Cumulative and comparative social media analytics for crisis communication

This paper draws on comparative analyses of Twitter data sets – over time and across different kinds of natural disasters and different national contexts – to demonstrate the value of shared, cumulative approaches to social media analytics in the context of crisis communication.

A state-wide systems approach to embedding the learning and teaching of sustainability in teacher education

Education systems have a key role to play in preparing future citizens to engage in sustainable living practices and help create a more sustainable world. Many schools throughout Australia have begun to develop whole-school approaches to sustainability education that are supported by national and state policies and curriculum frameworks. Preservice teacher education, however, lags behind in building the capacity of new teachers to initiate and implement such approaches (ARIES, 2010). This proposed project seeks to develop a state-wide systems approach to embedding Education for Sustainability (EfS) in teacher education that is aligned with the Australian National Curriculum and the aspirations for EfS in the Melbourne Declaration and other national documents. Representatives from all teacher education institutions and other agents of change in the Queensland education system will be engaged in a multilevel systems approach, involving collaboration at the state, institutional and course levels, to develop curriculum practices that reflect a shared vision of EfS.

Modelling as a vehicle for philosophical inquiry in the mathematics curriculum

Philosophical inquiry in the teaching and learning of mathematics has received continued, albeit limited, attention over many years (e.g., Daniel, 2000; English, 1994; Lafortune, Daniel, Fallascio, & Schleider, 2000; Kennedy, 2012a). The rich contributions these communities can offer school mathematics, however, have not received the deserved recognition, especially from the mathematics education community. This is a perplexing situation given the close relationship between the two disciplines and their shared values for empowering students to solve a range of challenging problems, often unanticipated, and often requiring broadened reasoning. In this article, I first present my understanding of philosophical inquiry as it pertains to the mathematics classroom, taking into consideration the significant work that has been undertaken on socio-political contexts in mathematics education (e.g., Skovsmose & Greer, 2012). I then consider one approach to advancing philosophical inquiry in the mathematics classroom, namely, through modelling activities that require interpretation, questioning, and multiple approaches to solution. The design of these problem activities, set within life-based contexts, provides an ideal vehicle for stimulating philosophical inquiry.

Designing Assessment for Quality Learning

- Considers broad-scale assessment approaches and how they impact on educational opportunity and outcomes. - Brings together internationally recognised scholars providing new insights into assessment for learning improvement and accountability. - Presents different theoretical and methodological perspectives influential in the field of assessment, learning and social change. - Contributes to the theorising of assessment in contexts characterised by heightened accountability requirements and constant change. This book brings together internationally recognised scholars with an interest in how to use the power of assessment to improve student learning and to engage with accountability priorities at both national and global levels. It includes distinguished writers who have worked together for some two decades to shift the assessment paradigm from a dominant focus on assessment as measurement towards assessment as central to efforts to improve learning. These writers have worked with the teaching profession and, in so doing, have researched and generated key insights into different ways of understanding assessment and its relationship to learning. The volume contributes to the theorising of assessment in contexts characterised by heightened accountability requirements and constant change. The book’s structure and content reflect already significant and growing international interest in assessment as contextualised practice, as well as theories of learning and teaching that underpin and drive particular assessment approaches. Learning theories and practices, assessment literacies, teachers’ responsibilities in assessment, the role of leadership, and assessment futures are the organisers within the book’s structure and content. The contributors to this book have in common the view that quality assessment, and quality learning and teaching are integrally related. Another shared view is that the alignment of assessment with curriculum, teaching and learning is linchpin to efforts to improve both learning opportunities and outcomes for all. Essentially, the book presents new perspectives on the enabling power of assessment. In so doing, the writers recognise that validity and reliability - the traditional canons of assessment – remain foundational and therefore necessary. However, they are not of themselves sufficient for quality education. The book argues that assessment needs to be radically reconsidered in the context of unprecedented societal change. Increasingly, communities are segregating more by wealth, with clear signs of social, political, economic and environmental instability. These changes raise important issues relating to ethics and equity, taken to be core dimensions in enabling the power of assessment to contribute to quality learning for all. This book offers readers new knowledge about how assessment can be used to re/engage learners across all phases of education.

