Extending the ABC's public service remit through ABC Pool

Historically, the public service broadcaster (PSB) acted beyond its institutional broadcasting remit by initiating and facilitating activities to support cultural infrastructure and national identity (Wilson, Hutchinson and Shea 2010). The recent focus to develop new content delivery platforms and services (Debrett 2010) signifies a semantic shift from the PSB to the public service media (PSM) organisation. The Australian PSM organisation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has moved beyond the era of ‘online’ publishing to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies to foster new relationships with the audience (Walker 2009) and engage in production activities with participatory cultures (Jenkins 2006). This shift presents opportunities and challenges to traditional media production, the existing editorial policies and governance models, and raises questions around the value of PSM experimental and innovative activities. Further, the incorporation of information communication technologies and participatory cultures challenge the core values of ‘public service’ within PSM. This paper examines ABC Pool (abc.net.au/pool) as a means of extending the ABC’s public service remit by incorporating participatory cultures into the production and governance models of the corporation and critically analyses the public value of such innovative experiments.

Importing Wikipedia principles into the cultural institution of a public service broadcaster : the case of ABC Pool

Web 2.0 technologies have mobilised collaborative peer production and participatory cultures for online content creation. However, not all online communities engaging in these activities are independently facilitated and often operate within the auspices of the cultural institutions that develop and resource them. Borrowing from the principles of Wikipedia that supports collaborative online content creation and online community, ABC Pool (abc.net.au/pool) is one such institutional online community operating with the support of the Australian Public Service Broadcaster (PSB), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This paper explores the collaborative, creative, and governance activities of an institutional online community and how the role of the community manager is an intermediary within these arrangements.

The role of the internet and digital technologies in the struggle for recognition of the forgotten Australians

Our contemporary public sphere has seen the 'emergence of new political rituals, which are concerned with the stains of the past, with self disclosure, and with ways of remembering once taboo and traumatic events' (Misztal, 2005). A recent case of this phenomenon occurred in Australia in 2009 with the apology to the 'Forgotten Australians': a group who suffered abuse and neglect after being removed from their parents – either in Australia or in the UK - and placed in Church and State run institutions in Australia between 1930 and 1970. This campaign for recognition by a profoundly marginalized group coincides with the decade in which the opportunities of Web 2.0 were seen to be diffusing throughout different social groups, and were considered a tool for social inclusion. This paper examines the case of the Forgotten Australians as an opportunity to investigate the role of the internet in cultural trauma and public apology. As such, it adds to recent scholarship on the role of digital web based technologies in commemoration and memorials (Arthur, 2009; Haskins, 2007; Cohen and Willis, 2004), and on digital storytelling in the context of trauma (Klaebe, 2011) by locating their role in a broader and emerging domain of social responsibility and political action (Alexander, 2004).

The 7pm Project

The Making Connections: Innovations in Learning and Teaching Forum, jointly hosted by the Division of Technology, Information and Learning Support (TILS) and the Learning and Teaching Unit (LTU), was held on 20 June. The forum provided a snapshot of innovative practice across QUT, as well as an overview of services supporting innovation. Past events have attracted sizeable audiences and informal feedback has been very positive and encouraging. The objective of the forum is to give an opportunity to academic teaching staff to share their innovative practice with their peers, and it is planned that more events will be held to allow for further sharing of ideas. The program for the June 2012 forum included the following presentations: Ms Lindy Osborne: The 7pm Project Dr Ana Pavasovic: A multifaceted approach to teaching a first year unit Mr Paul Willis: Out of our comfort zone: How can Collaborate engage students in inclusive teaching practices Dr Kelly Zuniga: Can you draw what I see? Recasting the ‘crit’ to engage a larger classroom audience Dr Peter Bell, Dr Mark Lauchs, Amy Henderson and Edward Robinson: Crime Club: Lightbulb moments Dr Deboarh Peach: Improving student engagement through the integration of blended delivery approaches in WIL. Lindy Osborne Biography: As an early career academic, Lindy Osborne draws upon professional experience as a registered architect to offer students pioneering curricula that are firmly grounded in real-world practice. Since commencing her academic career in 2008, she has purposefully reconceptualised the delivery of Architectural Design, Technology, Professional Practice and Research subjects, using innovative digital technology and empowering students to direct their own learning. Lindy is cognisant of the impact that the physical learning environment has on students, and seeks to actively modify it to support students by enabling powerful enactive learning. Using technology embedded flexible learning spaces and innovative simulated office practice pedagogy,students actively learn in an authentic environment, redressing the structural and cyclical factors that have resulted in a lack of workplace learning opportunities. Lindy’s creative integration of interdisciplinary opportunities, popular culture, social media and Web-2.0 technologies connects with students on their level, while they develop critical professional skills both inside and perhaps more importantly outside, the formal classroom environment.

