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"This article explores how composition courses might address contemporary capitalism's strain on students' time resources through a classroom practice of temporal awareness. The piece discusses two related dimensions of this approach. The first involves incorporating students' considerations of time into course content; the second, rooted in teacher inquiry, asks writing instructors to examine how time mediates the pedagogical relationships developed within their courses."

"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."

"Educational programs designed to bridge the digital divide for girls often aim to increase girls' technological literacy. However, little research has examined what aspects of technological literacy are highlighted in these programs. In this article, I provide a case study of a video game design workshop hosted by a girls' advocacy organization. Through observations, interviews, and analysis of program materials, I look at how the organization conceptualizes technological literacy as contributing to gender equality. I compare this conceptualization to how technological literacy was taught in the classroom. Finally, I draw on situated learning theory to help explain how girls responded to the class. In the end, both the organization's limited notion of how technological literacy could increase gender equality as well as gender and race differences between the teachers and the girls influenced girls' participation in the workshop."

"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."

"This article explores how human interactions with networked technologies enable and constrain the emergence of social structures that nourish public knowledge and experience. By adapting Anthony Giddens' (1984) Structuration Theory and extending its perspective to technology (W. J. Orlikowski, 2000 ), the study endeavors to examine the manner in which engagement with networked technologies by people outside mainstream news organizations reproduces structures that neutralize the power of media institutions to construct social reality, as well as the manner in which their actions simultaneously produce new social structures (N. Couldry, 2000 ). The study is grounded in analysis of the online activities of members of Machsom Watch-a women's organization that monitors the human rights of Palestinians at checkpoints set up by the Israeli army."

News providers such as Bloomberg's multiplatform service and innumerable business-to-business magazines are flourishing despite the hugely challenging economic climate for journalism. They are catering for a new type of global audience that demands a different editorial strategy. Rather than writing news for local markets they produce for a global professional readership. This paper interrogates the nature of this global news style through linguistic analysis, supported by interviews with journalists. The paper raises questions about the continued efficacy of "traditional" models of journalism practice and notions of audience.

This paper looks at examples of journalistic institutions that receive prior funding (as opposed to post facto reward) from charitable foundations. It examines ProPublica in the United States (financed by the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation), Transitions Online in Eastern Europe (financed initially by the Open Society Institute) and the Centre for Public Inquiry in Ireland (closed down by its sole funder, Atlantic Philanthropies, after a government and press campaign against its executive director). Drawing on the sociological literature about foundations, it raises questions about the purposes of philanthropy, about the transparency of media that use philanthropically funded material, and about the assumption of a unitary "public interest" common to both philanthropy and to traditional journalism. It concludes that both a critical understanding of foundations themselves and a consideration of the case-studies presented should encourage wariness about philanthropic funding as an unproblematic model for the future of journalism.

This article describes the culture of some English departments and the value system often attached to various forms of media in them. Because English studies so often values the letter, texts, and the consumption of these, it's been caught in its own hier

This article investigates the contemporary phenomenon of "child media advocacy," or the practice of "empowering" child subjects by providing them with media technologies as a means of self-representation. Tracing the genealogy of this practice to an older ethnographic tradition of "handing over the camera" to the native, or autoethnography, this article argues that the liberatory impulse of child media advocacy needs to be interrogated as a part of the legacy of harnessing media for turning deviant or dangerous types into productive social subjects. The centerpiece of the article is a reading of Born into Brothels, an award-winning film documenting the codirector and photojournalist Zana Briski's humanitarian project to emancipate the children of prostitutes in India by training them in photography and creating avenues for them to sell their own photographs of brothel life. A close reading of two autoethnographic photographs follows, which suggests that the visual rhetoric of immediacy that permeates and surrounds the film conceals a more complex set of transactions that draw on the enduring ethnographic mythology of the mimetic child to authenticate the project of the film. The article concludes by arguing that Born into Brothels puts to work the immaterial or affective labor of children in the production of cultural commodities as a humane and "empowering" alternative to coerced sex work. This move to mobilize the child as a new figure of economic promise indicates the vexed bonds that contemporary humanitarian discourses of media advocacy are forging with the affirmative economic imperatives of neoliberalism.

The internet media require the development of new user skills not required by the traditional media. Current European initiatives focus on providing access to a PC with internet and ensuring basic usage skills to address the digital divide, while media co

BENTO GONÇALVES, Brasil, 31 jul (IPS) - Esta ciudad de 100.000 habitantes en el meridional estado brasileño de Rio Grande do Sul honra desde su nombre al líder de la independentista Revolución de los Farrapos, librada entre 1835 y 1845 bajo la consigna de

This paper reports on a two-day workshop held in Sweden (7-8 April 2008) to bring together researchers and professionals to share insights and experiences in the application of information and communication technology (ICT) to sustainable development (SD)

In this article we focus on new methods of multimodal digital research and teaching that allow for the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy practices in digital and nondigital environments. These methodologies-inflected by feminist re

Social movements operate in 'an environment for politics that is increasingly information-rich and communication-intensive' (Bimber 2001, p. 53). There is an established literature on new ICTs and social movements, but little of it considers mobilization in the global South. This paper presents a case study on the use of ICTs by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African social movement campaigning for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS. McAdam et al.'s comparative framework of three theoretical perspectives on mobilization (McAdam et al. 1996) - mobilising structures, opportunity structures and framing processes - is used to link the analysis into the social movement literature. The findings show extensive use of email, mailing lists and the Internet in TAC activities despite low levels of access among the movement's largely poor activist base. ICTs are used to help the movement engage with elites, professional groups and media, as well as in the development of local and international movement networks. There is also widespread informal use of mobile phones, which a local NGO is working with the TAC to extend. Mobiles are seen as a way to reach the previously disconnected majority, strengthening their involvement in existing processes as well as extending the movement's reach beyond its current branch-based structure.