Pedagogies of inclusive transition to school

Teachers in inclusive early education classrooms face competing pressures that are highlighted as children transition from play-based settings into formal school. Their challenge is to engage in pedagogical practice that caters for the complex range of school entrants. Yet the existing literature reports on transition challenges for separate groups of children rather than on shared needs or processes within diverse class populations. This study addressed this gap by investigating practices that supported transition in three Australian sites in which the populations represented different types of pedagogic challenge. Four themes regarding inclusion and transition were identified from a synthesis of the literature and applied to three cases. Results indicated that teachers adopted a range of approaches framed by the visibility of diversity, by classroom and school context and by the teachers’ professional transition in enacting changing policies. The results suggest that competing demands are balanced through dynamic, contextually framed strategies of relevance to both ECEC and schools.

Defining food literacy and its components

Food literacy has emerged as a term to describe the everyday practicalities associated with healthy eating. The term is increasingly used in policy, practice, research and by the public; however, there is no shared understanding of its meaning. The purpose of this research was to develop a definition of food literacy which was informed by the identification of its components. This was considered from two perspectives: that of food experts which aimed to reflect the intention of existing policy and investment, and that of individuals, who could be considered experts in the everyday practicalities of food provisioning and consumption. Given that food literacy is likely to be highly contextual, this second study focused on disadvantaged young people living in an urban area who were responsible for feeding themselves. The Expert Study used a Delphi methodology (round one n = 43). The Young People’s Study used semi-structured, life-course interviews (n = 37). Constructivist Grounded Theory was used to analyse results. This included constant comparison of data within and between studies. From this, eleven components of food literacy were identified which fell into the domains of: planning and management; selection; preparation; and eating. These were used to develop a definition for the term “food literacy”.

Professional conversations : a collaborative approach to support policy implementation, professional learning and practice change in ECEC

In 2012, Australia introduced a new National Quality Framework, comprising enhanced quality expectations for early childhood education and care services, two national learning frameworks and a new Assessment and Rating System spanning child care centres, kindergartens and preschools, family day care and outside school hours care. This is the linchpin in a series of education reforms designed to support increased access to higher quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) and successful transition to school. As with any policy change, success in real terms relies upon building shared understanding and the capacity of educators to apply new knowledge and to support change and improved practice within their service. With this in mind, a collaborative research project investigated the efficacy of a new approach to professional learning in ECEC: the professional conversation. This paper reports on the trial and evaluation of a series of professional conversations to support implementation of one element of the NQF, the Early Years Learning Framework (DEEWR,2009), and their capacity to promote collaborative reflective practice, shared understanding, and improved practice in ECEC. Set against the backdrop of the NQF, this paper details the professional conversation approach, key challenges and critical success factors, and the learning outcomes for conversation participants. Findings support the efficacy of this approach to professional learning in ECEC, and its capacity to support policy reform and practice change in ECEC.

Cultural flows in an Aboriginal school : deterritorializing textual production through a socially mediated Indigenous heritage

Flows of cultural heritage in textual practices are vital to sustaining Indigenous communities. 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, 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 Yugambeh elders and an Aboriginal principal. 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. Using conversations with Indigenous elders and material artifacts as an entry point for storytelling; iii. Dadirri – spiritual listening in the yarning circle to develop storytelling (Ungunmerr-Baumann, 2002); and iv. Writing and publicly sharing oral histories through digital scrapbooking shared via social media. The program aligned with the Australian National Curriculum English (ACARA, 2012), which mandates the teaching of multimodal text creation. Data sources included a class set of digital scrapbooks collaboratively created in a multi-age 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. The findings demonstrate 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, xv). It demonstrated how the children’s experiences of culture are layered over time, as successive generations inherit, interweave, and hear others’ cultural stories or maps. It also demonstrated how the children’s production of narratives through multimedia can provide a platform for the flow and reconstruction of performative collective memories and “lived traces of a common past” (Giaccardi, 2012). It disrupts notions of cultural reductionism and racial incommensurability that fix and homogenize Indigenous practices within and against a dominant White norm. 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.