Understanding the participatory library through a grounded theory study

Lankes and Silverstein (2006) introduced the “participatory library” and suggested that the nature and form of the library should be explored. In the last several years, some attempts have been made in order to develop contemporary library models that are often known as Library 2.0. However, little research has been based on empirical data and such models have had a strong focus on technical aspects but less focus on participation. The research presented in this paper fills this gap. A grounded theory approach was adopted for this study. Six librarians were involved in in-depth individual interviews. As a preliminary result, five main factors of the participatory library emerged including technological, human, educational, social-economic, and environmental. Five factors influencing the participation in libraries were also identified: finance, technology, education, awareness, and policy. The study’s findings provide a fresh perspective on contemporary library and create a basis for further studies on this area.

Time-aware topic recommendation based on micro-blogs

Topic recommendation can help users deal with the information overload issue in micro-blogging communities. This paper proposes to use the implicit information network formed by the multiple relationships among users, topics and micro-blogs, and the temporal information of micro-blogs to find semantically and temporally relevant topics of each topic, and to profile users' time-drifting topic interests. The Content based, Nearest Neighborhood based and Matrix Factorization models are used to make personalized recommendations. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is demonstrated in the experiments conducted on a real world dataset that collected from Twitter.com.

The state-of-the-art in personalized recommender systems for social networking

With the explosion of Web 2.0 application such as blogs, social and professional networks, and various other types of social media, the rich online information and various new sources of knowledge flood users and hence pose a great challenge in terms of information overload. It is critical to use intelligent agent software systems to assist users in finding the right information from an abundance of Web data. Recommender systems can help users deal with information overload problem efficiently by suggesting items (e.g., information and products) that match users’ personal interests. The recommender technology has been successfully employed in many applications such as recommending films, music, books, etc. The purpose of this report is to give an overview of existing technologies for building personalized recommender systems in social networking environment, to propose a research direction for addressing user profiling and cold start problems by exploiting user-generated content newly available in Web 2.0.

Personalized recommender systems integrating tags and item taxonomy

The social tags in Web 2.0 are becoming another important information source to profile users' interests and preferences to make personalized recommendations. To solve the problem of low information sharing caused by the free-style vocabulary of tags and the long tails of the distribution of tags and items, this paper proposes an approach to integrate the social tags given by users and the item taxonomy with standard vocabulary and hierarchical structure provided by experts to make personalized recommendations. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively improve the information sharing and recommendation accuracy.

Internet and e-commerce law, business and policy

Over the last two decades, the internet and e-commerce have reshaped the way we communicate, interact and transact. In the converged environment enabled by high speed broadband, web 2.0, social media, virtual worlds, user-generated content, cloud computing, VoIP, open source software and open content have rapidly become established features of our online experience. Business and government alike are increasingly using the internet as the preferred platform for delivery of their goods and services and for effective engagement with their clients. New ways of doing things online and challenges to existing business, government and social activities have tested current laws and often demand new policies and laws, adapted to the new realities. The focus of this book is the regulation of social, cultural and commercial activity on the World Wide Web. It considers developments in the law that have been, and continue to be, brought about by the emergence of the internet and e-commerce. It analyses how the law is applied to define rights and obligations in relation to online infrastructure, content and practices.

Facebook : a 24 hour studio environment for contemporary architectural education

The popularity of Web 2.0 technology amongst tertiary students has become an increased talking point due to its pedagogical capabilities. The purpose of this research was to incorporate the social network Facebook within an architectural design studio to reintroduce the social interaction that was once generated within the traditional, 24 hour setting. This interaction has proven vital to an architect’s future as here they develop the initial peer network within the industry. The study draws upon existing literature to gage the effectiveness of introducing Facebook within the contemporary university environment, further, a case study was established within a second year architectural class. The correspondence was monitored at five intervals across the semester, with the information that was shared, quantified. The aim of this research was to provide the necessary foundation for the feasibility on the possible inclusion of Facebook within architectural tertiary education.

