Group items tagged

In an effort to further understand the nature of the productive consumption of media fans in an era of digital connectivity, this article expands on Lévy's (1997) concept of the knowledge community as it applies to fans of the digital-game series Fallout. Lévy proposed that the age of digital-connectivity would usher in knowledge communities where participation was voluntary, aggregate, and democratic. I argue that Baym's (2000) interpretive and informative practices, which serve as the lynchpins of fan discourse, may be understood as the lynchpins of the knowledge community as well. Further, here interpretive and informative practices are not only used to build community and negotiate values, but also to define status and position within the contested Fallout knowledge community. By testing the knowledge community against such an environment, and integrating it into previous research on the role of fan labor in an era where producers are increasingly interested in that labor, this article proposes an understanding of the concept that may well add nuance and context beyond the theory's utopian roots.

The purpose of this article is to examine the authors' experiences while trying to enter and engage local communities in bottom-up literacies through participatory action research (PAR) toward the community's own collective self-development. In trying to enter five different communities, I have found several challenges and roadblocks such as mistrust of 'university people': legacy of the conventional outside-in and top-down research procedures for working in communities; power struggles with community 'gatekeepers', including 'building keepers'; and bureaucratized project-driven community work. I consider that under the current neoliberal educational policies that are plaguing the world, for example, No Child Left Behind in the USA, self-development projects promoted through PAR can be viable ways to defy these policies and their fatalist thinking. School children's parents and their communities are nowadays in a better position than teachers to fight for reclaiming local control of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

"Based on almost 50 years of combined experience as prison activists and prison teachers, the authors offer three case studies of prison activism and pedagogy in action. The first case study, by Hartnett, details the "artistry of agency" as enacted in poetry workshops in prison and in public poetry events, thus illustrating artistic communication. The second, by Wood, examines how friendship becomes political in the epistolary communication between free and imprisoned correspondents, thus addressing interpersonal communication. The third, by McCann, addresses web-based communication as a tool for advocacy for condemned prisoner/activists on Texas's death row, and hence political communication. Taken as a whole, the three case studies celebrate different communication strategies as avenues of enlightenment and empowerment while offering powerful arguments for abolishing the prison-industrial complex."

"Research exploring the means by which new media technologies can shape development within marginalized communities worldwide has began to move away from discussion limited to technical and infrastructural, to consider the interactions, beliefs, and values of local communities. Yet most projects continue to focus on enabling communities to access external information, rather than on the possibility of using media to catalyze community reflection and thereby developmental activity from within. This article shows how this promise can be actualized by providing an overview of an experimental project that made available a set of video cameras to a carefully selected group of community members in a ritualized, largely nonliterate village in Andhra Pradesh, India. It concludes that policymakers, researchers, and practitioners would benefit from considering the possibilities that reflective media hold to generate collective action and consensus building, and that these possibilities can synergize with the need to develop scalable projects."

Mobile communication has become a common phenomenon in most parts of the world. There are indeed more mobile subscriptions than there are people who use the internet. For many people outside of the metropolitan areas of Europe and North America, this is literally their first use of electronically mediated interaction. This preface to the special issue of New Media & Society examines mobile communication in a global context. Through an overview of eight articles situated in the global south, we describe how mobile communication sheds light upon notions of information, appropriation and development and how it is challenging, and in many cases changing, notions of gender. While the mobile phone reshapes development and micro dynamics of gendered interactions, it is not necessarily a revolutionary tool. Existing power structures may be rearranged, but they are nonetheless quite stable. The analysis of mobile communication in the global south helps us to understand the rise of innovative practices around information and communication technologies and, in turn, enables us to develop theory to understand these emergent empirical realities.

"In this paper we develop a conceptual framework for understanding the co-evolution of a virtual community and a hybrid governance regime. The research site is the Eclipse software development community led by IBM and based on data collected from activities of community members, we examine the attempts of participants to construct and refine a hybrid governance structure while developing and expanding the community. Drawing on strategy-as-practice approach and institutional theory, we bring arguments at two instances of this co-evolution process: the initiation and enactment. For the initiation of the community we argue that, beyond market-driven considerations, tensions and polarisation in the existing proprietary regimes, governance structures, and philosophies promote new practices. For the establishment process we emphasise the role of member-driven horizontal and vertical structural adjustments, and the maintenance of open-source developer spirit."

During the last decade or so, schooling policy has had to increasingly grapple with processes that have a global reach. One significant aspect of globalisation has been the global flows of asylum seekers and refugees. Although Australia has a long history of accepting asylum seekers and refugees, in recent times, concerns about national security have fuelled community disquiet about refugees and asylum seekers. As such the 'refugee problem' is a crucial site for research by those interested in the relationships between a vibrant and socially just society and educational policy and practice. This paper draws on Rose's genealogy of 'community' (that is community now a site for governmentality); and Bauman's meditation on 'elusive community' (how can we have both freedom and security?) as a means to think through an appropriate ethico-politics for educators grappling with the refugee problem in Australia.

