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This article interrogates the notion of Web 2.0, understanding it through three related conceptual lenses: (1) as a set of social relations, (2) as a mode of production, and (3) as a set of values. These conceptual framings help in understanding the discursive, technological, and social forces that are at play in Web 2.0 architectures. Based on research during a two-year period, the second part of this article applies these lenses to the case of the Human Rights Portal, a Web portal designed to leverage the participatory knowledge production ethos of Web 2.0 for human rights organizations. This section discusses the design process and the ways in which the discourse of Web 2.0 as parsed through the three lenses described informed this process.

"This paper contrasts the notion of 'independent learning' as perceived by two informant groups at a UK institution of higher education: (1) teachers, educators and providers of education and (2) their students or 'consumers' of education. Both informant groups are staff and students studying in a culture different to that of their first education. They are identified in their receiving institution as 'international', or have identified themselves as such. The experience of transition into a UK University was explored with both informant groups, through interviews and focus groups, over a cycle of two years. 'Independent learning' as rhetoric and practice emerged for both groups as an issue in their transition from familiar to unfamiliar learning culture. Three key insights emerged. Firstly, a mismatch is identified between teacher perceptions and student interpretation of 'independent learning' expectations and practice. Secondly, it emerges that student experience of the learning culture is in a state of continuous flux, evolving between first arrival and end of programme through cycles of bafflement and empowerment. Finally, both students and teachers identify a number of strategies for dealing with this experience of 'transitional' independence. The paper concludes by recommending a notion of 'phased scaffolding' that might inform educational practice and by reflecting on the implications for the educator in revisiting received educational discourse from the perspective of participants negotiating a second learning culture."

"This paper explores the methodological basis for empirically researching moments of major policy change. Its genesis is in the methodological challenges presented by the initial stages of an ongoing research project examining the current attempts to establish the first nation-wide Australian curriculum. We draw on Dorothy Smith's development of institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis to outline a methodological framework for research that has at its centre a concern to understand the social and institutional processes that enable, support and discursively prepare for significant educational reform. Working with and between these two eminent contributions to sociological enquiry, our paper explores the ways in which research can trace educational governance through the production, reproduction and subsequent enactment of generations of policy texts even before they are officially released for use in schools. In particular, we suggest that examination of the day-to-day processes involved in policy production shows how policy texts are progressively invested with institutional meanings and come to instantiate and govern institutional relations. The methodology we are developing foregrounds the creation and dissemination of discourses that support specific orientations to educational practice and governance, as well as the institutional practices that embed the logics of the field."

"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 article contends that the effectiveness of Postcolonial Studies in the Brazilian Academy is inseparable from an understanding of the singularity of Portuguese colonization in Brazil, responsible for the ethnic and cultural formation of the country and for many of the forms taken by its social and economic development, from colonial and monarchic days to the present. Since postcolonial criticism illuminates and is illuminated by the cultural production of the past and present, in the comparison and confrontation of the different colonial systems and their aftermath, Postcolonial Studies may substantially contribute to the research on identity and other crucial issues-in the Brazilian case, notably the problematic of the so-called minority discourses, native cultures and the Afro-descendant legacy vis-à-vis the European heritage."

"The National Rescue Chilan Cypress Forests Campaign between 1998 and 2000 was one of Taiwan's most high-profile environmental movements. The campaign began as a concerted effort to put a stop to the operations implemented by the Veterans Affairs Commission, the managing authority of the old-growth forests in Chilan. The environmental activists then went on to demand a new national park in the area, which was approved by the central government in 2000. Focusing on the ways in which activists articulated the rationale for their protest against a seemingly technical issue, this discussion centres on the discursive themes in the activists' narration of relevant events and environmental history of endemic cypress forests. Drawing on Luhmann's thinking, it argues that an assessment of such discourses should take into consideration the protest/issue distinction specific to modern social movements."

"This article focuses on the administration of disciplinary exclusion (expulsion) from school. It identifies a number of social boundaries between people that negatively affect students subject to permanent exclusion, to the extent that they can be seen as constituting incidents of institutional racism. For example, the high statistical currency of the English language and the lack of adequate translation facilities are shown to constitute social boundaries between people that undermine the participation of parents in school exclusion and inclusion processes. Age assessments for immigrant and refugee children are also seen to affect institutional responses to individual cases of permanent exclusion from school. Assumptions about what excluded students 'need' are found to sometimes be made on the basis of reductive skin‐colour labels, and a disconnect is discovered between the discourses that school and family are socially authorised to adopt in discussing students at risk of exclusion. It is recommended that institutional racism in schooling is acknowledged and acted upon by both policy makers and practitioners."

"This article examines changes in curriculum policy in secondary education in England. It is concerned with recent curriculum policy and reform, and the proliferation of non-government actors in curriculum policy creation. It examines the emergence of a loose alliance of third sector organisations and their involvement in a series of alternative 'curriculum experiments'. The third sector curriculum policy network revolves around a policy vision of decentralisation constituted by public-private partnership, media-friendliness, social enterprise and an 'open source' or network-based organisational logic. It assembles a policy ideal of 'centrifugal schooling' which links together ideas about 'networked governance' with 'flexible' learning and 'entrepreneurial' curricula. The article traces and discusses some of the inter-organisational relations, materials and discourses of the third sector network of alternative curriculum policy developments, and provides a case study of a prototypical third sector curriculum programme. It examines the organisational relations and practices by which the project was produced and the conditions leading to its failure."