Innovation for Equity in Rural Education : Proceedings of the International Symposium for Innovation in Rural Education

PREFACE The concept of an international symposium on rural education arose from a meeting between members of the SiMERR National Centre, Australia and the NURI Teacher Education Innovation Centre (NURI-TEIC) at Kongju National University, Korea in 2007. Despite the very different national contexts, the teams were struck by the similarities of the challenges facing rural schools in the two countries, and curious about the degree to which these challenges were shared by other countries. At a subsequent meeting in Australia in December 2007, the two centre Directors - Professor John Pegg (SiMERR) and Professor Youn-Kee Im (NURI-TEIC) - agreed on a framework for the first International Symposium for Innovation in Rural Education (ISFIRE). This volume consists of the keynotes and refereed papers presented at ISFIRE 2009. The papers provide insights into rural education in Australia, Bhutan, Canada, Korea, Norway, South Africa and the United States along the following themes: 1. Promoting rural policy initiatives; 2. Nurturing the rural teacher experience; 3. Enhancing rural student experience and growth; 4. Optimising the curriculum; 5. Improving resources in rural schools; and 6. Addressing special issues in rural education. The authors and titles of a further 23 presentations based on refereed abstracts only are listed at the end of this volume. The abstracts for these presentations can be found in the symposium Program. The academics and practitioners who came together for this symposium are passionate about rural education and have dedicated their time and capacities to working for the benefit of rural teachers, students and communities. The papers in this volume offer direction not only for Australia and South Korea, who jointly hosted this symposium, but for all countries in which rural education is contested ground. The keynotes in particular contribute rich perspectives on rural education trends, policies and practices. We hope that this volume generates a greater appreciation of the advantages of rural education and the many innovative approaches being implemented to meet its challenges.

Towards networked governance : improving interagency communication and collaboration for disaster risk management and climate change adaptation in Australia

Major disasters, such as bushfires or floods, place significant stress on scarce public resources. Climate change is likely to exacerbate this stress. An integrated approach to disaster risk management (DRM) and climate change adaptation (CCA) could reduce the stress by encouraging the more efficient use of pooled resources and expertise. A comparative analysis of three extreme climate-related events that occurred in Australia between 2009 and 2011 indicated that a strategy to improve interagency communication and collaboration would be a key factor in this type of policy/planning integration. These findings are in accord with the concepts of Joined-up Government and Network Governance. Five key reforms are proposed: developing a shared policy vision; adopting multi-level planning; integrating legislation; networking organisations; and establishing cooperative funding. These reforms are examined with reference to the related research literature in order to identify potential problems associated with their implementation. The findings are relevant for public policy generally but are particularly useful for CCA and DRM.

Creating and sharing : teens' information practices in digital communities

Introduction In a connected world youth are participating in digital content creating communities. This paper introduces a description of teens' information practices in digital content creating and sharing communities. Method The research design was a constructivist grounded theory methodology. Seventeen interviews with eleven teens were collected and observation of their digital communities occurred over a two-year period. Analysis The data were analysed iteratively to describe teens' interactions with information through open and then focused coding. Emergent categories were shared with participants to confirm conceptual categories. Focused coding provided connections between conceptual categories resulting in the theory, which was also shared with participants for feedback. Results The paper posits a substantive theory of teens' information practices as they create and share content. It highlights that teens engage in the information actions of accessing, evaluating, and using information. They experienced information in five ways: participation, information, collaboration, process, and artefact. The intersection of enacting information actions and experiences of information resulted in five information practices: learning community, negotiating aesthetic, negotiating control, negotiating capacity, and representing knowledge. Conclusion This study contributes to our understanding of youth information actions, experiences, and practices. Further research into these communities might indicate what information practices are foundational to digital communities.

