Academic attention to educational podcasts has grown significantly in recent years. However, to date, the concept of genres in podcasting is yet to gain scholarly attention. By examining genres emergent from a corpus of educational podcasts available online, this paper introduces the value of genre analysis to educational podcast research. It proposes three genres, named ‘The Quick Burst’, ‘The Narrative’ and ‘The Chat Show’. The three genres show both the versatility of podcasting for education and how genre analysis could introduce new ideas to the educational podcasting literature, including ideas about supporting deep learning in e-learning environments.

Non-traditional open-plan schools and classrooms are currently enjoying a resurgence in Australia, with proponents arguing for the necessity of educational spaces that more readily accommodate the needs of 21 st century learners. However, these learning environments can pose considerable pedagogic challenges for teachers who must balance the ethos of spaces designed to facilitate autonomous and flexible student learning, while simultaneously managing the complexities of shared space and resources, decreased staff-student ratios, and highly variable student responses to learning in open-plan settings. This paper draws on observational and interview data from an Australian study of three primary schools operating in open-plan spaces. Informed by cultural theories of spatial practice, we argue that the ways in which teachers conceptualise and operationalize notions of 'structure' is pivotal to the responsiveness of pedagogic approaches within openplan spaces.

The versatility, intimacy, and ease of production of podcasting makes it a logical technology to apply to flexible education contexts. As a result, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the value of education podcasting in recent years. While education podcasting literature has tended to explore podcast implementation in institutional contexts, education podcasts outside of academia have also grown in popularity, to the extent that 'education' is a common subgroup in podcast aggregation sites. This paper adapts Fernandez, Sallan and Simo's (2015) framework of variables in education podcast design, to conduct a textual analysis of emergent design themes in non-institutional education podcasts. The findings reveal how highly successful podcasts from outside of educational institutions can both reinforce and challenge norms about education podcast design that exist within academic discourse, including in regards to podcast length, pedagogical approaches, and the position of the podcast in the learning experience. It is the hope that the findings of this study might shift discourse from an interest in universalizing ideas about 'good practice' in education podcast design, towards more nuanced discussion of design practices that fit within specific contexts.

Australia’s neoliberal education agenda drives a competitive market climate where schools compete for potential clientele. In this climate, school impression management and self-promotion has become an important factor in maintaining a financially viable school. Schools produce image management texts including school prospectuses, newspapers advertisements, and school websites. Examining fifteen elite school websites from New South Wales Australia, this paper argues that the websites construct elite ideological discourses in order to position themselves as desirable within the neoliberal education context. The placement of promotional images and hyperlinks in salient places on the websites reveals the importance of self-promotion and the production of images of elitism in the marketised education climate. The school websites examined are found to have multiple animated and interactive functions that are used in the promotion of the schools as elite.

In response to the demands of the '21st century learner' classroom environments are increasingly moving away from traditional models of a single-teacher isolated in their classroom. There is an advent of 'nontraditional' environments that challenge long-held practices in teaching. To support these changes there is a pressing need to create opportunities for professional learning. This paper reports on a study undertaken within three primary schools that had recently adopted 'non-traditional' classroom environments. The study aimed to identify how these new spaces were shaping teaching practices and the challenges that they presented for professional learning. This paper presents findings from this study with recommendations for how systems and schools can better manage the opportunities presented by these 'non-traditional' environments.