Life Drama : an arts education response to social and cultural challenges in Papua New Guinea

The Life Drama program is a theatre-based experiential learning program developed in Papua New Guinea over the past seven years. The Life Drama team recognises that a significant proportion of “education” for learners of all ages takes place outside formal education systems, particularly in developing nations such as Papua New Guinea. If arts education principles and practices are to contribute meaningfully and powerfully to resolving social and cultural challenges, it is important to recognise that many learners and educators will encounter and use these principles and practices outside of school or university settings. This paper briefly describes the Life Drama program and its context, highlights its two streams of operation (community educators and teacher educators) and indicates some ways in which an arts-based education initiative like Life Drama contributes to Goal 3 of the Seoul Agenda:“Apply arts education principles and practices to contribute to resolving the social and cultural challenges facing today‟s world.” In particular, the project addresses sub-goal 3b:“Recognize and develop the social and cultural well-being dimensions of arts education”.

Place psychology: Engaging with notions of 'home'

Psychology of place is theoretical territory shared by a wide range of disciplines. Currently, while environmental psychology addresses such questions as how people interact with and make meaning in places, clinical psychology has paid scant attention to the role of place in mental health. This paper focuses on two concepts from place psychology - place attachment and place identity. Place attachment is here defined as a sense of positively-valanced emotional connection to a familiar place (Morgan 2010). Place identity implies a stronger sense of belonging: the person as part of the place and the place as part of the person (Memmot & Long 2002). Both place attachment and place identity can be seen as relating to notions of ‘home’. My PhD is a work of interdisciplinary practice-based research using creative writing as a methodology to explore how place attachment, place identity and notions of home may support recovery from psychological trauma. A novel provides a site of imaginative encounter between author and reader, in which the two parties collaboratively create place and character through the medium of language. This paper links theory with practice by outlining some choices involved in exploring psychological constructs through narrative fiction.

Information quality in social media : a conceptual model

Social Media (SM) is increasingly being integrated with business information in decision making. Unique characteristics of social media (e.g. wide accessibility, permanence, global audience, recentness, and ease of use) raise new issues with information quality (IQ); quite different from traditional considerations of IQ in information systems (IS) evaluation. This paper presents a preliminary conceptual model of information quality in social media (IQnSM) derived through directed content analysis and employing characteristics of analytic theory in the study protocol. Based in the notion of ‘fitness for use’, IQnSM is highly use and user centric and is defined as “the degree to which information is suitable for doing a specified task by a specific user, in a certain context”. IQnSM is operationalised as hierarchical, formed by the three dimensions (18 measures): intrinsic quality, contextual quality and representational quality. A research plan for empirically validating the model is proposed.

Gelatine : making coworking places gel for better collaboration and social learning

Public libraries and coworking spaces seek for means to facilitate peer collaboration, peer inspiration and cross-pollination of skills and creativity. However, social learning, inspiration and collaboration between coworkers do not come naturally. In particular in (semi-) public spaces, the behavioural norm among unacquainted coworkers is to work in individual silos without taking advantage of social learning or collaboration opportunities. This paper presents results from a pilot study of ‘Gelatine’ – a system that facilitates shared encounters between coworkers by allowing them to digitally ‘check in’ at a work space. Gelatine displays skills, areas of interest, and needs of currently present coworkers on a public screen. The results indicate that the system amplifies users’ sense of place and awareness of other coworkers, and serves as an interface for social learning through exploratory, opportunistic and serendipitous inspirations, as well as through helping users identify like-minded peers for follow-up face-to-face encounters. We discuss how Gelatine is perceived by users with different pre-entry motivations, and discuss users’ challenges as well as non-use of the system.

Factors influencing research engagement : research interest, confidence and experience in an Australian speech-language pathology workforce

Background Recent initiatives within an Australia public healthcare service have seen a focus on increasing the research capacity of their workforce. One of the key initiatives involves encouraging clinicians to be research generators rather than solely research consumers. As a result, baseline data of current research capacity are essential to determine whether initiatives encouraging clinicians to undertake research have been effective. Speech pathologists have previously been shown to be interested in conducting research within their clinical role; therefore they are well positioned to benefit from such initiatives. The present study examined the current research interest, confidence and experience of speech language pathologists (SLPs) in a public healthcare workforce, as well as factors that predicted clinician research engagement. Methods Data were collected via an online survey emailed to an estimated 330 SLPs working within Queensland, Australia. The survey consisted of 30 questions relating to current levels of interest, confidence and experience performing specific research tasks, as well as how frequently SLPs had performed these tasks in the last 5 years. Results Although 158 SLPs responded to the survey, complete data were available for only 137. Respondents were more confident and experienced with basic research tasks (e.g., finding literature) and less confident and experienced with complex research tasks (e.g., analysing and interpreting results, publishing results). For most tasks, SLPs displayed higher levels of interest in the task than confidence and experience. Research engagement was predicted by highest qualification obtained, current job classification level and overall interest in research. Conclusions Respondents generally reported levels of interest in research higher than their confidence and experience, with many respondents reporting limited experience in most research tasks. Therefore SLPs have potential to benefit from research capacity building activities to increase their research skills in order to meet organisational research engagement objectives. However, these findings must be interpreted with the caveats that a relatively low response rate occurred and participants were recruited from a single state-wide health service, and therefore may not be representative of the wider SLP workforce.