"Intergroup dialogue is designed to foster commitment to action. This article analyzes papers written by students in 52 intergroup dialogue courses (N = 739) to test a theoretical model of how intergroup dialogue is expected to encourage frequency of acting to educate others and to collaborate with others. The theoretical model posits that dialogue pedagogy fosters distinctive communication processes, which influence psychological processes that, in turn, relate to action (Nagda, 2006 21. Nagda , B. A. 2006 . Breaking barriers, crossing boundaries, building bridges: Communication processes in intergroup dialogues . Journal of Social Issues , 62 : 553 - 576 . [CrossRef] , [Web of Science ®] View all references ; Sorensen, Nagda, Gurin, & Maxwell, 2009 31. Sorensen , N. , Nagda , B. A. , Gurin , P. and Maxwell , K. 2009 . Taking a "hands on" approach to diversity in higher education: A critical-dialogic model for effective intergroup interaction . Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy , 9 ( 1 ) : 3 - 35 . [CrossRef] View all references ). Statistical analyses of the number of references to each of these concepts that were coded in the students' papers provide substantial support for the model. Dialogue pedagogy, communication processes, and psychological processes all influenced how much students wrote about action, and the influence of these concepts conforms to the theoretical model. Results also show that educating others was written about more by students in race/ethnicity dialogues than in gender dialogues, at least partially because students in race/ethnicity dialogues also wrote more about the communication processes and psychological processes that specifically related to educating others."

"In this article, we investigate the question of who benefits from language minority research by analyzing the discourses of language rights and human rights jointly, because language rights are perforce part of human rights. We argue that some 'small' minority languages flourish and others fail unless speakers of these languages articulate their voices and needs. We also explore how human rights discourses relate to traditional practices. The interests of local communities and the involvement of linguists do not enhance the status of minority communities unless linguists traverse the gap between academic discourses on rights and vernacular discourses on similar topics. African linguists are themselves in a double bind: on the one hand, they seek to promote the interests of local communities and, on the other hand, they have to meet their professional obligations. They are not able to address the material needs of local communities because advocating language and human rights cannot resolve Africa's intractable problems. In addition, epistemologically, African scholarship is not sufficiently contextualized to be relevant to complex, labile, and polyvalent contexts. The defining epistemological trope contributing to the crises in African scholarship on rights and other sociolinguistic topics is 'theoretical extraversion': African linguists construe their professional work as a space to test Western constructs rather than to develop endogenous knowledge practices, a situation that is difficult to overcome."

Communication-across-the-curriculum (CXC) programs provide assistance to other disciplines on the teaching and learning of communication-meeting an increasingly important need for students not only to be content specialists, but also coherent communicator

"Indigenous scholars have debated the impact that researchers and the act of researching have on Native and Indigenous people and communities. Although literature on this subject has grown, little has been written explicitly laying out the doing of research with these communities. The authors seek to articulate their doing by drawing upon the essential research principles and standards set by scholars. The authors seek to examine their work as education researchers in three different international contexts-Kenya, Cambodia, and "Indian country" in the United States-highlighting research practice shaped by context, relationship, and discourse emergent in their investigations of schooling, language revitalization, and scientific knowledge access. The authors reflect, analyze, and summarize their actions of decolonizing research that were present or particularly challenging cross-culturally, in each context. Examples of common action in the projects include relinquishing control, reenvisioning knowledge, cultivating relationships, and purposeful representation of communities. Finally, the authors connect their actions to the principles and standards set by scholars and discuss lessons learned."

"This paper considers the intersection of Aboriginal traditions surrounding photography and the use of new technologies as both a research tool and a community resource. Over recent decades Australian cultural institutions have radically altered their management of photographic archives in response to changing political and intellectual circumstances - especially Indigenous advocacy. A sense of moral obligation has become the arbiter of new cultural protocols that have moved far beyond legal provisions for protecting intellectual property. Experiments with new digital tools attempt to understand and balance the role of photographs of Aboriginal people within Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. However, cultural protocols rely significantly upon representations of "remote" Aboriginal communities in northern Australia that emphasize difference and reify practices that may in fact be fluid, and overlap with Western values. In the aftermath of colonialism, photographs are important to Aboriginal communities, especially in southern Australia, not merely as an extension of tradition, but also in the context of colonial dispossession and loss. As a form of Indigenous memory the photographic archive may address the exclusions and dislocations of the recent past, recovering missing relatives and stories, and revealing a history of photographic engagement between colonial photographers and Indigenous subjects."