This article emerges from a long-term project investigating the BBC initiative 'Blast' - an on- and offline creative resource for teenagers. Designed to 'inspire and equip' young people to be creative, the research interrogates the assumptions behind such a resource, particularly in terms of the so-called 'digital native', and tests such assumptions against the populations actually using and engaging with it. It finds that the conception of a 'digital native' - a technologically enthusiastic, if not technologically literate - teenage population, which is operationalized through the workshop structure of BBC Blast, rarely filters down to the teenagers themselves. Teenage delegates to the Blast workshops rarely validate interest based on technological facilities, enthusiasm or competency. Instead, it is peer groups and social alignments which shape declarations and, more importantly, enactments of interest

These texts by Margaret Dickinson consist of a short article written in 1979 for the journal of the UK film trade union, the ACTT, and explanatory notes written in 2010. While the main article is about the author's experiences of teaching film editing to absolute beginners in newly independent Mozambique, the notes provide background information about both Mozambique and ACTT. In the early 1970s elements within the ACTT proposed nationalisation as a solution to problems of the British film industry; the union commissioned a detailed report, which was hotly debated but then shelved. In Mozambique after independence in 1975 the government decided to develop cinema on the basis of partial nationalisation and established a national film institute, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC), for the purpose. There was also a personal connection between ACTT and Mozambican cinema through the film-maker and radical thinker, Simon Hartog, who wrote the ACTT report and was subsequently employed in Mozambique to work for the INC there.

The connections between the concepts of emergence and narrative are manifold, complex and significantly non-obvious, but in one context at least they come together explicitly: the term "emergent narrative" has an established currency in computer game studies as a potential (and desirable) effect of interactive media. Indeed for many it is the holy grail of contemporary computer game design, offering as it does the prospect of reconciliation between the conflicting values of narrative satisfaction and player autonomy. In the academic context of digital media studies, this same promise of synthesis has put emergent narrative in the front line of a long-running debate between ludologists and narratologists about the relative importance of game and narrative paradigms. My argument here suggests that emergent narrative is not the unifying concept it appears to be for computer game studies, though it does have interesting possibilities in that field; more fundamentally, though, I want to argue that this seemingly very specific concept helps to clarify the incommensurability of emergence and narrative and has implications for our larger understanding of the process of narrative sense making. The discussion begins with an introduction to emergence and some indication of its problematic relation to narrative. I then turn to emergent narrative itself, outlining the history of the concept and some difficulties of definition. I argue that these difficulties arise from confusions about the nature of simulation, and I make a case for understanding narrative and simulation as distinct and, in certain respects, antithetical modes of representation.

With the advent of digital technologies, awareness of media is acquiring crucial importance. Media literacy, information literacy and digital literacy are the three most prevailing concepts that focus on a critical approach towards media messages.This article gives an overview of the nature of these literacies, which show both similarities to and differences from each other. The various contexts of their functioning are outlined and additional literacies are mentioned. Especial attention is given to the question of the blurring line between media consumers and producers.

This special issue assembles an international group of scholars to explore emerging connections between comics studies and narrative theory-two fields which, until the last five to ten years, have developed largely in parallel, without much cross-fertilization or even interaction. The signs of this new convergence of scholarly interests and research practices are unmistakable. Recent meetings of the Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the International Society for the Study of Narrative have increasingly featured papers and sessions on the intersections between scholarship on narrative and research on comics and graphic novels. Further, recent publications have featured narratologically oriented work by analysts of graphic narrative, including Jeanne Ewert's and Erin McGlothlin's path breaking studies of Art Spiegelman's Maus, Pascal Lefèvre's analysis of "Narration in Comics" in the inaugural issue of Image [&] Narrative, Teresa Bridgeman's work on bande dessinée, and Richard Walsh's discussion of "The Narrative Imagination across Media" in Modern Fiction Studies' special issue on "Graphic Narrative" (2006). In Francophone scholarship, there is a longstanding tradition of studying comics using semiotic concepts, which are part of the foundation for contemporary narratology.

Journalism educators in Europe are gradually implementing training aimed at breaching borders between national newsroom cultures. At the same time, a "European" journalism culture has yet to materialize on a significant scale in the continent's newsrooms. This article examines this disconnect via a case study of a new transnational journalism education program. Graduates of the Master's in French-German journalism program face challenges in locating jobs that utilize their abilities, in large part because the media world still seems locked into national ways of thinking about journalism. As a result, these future journalists often find themselves in a sort of limbo, armed with a cutting-edge preparation but stymied by a profession still waiting to advance to a pan-European mindset.