Building knowledge capabilities : an organisational learning approach

The communal nature of knowledge production predicts the importance of creating learning organisations where knowledge arises out of processes that are personal, social, situated and active. It follows that workplaces must provide both formal and informal learning opportunities for interaction with ideas and among individuals. This grounded theory for developing contemporary learning organisations harvests insights from the knowledge management, systems sciences, and educational learning literatures. The resultant hybrid theoretical framework informs practical application, as reported in a case study that harnesses the accelerated information exchange possibilities enabled through web 2.0 social networking and peer production technologies. Through complementary organisational processes, 'meaning making' is negotiated in formal face-to-face meetings supplemented by informal 'boundary spanning' dialogue. The organisational capacity building potential of this participatory and inclusive approach is illustrated through the example of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in San Jose, California, USA. As an outcome of the strategic planning process at this joint city-university library, communication, decision-making, and planning structures, processes, and systems were re-invented. An enterprise- level redesign is presented, which fosters contextualising information interactions for knowledge sharing and community building. Knowledge management within this context envisions organisations as communities where knowledge, identity, and learning are situated. This framework acknowledges the social context of learning - i.e., that knowledge is acquired and understood through action, interaction, and sharing with others. It follows that social networks provide peer-to-peer enculturation through intentional exchange of tacit information made explicit. This, in turn, enables a dynamic process experienced as a continuous spiral that perpetually elevates collective understanding and enables knowledge creation.

An ontology-based method for sparsity problem in tag recommendation

Tags or personal metadata for annotating web resources have been widely adopted in Web 2.0 sites. However, as tags are freely chosen by users, the vocabularies are diverse, ambiguous and sometimes only meaningful to individuals. Tag recommenders may assist users during tagging process. Its objective is to suggest relevant tags to use as well as to help consolidating vocabulary in the systems. In this paper we discuss our approach for providing personalized tag recommendation by making use of existing domain ontology generated from folksonomy. Specifically we evaluated the approach in sparse situation. The evaluation shows that the proposed ontology-based method has improved the accuracy of tag recommendation in this situation.

Open and networked initiatives and the digital transformation of academic publishing in China

Many aspects of China's academic publishing system differ from the systems found in liberal market based economies of the United States, Western Europe and Australia. A high level of government intervention in both the publishing industry and academia and the challenges associated with attempting to make a transition from a centrally controlled towards a more market based publishing industry are two notable differences; however, as in other countries, academic communities and publishers are being transformed by digital technologies. This research explores the complex yet dynamic digital transformation of academic publishing in China, with a specific focus of the open and networked initiatives inspired by Web 2.0 and social media. The thesis draws on two case studies: Science Paper Online, a government-operated online preprint platform and open access mandate; and New Science, a social reference management website operated by a group of young PhD students. Its analysis of the innovations, business models, operating strategies, influences, and difficulties faced by these two initiatives highlights important characteristics and trends in digital publishing experiments in China. The central argument of this thesis is that the open and collaborative possibilities of Web 2.0 inspired initiatives are emerging outside the established journal and monograph publishing system in China, introducing innovative and somewhat disruptive approaches to the certification, communication and commercial exploitation of knowledge. Moreover, emerging publishing models are enabling and encouraging a new system of practising and communicating science in China, putting into practice some elements of the Open Science ethos. There is evidence of both disruptive change to old publishing structures and the adaptive modification of emergent replacements in the Chinese practice. As such, the transformation from traditional to digital and interactive modes of publishing, involves both competition and convergence between new and old publishers, as well as dynamics of co-evolution involving new technologies, business models, social norms, and government reform agendas. One key concern driving this work is whether there are new opportunities and new models for academic publishing in the Web 2.0 age and social media environment, which might allow the basic functions of communication and certification to be achieved more effectively. This thesis enriches existing knowledge of open and networked transformations of scholarly publishing by adding a Chinese story. Although the development of open and networked publishing platforms in China remains in its infancy, the lessons provided by this research are relevant to practitioners and stakeholders interested in understanding the transformative dynamics of networked technologies for publishing and advocating open access in practice, not only in China, but also internationally.

Pulse: The London Symphony Orchestra Student Mobile Project

This report documents the key findings of a year-long collaborative research project focusing on the London Symphony Orchestra’s (LSO) development, implementation and testing of a mobile ticketing and information system. This ticketing system was developed in association with the LSO’s technical partners, Kodime Limited and in collaboration with the Aurora Orchestra.

The role of the internet in testimony : the case of the ‘Forgotten Australians’

This paper examines the case of the Forgotten Australians as an opportunity to examine the role of the internet in the presentation of testimony. ‘Forgotten Australians’ are a group who suffered abuse and neglect after being removed from their parents – either in Australia or in the UK - and placed in Church and State run institutions in Australia between 1930 and 1970. The campaign by this profoundly marginalised group coincided with the decade in which the opportunities of Web 2.0 were seen to be diffusing throughout different social groups, and were considered a tool for social inclusion. We outline a conceptual framework that positions the role of the internet as an environment in which the difficult relationships between painful past experiences and contemporary injunctions to remember them, are negotiated. We then apply this framework to the analysis of case examples of posts and interaction on websites with web 2.0 functionality: YouTube and the National Museum of Australia. The analysis points to commonalities and differences in the agency of the internet in these two contexts, arguing that in both cases the websites provided support for the development of a testimony-like narrative and the claiming, sharing and acknowledgement of loss.