A semi-supervised graph-based algorithm for detecting outliers in online-social-networks

In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised approach of anomaly detection in Online Social Networks. The social network is modeled as a graph and its features are extracted to detect anomaly. A clustering algorithm is then used to group users based on these features and fuzzy logic is applied to assign degree of anomalous behavior to the users of these clusters. Empirical analysis shows effectiveness of this method.

Consumers' behavioural responses toward technology-based social products

This thesis examined the determinants of consumers’ use of emerging mental health services delivered via mobile phone technology, which promise to provide cost-effective psychotherapeutic support where and when needed. It builds on the Model of Goal-Directed Behaviour by recognising the role that competition between behavioural alternatives plays in influencing consumers’ decision to use these services. The research employed a three-study, mixed-methodological approach.

Corporate Social Responsibility Implementation in the EU and USA : The Trend and the Way Forward

The core principles of CSR are being integrated into the core policy objectives of different economies and global companies and are also moving beyond their individual business initiatives. This integration can be seen from individual states’ perspectives; states are also accepting these issues in their socio-economic strategies and thus are establishing these issues within national economies. Given this background, this chapter explicates the trends in implementing CSR principles in the EU and USA. It demonstrates that companies in the developed countries use a mix of different strategies to incorporate CSR principles in their self-regulatory mechanisms. Strategies based on legal regulation are not foremost in this mix; rather, in these countries regulation-based strategy is meant to assist the non-legal drivers of CSR.

Social support promotes psychological well-being following a natural disaster

Receiving emotional support has consistently been demonstrated as an important factor associated with mental health but sparse research has investigated giving support in addition to receiving it or the types of support that predict well-being. In this paper the relationship between giving and receiving instrumental and emotional social support and psychological well-being during and following a natural disaster is investigated. A survey administered between four and six months after fatal floods was conducted with 200 community members consisting of men (n = 68) and women (n = 132) aged between 17 and 87 years. Social support experiences were assessed using the 2-Way Social Support Scale (2-Way SSS; Shakespeare-Finch & Obst, 2011) and eudemonic well-being was measured using the Psychological Well-Being Scale (PWBS; Ryff & Keyes, 1995). Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to examine expected relationships and to explore the differential effects of the four factors of the 2-Way SSS. Results indicated that social support shared significant positive associations with domains of psychological well-being, especially with regards to interpersonal relationships. Receiving and giving emotional support were respectively the strongest unique predictors of psychological well-being. However, receiving instrumental support predicted less autonomy. Results highlight the importance of measuring social support as a multidimensional construct and affirm that disaster response policy and practice should focus on emotional as well as instrumental needs in order to promote individual and community psychosocial health following a flooding crisis.

Young people and the social exclusion of their public and private space

This paper explores the concept of social exclusion as it impacts on young people within their local communities and the wider British, European and Australian context in terms of surveillance and other control measures.

Young people, children and their social and spatial citizenship rights

The use of public space by young people and children is a major issue in a number of countries and a range of measures are deployed to to control public space which restrict their social and spatial citizenship rights.

Social influences and the physical activity intentions of parents of young-children families: An extended Theory of Planned Behavior Approach

Evidence within Australia and internationally suggests parenthood as a risk factor for inactivity; however, research into understanding parental physical activity is scarce. Given that active parents can create active families and social factors are important for parents’ decision making, the authors investigated a range of social influences on parents’ intentions to be physically active. Parents (N = 580; 288 mothers and 292 fathers) of children younger than 5 years completed an extended Theory of Planned Behavior questionnaire either online or paper based. For both genders, attitude, control factors, group norms, friend general support, and an active parent identity predicted intentions, with social pressure and family support further predicting mothers’ intentions and active others further predicting fathers’ intentions. Attention to these factors and those specific to the genders may improve parents’ intentions to be physically active, thus maximizing the benefits to their own health and the healthy lifestyle practices for other family members.

Living with the Legacy of Conquest and Culture : Social Justice Leadership in Education and the Indigenous Peoples of Australia and America

Indigenous peoples have survived the most inhumane acts and violations against them. Despite acts of genocide, Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans have survived. The impact of the past 500 years cannot be separated from understandings of education for Native Americans in the same way that the impact of the past 220 years cannot be separated from the understandings of Australian Aboriginal people’s experiences of education. This chapter is about comparisons in Aboriginal and Native American communities and their collision with the dominant, white European settlers who came to Australia and America. Chomsky (Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: parallels and differences. In: Peck J (ed) The Chomsky Reader. Pantheon Books, New York, p 315, 1987) once remarked that if one took two historical events and compared them for similarities and differences, you would find both. The real test was whether on the similarities they were significant. The position of the coauthors of this chapter is in the affirmative and we take this occasion to lay them out for analysis and review. The chapter begins with a discussion of the historical legacy of oppression and colonization impacting upon Indigenous peoples in Australia and in the United States, followed by a discussion of the plight of Indigenous children in a specific State in America. Through the lens of social justice, we examine those issues and attitudes that continue to subjugate these same peoples in the economic and educational systems of both nations. The final part of the chapter identifies some implications for school leadership.