Primary control level of parallel distributed energy resources converters in system of multiple interconnected autonomous microgrids within self-healing networks

To minimise the number of load sheddings in a microgrid (MG) during autonomous operation, islanded neighbour MGs can be interconnected if they are on a self-healing network and an extra generation capacity is available in the distributed energy resources (DER) of one of the MGs. In this way, the total load in the system of interconnected MGs can be shared by all the DERs within those MGs. However, for this purpose, carefully designed self-healing and supply restoration control algorithm, protection systems and communication infrastructure are required at the network and MG levels. In this study, first, a hierarchical control structure is discussed for interconnecting the neighbour autonomous MGs where the introduced primary control level is the main focus of this study. Through the developed primary control level, this study demonstrates how the parallel DERs in the system of multiple interconnected autonomous MGs can properly share the load of the system. This controller is designed such that the converter-interfaced DERs operate in a voltage-controlled mode following a decentralised power sharing algorithm based on droop control. DER converters are controlled based on a per-phase technique instead of a conventional direct-quadratic transformation technique. In addition, linear quadratic regulator-based state feedback controllers, which are more stable than conventional proportional integrator controllers, are utilised to prevent instability and weak dynamic performances of the DERs when autonomous MGs are interconnected. The efficacy of the primary control level of the DERs in the system of multiple interconnected autonomous MGs is validated through the PSCAD/EMTDC simulations considering detailed dynamic models of DERs and converters.

Cryptography in the cloud : advances and challenges

Cloud computing is a currently developing revolution in information technology that is disturbing the way that individuals and corporate entities operate while enabling new distributed services that have not existed before. At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services. Security is often said to be a major concern of users considering migration to cloud computing. This article examines some of these security concerns and surveys recent research efforts in cryptography to provide new technical mechanisms suitable for the new scenarios of cloud computing. We consider techniques such as homomorphic encryption, searchable encryption, proofs of storage, and proofs of location. These techniques allow cloud computing users to benefit from cloud server processing capabilities while keeping their data encrypted; and to check independently the integrity and location of their data. Overall we are interested in how users may be able to maintain and verify their own security without having to rely on the trust of the cloud provider.

A novel process of group-oriented question reduction for rule-based recommendation websites

Several websites utilise a rule-base recommendation system, which generates choices based on a series of questionnaires, for recommending products to users. This approach has a high risk of customer attrition and the bottleneck is the questionnaire set. If the questioning process is too long, complex or tedious; users are most likely to quit the questionnaire before a product is recommended to them. If the questioning process is short; the user intensions cannot be gathered. The commonly used feature selection methods do not provide a satisfactory solution. We propose a novel process combining clustering, decisions tree and association rule mining for a group-oriented question reduction process. The question set is reduced according to common properties that are shared by a specific group of users. When applied on a real-world website, the proposed combined method outperforms the methods where the reduction of question is done only by using association rule mining or only by observing distribution within the group.

Never-Never Land : affective landscapes, the touristic gaze and heterotopic space in Australia

This article explores how the imaginative use of the landscape in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) intersects with the fantasy of Australianness that the film constructs. We argue the fictional Never-Never Land through which the film’s characters travel is an, albeit problematic, ‘indigenizing’ space that can be entered imaginatively through cultural texts including poetry, literature and film, or through cultural practices including touristic pilgrimages to landmarks such as Uluru and Kakadu National Park. These actual and virtual journeys to the Never-Never have broader implications in terms of fostering a sense of belonging and legitimating white presence in the land through affect, nostalgia and the invocation of an imagined sense of solidarity and community. The heterotopic concept of the Never-Never functions to create an ahistorical, inclusive space that grounds diverse conceptions of Australianness in a shared sense of belonging and home that is as mythical, contradictory and wondrous as the idea of the Never-Never itself. The representations of this landscape and the story of the characters that traverse it self-consciously construct a relationship to past events and to film history, as well as constructing a comfortable subject position for contemporary Australians to occupy in relation to the land, the colonial past, and the present.