"Although the Internet is largely decentralized in its communication and social patterns, its technical and regulatory apparatuses are highly centralized and hierarchical. Consequently, digital communications are vulnerable to a degree of surveillance and censorship that would be unthinkable in traditional social arenas, threatening "Internet freedom" and cyberliberties in both democratic and politically repressed societies. We believe a new architecture is required in order to protect the continuance of civil liberties in networked society. In this article, we propose 10 "social specifications" describing the requirements of such a network, and outline an architecture called MondoNet that meets these specifications using ad hoc, wireless mesh networking technologies. We also address the legal and technical challenges facing the MondoNet project, and anticipate future developments in this field."

"Horrible Science is a popular UK-based brand of books, toys and magazines aimed at 7-11 year olds. At first sight, the term 'horrible' might be taken as embodying a critique of science and technology. However, a closer look reveals Horrible Science quite playfully twisting between positive and negative uses of the word, often transforming the latter into the former in the process. The horrible of Horrible Science is clearly signalled as fun. It is domesticated to undermine any sense of fear associated with its imagery. Moreover, the horrible of Horrible Science becomes related to an imagery of truth which is deferential to the work and social standing of the scientific community; it draws analogies between the horrible and science in terms of granting hardness, exclusivity, and even an intuitive closeness to nature. Horrible Science's cultural critique of science and technology, as much as they exist, are accommodated within a traditional discourse of celebrating scientific achievements and deferring to its expertise. By sampling more irreverent discourses, Horrible Science offers a way to excuse a type of earnest reverence, delight and excitement for science that had become unfashionable by the end of the twentieth century. It packages science for sale to a 'public' who want to enjoy science and be seen doing so, but who are also aware of the advantages of their outsider identity. In Horrible Science, an irreverent deference is a form of quite 'late modern' science communication, one that feels the need to show awareness of critique and counter-arguments if it to be trusted by its critically aware audiences."

The community is an important stakeholder in language education, and community views are critical for the successful implementation of new language policies. This article reports on a study on multilingual language policies conducted in two primary school

"This article presents a few issues in the making of our film A Long History of Madness that pertain to the 'Babylonic'. Spoken in 12 languages, ranging across six centuries, and shot in five countries, the film possesses an inherent Babylonism. It makes a case for a multilingual mode of communicating. Yet, beyond the obvious need for verbal communication, for which subtitles are necessary but insufficient, the film presents other reasons for extending the concept of translation. The knot of potential confusion and the need for 'translation' are the ontological uncertainties surrounding 'madness' itself. The key questions are: are people mad? Do they perform madness, or do others perceive them as mad because they are too dissimilar from them to be accepted as 'normal'? This fundamental uncertainty affects all forms of alterity. Translation becomes, then, a tool to negotiate alterity under the terms of the acceptance of this ontological uncertainty."

Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift

The popularity of visual literacy may have resulted, in part, from some school authorities rushing the process of determining school curriculum. This article argues that the haste is reflective of pressure placed on educational discourse to conform to neo-liberal reforms of the sector, and is not the result of a careful and complex debate within the education community. In Australia, such reform has contributed to the erosion of visual art as a discrete subject in the general curriculum. The article accounts for the fact that the lack of careful debate may be due to art educators rehearsing tired arguments for retaining the place occupied by visual art, which smack of sentimentality. The author examines the conceptualisation of visual art at a cultural and theoretical level, and argues that by considering the function art has traditionally played in relation to conceptions of human subjectivity, we may disclose the marginalisation of visual art as a signal of much larger threats to political and economic structures in democratic society. The article considers whether the absorption of 'art' within a broader preference for visual communication, graphic design, or design and technology, is symptomatic of a long-term cultural stagnation.

"Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) has been discussed in Bolivia since the 1970s. The first Educational Act with a bilingual and intercultural curriculum adapted to cultural and linguistic diversity - Ley de Reforma Educativa - was passed in 1994 with implementation starting in 1996. However, discussions continued: when the Evo Morales government was installed in January 2006, it abolished the act initiating work on a new law - 'Ley Elizardo P rez y Avelino Si ani' (decolonised community education) - arguing that intercultural education is more than bilingualism; the new law would emphasise the main values of Amerindian communities. The article will focus on the contextual background of educational reforms in relation to IBE. How is IBE defined and related to an Amerindian context? Why did the government dominated by ministers of an indigenous background abolish an educational act that emphasised intercultural education? Why would a revision not have sufficed? As the historical process is the basis for the current situation, I will begin by presenting the country's history emphasising the state of education and progress."

"This paper reports on classroom-based research that was designed to monitor the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in a teacher-guided collaborative online learning context to encourage students' critical response to literary texts. The study investigates the premise that an ICT project where children read books and then use email communication to exchange responses with other learners will support critical thinking. Videos of classroom observations, journals and rap sheets were analysed for individual students' levels of critical awareness. Improvements in critical thinking were measured using linguistic analysis. Teachers and students were also interviewed for attitudes to technology use related to learning. Although there were gains in critical thinking, there was little student engagement with technology. The discussion problematises the integration of technology in the classroom through a repositioning of collaboration in a blended learning context known as book raps."