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 Right has done much of its work in the name of scientific "objectivity," wildly deploying a popular discourse around "the real world" to achieve a range of specific ends. Complicating this are the long-standing critiques of "objectivity" and "reality"

Marie Lall's contribution uses recently collected empirical data to analyse a slow shift from traditional discourses regarding attitudes towards girls' education according to ethnicity. Using a series of case studies from different ethnic groups in Pakist

In this article I will look closer at the similarities and differences between these two thinkers regarding their psycho-utopian notions. I will conclude with similar reflections on psycho-utopian tendencies in present discourses on information and commun

Challenging incidents associated with privilege and oppression occur daily. Within the fields of adult education and higher education, researchers and practitioners have examined and critiqued the exploration and understanding of privilege (e.g., White privilege). Studies have explored how adult educators, who acknowledged their own White privilege and the norms of whiteness, are working to change systems of privilege and oppression. This work furthers the current literature. The authors employ a meta-narrative approach analyzing narratives from faculty and professionals in the helping fields. The meta-narrative designation of a ''collective story,'' utilizing professional voices is a unique contribution in addressing privilege. The narrative tradition offers participant stories to systematically explore the interaction of dominant and nondominant privilege statuses. The findings relate to transformational learning and verify the need to consistently employ self-reflection and discourse toward examining and refining one's understanding of and interactions with privilege and oppression.

But, just as academics have, for years, sought to critically interrogate texts as part of the classroom, working with students to deconstruct and decode articles, poems, plays, novels, non-fiction books, films, games, and more, we would argue that technology also has become a text, one which plays a central role in our lives and that of our students. What is the relationship between a critically engaged activism, pedagogy, and technology? What does radical teaching with technology look like? How do we, as radical teachers, ensure that we and our students are shaping the content and meaning of technology rather than just being shaped by it? Teaching today, from K-12 through graduate school, is ubiquitously tied to digital technology, and the call to make it more so grows. Institutional resources are increasingly directed toward classroom digital initiatives. The "digital divide" discourse, abandoned for a while

With the increasing use of video recording in social research methodological questions about multimodal transcription are more timely than ever before. How do researchers transcribe gesture, for instance, or gaze, and how can they show to readers of their transcripts how such modes operate in social interaction alongside speech? Should researchers bother transcribing these modes of communication at all? How do they define a 'good' transcript? In this paper we begin to develop a social semiotic framework to account for transcripts as artefacts, treating them as empirical material through which transcription as a social, meaning making practice can be reconstructed. We look at some multimodal transcripts produced in conversation analysis, discourse analysis, social semiotics and micro-ethnography, drawing attention to the meaning-making principles applied by the transcribers. We argue that there are significant representational differences between multimodal transcripts, reflecting differences in the professional practices and the rhetorical and analytical purposes of their makers.

"This article analyses the discursive unities which make possible the current transformation of teacher training and our understanding of teaching as a profession, while focusing particularly on European educational policy and the situation in Slovakia. Using Foucault's archaeological method, we reconstruct the discursive link points between the circumscribed, and at first glance, different approaches to teacher training, where on the one hand, we have a humanistic and constructivist prism, and on the other, we find the pragmatic, economizing pressure of neoliberal educational policy. Discursive reconstruction, however, shows that these approaches are not contradictory, rather that a humanistic and constructivist discourse, by shaping a specific kind of subjectivity (the teachers), supports the neoliberal reform of teacher training and constitutes the reasoning upon which it is based. The analysis is conducted by drawing together various components: the logic of the higher education reforms, the changes to the epistemological basis of teacher training, the regulation of professional development through professional standards, the psychological content and general permeation of entrepreneurial culture into education right through to the performance culture of the 'portfolios', which are the typical attributes of neoliberal governmentality, and not only in teacher training."

"Academic disciplines in the school curriculum which engage explicitly with cultural identities pose a major dilemma for liberal, pluralist societies seeking to foster the dual imperatives of diversity education and social cohesion. This paper uses the case of Islam as school knowledge to analyse the relations between political stances and symbolic constructions in English religious education. For this purpose, the study applies an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, integrating diachronic concepts of the nation-state with cultural recontextualization theory from the sociology of the curriculum."

"The paper positions education and learning in the context of Gilles Deleuze's ethico-political philosophy oriented to becoming-other amidst experiences and events. Deleuze's unorthodox affective epistemology is inseparable from ethics in terms of real-life consequences at the level of practice. The paper presents the critical and clinical analysis of experiential events as texts comprising a mode of the informal pedagogy in terms of creating new concepts, meanings, and values for experience. The logic of sense foregrounds ethical evaluations of experience with regard to multiple directions we might take in novel situations, which disrupt common sense with problems that do not yet yield answers as univocal and unidirectional solutions. The paper conceptualizes a model of the new ethics of integration as a follow-up to the ethics of care in education informed by the relational self-other dynamics and moral interdependence."

An ethical and democratic globality, and the kind of education that would contribute to it, are only possible in the context of a recognition of the relations of power that have shaped history, and in particular the political, cultural, economic, and epis

This article examines the ways in which the complex and at times contradictory project of 'conservative modernization' has altered the terrain of education. It extends the arguments I make in Educating the 'Right' Way (2006) about understanding the 'right