The small but developing literature on weblogging underscores its potential as an effective learning resource for use in higher education. This paper contributes to these discussions through an initial case study of the authors' experience with the on going development of an educational blogging resource for use in a large cohort, undergraduate liberal arts subject. Detailing the theoretical aims, design, implementation and incipient evaluation of the project, the paper supports the argument for the educational use and value of blogging but also highlights potential limitations and problem areas. IntroductionWeblogs, or blogs, have rapidly evolved to become a popular and influential form of online micro-publishing and computer mediated communication (Bruns & Jacobs, 2006). Critical studies of blogging are still in their infancy, but the available literature suggests that "blogging has the potential to be a transformational technology for teaching and learning" (Williams & Jacobs, 2004). In particular, it is claimed that blogging is a useful practice for the development of higher order learning skills, active, learner centered pedagogy, authentic learning, associative thinking, and interactive learning communities (O'Donnell, 2006;Farmer, 2006). This paper reports on a case study of the development and use of a blogging resource in a large-cohort first year arts subject at the University of Melbourne. Evaluation is on going, but initial results offer support for the potential of blogging as an enabling learning tool in higher education. Literature review and theoretical principlesBlogs-a contraction of 'web based logs' or 'weblogs'-are essentially online journals where an author (or authors) publishes a series of chronological, updateable entries or posts on various topics, typically of personal interest to the author(s) and often expressed in a strongly subjective voice, on which readers are invited to comment. Blogs typically make central use of the hypertextual facilities of online communication: linking internally between posts, providing links to other web content, and/or linking to other users' blogs. Collectively, blogs and their multiple links are referred to as the 'blogosphere', a term coined by analogy with the concept of the 'public sphere', a space 124 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2008, 24(2) for the exercise of public communication and individual free speech (Tremayne, 2006;Barlow, 2007).From their initial emergence in the mid to late 1990s, blogs have expanded exponentially, seemingly capturing "the public imagination… like no media form since the emergence of the World Wide Web itself" (Bruns & Jacobs, p. 1). As of April 2007, the blog oriented Internet search engine, Technorati, reported an indexing total of over 75 million weblogs worldwide (Sifry, 2007). Due to the sheer scale and diversity of blogging, it is difficult to generalise about its forms and functions or the motivations of its users, known as 'bloggers'. Scholarly research on blogging tends to emphasise its f...
The last decade has witnessed the emergence and consolidation of new and established gay cities in East and Southeast Asia, in particular, the sexualisation of the Singapore city-state, the commerce-led boom of queer Bangkok, the rise of middle-class gay consumer cultures in Manila and Hong Kong, and the proliferation of underground LGBT scenes in Shanghai and Beijing. In the West, scholarships on urban gay centres such as San Francisco, New York and London focus on the paradigms of ethnicity (Sinfield, 1996), gentrification (Bell and Binnie, 2004) and creativity (Florida, 2002). Mapping the rise of commercial gay neighbourhoods by combining the history of ghettos and its post-closet geography of community villages, these studies chart a teleological model of sexual minority rights, group recognition and homonormative mainstream assimilation. Instead of defaulting to these specifically North American and European paradigms and debates, this paper attempts to formulate a different theoretical framework to understand the rise of the queer Asian city. Providing case studies on Singapore and Hong Kong, and deploying an inter-disciplinary approach including critical creative industrial studies and cultural studies this paper examines the intersections across the practices of gay clusters, urban renewal and social movement. It asks: if queer Asian sexual cultures are characterised by disjunctive modernities, how do such modernities shape their spatial geographies and produce the material specificities of each city?
The field of critical digital literacy studies has burgeoned in recent years as a result of the increased cultural consumption of digital media as well as the turn to the production of digital media forms. This article extends extant digital literacy studies by focusing on its subfield of digital citizenship. Proposing that digital citizenship is not another dimension or axis of citizenship, but a practice through which civic activities in the various dimensions of citizenship are conducted, this article critically considers how the concept of digital citizenship can furnish further insight into the quality of online civic participation that results in claims to and acts of citizenship. Through interdisciplinary scholarship, drawing from critical media and cultural theory, and media psychology, and deriving new empirical data from qualitative digital ethnography and quantitative focus group and survey studies, it presents original case studies with young people in Southeast Asia, including young Muslim women’s groups in Indonesia and youth public opinion on LGBTs in Singapore. It argues that Southeast Asian youth digital citizenship foregrounds civic participation as emergent acts that not only serve to make society a better place, but also enacts alternative publics that characterise new modes of civic-making in more conservative, collectivistic Southeast Asian societies.
Despite clear evidence pointing to the centrality of the Chinese press in the historical formation of the Chinese community, and despite the continued importance of the Chinese-language press in the current political, cultural, social and economic life of the Chinese community, there is little understanding of its history and recent growth in mainstream English-language media scholarship. Worse still, the shift in recent scholarship to the power of cyberspace and other forms of new media in assisting the formations of diasporic subjectivities runs the risk of giving the impression that the print media are no longer relevant. Our article aims to address this blind spot by mapping out the contours of change and continuity within the Chinese-language press in Australia. In the first part, we provide a brief historical account of the Chinese migrant communities in Australia, and the role of the press in their formation. We argue that this symbiotic relationship is crucial to understanding the development of the early Chinese-language print media in Australia, which was a less than hospitable society for the Chinese migrants. We then trace the development and evolution of the Chinese-language print media in a range of areas, including the Chinese-language media's current modus operandi, business strategies, cultural practices and ideological positioning, within the context of China's rise and the widening impact of China's promotion of soft power. We conclude by identifying some future directions in the research on the Chinese-language media in Australia, thus contributing to our understanding of some of the opportunities and challenges present in the (re)shaping of Australia's multicultural policies and politics.
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