area. The final observation group of nine participants included eight teachers from the Brisbane area and one from a rural area. The characteristics of the final group included three females and six males from private and public schools with a range of teaching experience in years and a range of physical activities. Four year 12 and five year 11 teachers and their classes were videoed on three occasions as they progressed through an eight – nine week unit of work. This resulted in 24 hours 48 minutes and 20 seconds (or 4465 observations) of video teaching data which was subsequently coded by several researchers (99% interobserver reliability) to determine the teaching styles employed by the participants. This research indicated that, based on Mosston and Ashworth’s (2002) Spectrum of Teaching Styles, teachers of Senior Physical Education in Queensland used predominantly one style to teach 27 observed lessons. This is in sharp contrast to the variety of styles 110 teachers self- reportedly used and in spite of the Queensland Senior Physical Education Syllabus (2004) suggesting a range of specific styles be used. These results are discussed in the context of the Queensland Senior Physical Education Syllabus (2004), teacher knowledge of teaching styles and high-stakes curriculum and external pressures such as national testing and the publication of data from schools in tabloid newspapers. The data and findings in this research provide a rationale for improving teacher knowledge regarding teaching styles and the need for a clear definition of terminology in syllabus documents. Careful examination of the effects that the publishing of school data may have on teaching styles is advised. This research not only collected teacher’s perceptions of the teaching styles they believed they used it also verified these claims through direct observations of the teachers while teaching. These findings are relevant to syllabus writers, teacher educators, policy makers within education and teachers.

Citizen motivation on the go : the role of psychological empowerment

Although advances in technology now enable people to communicate 'anytime, anyplace', it is not clear how citizens can be motivated to actually do so. This paper evaluates the impact of three principles of psychological empowerment, namely perceived self-efficacy, sense of community and causal importance, on public transport passengers' motivation to report issues and complaints while on the move. A week-long study with 65 participants revealed that self-efficacy and causal importance increased participation in short bursts and increased perceptions of service quality over longer periods. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for citizen participation projects and reflect on design opportunities for mobile technologies that motivate citizen participation.

Virtual birding : extending an environmental pastime into the virtual world for citizen science

This paper investigates engaging experienced birders, as volunteer citizen scientists, to analyze large recorded audio datasets gathered through environmental acoustic monitoring. Although audio data is straightforward to gather, automated analysis remains a challenging task; the existing expertise, local knowledge and motivation of the birder community can complement computational approaches and provide distinct benefits. We explored both the culture and practice of birders, and paradigms for interacting with recorded audio data. A variety of candidate design elements were tested with birders. This study contributes an understanding of how virtual interactions and practices can be developed to complement existing practices of experienced birders in the physical world. In so doing this study contributes a new approach to engagement in e-science. Whereas most citizen science projects task lay participants with discrete real world or artificial activities, sometimes using extrinsic motivators, this approach builds on existing intrinsically satisfying practices.