The Restructuring of Academic Work in Australia: Power,management and gender

This paper examines how the restructuring of Australia's university system and the introduction of corporate managerialism has changed the work performed by academic staff. The paper illustrates how the emergence of higher education as both a major export industry and a vehicle for attaining greater international competitiveness has led to more intense regulation of academic work. Within a context of funding cutbacks, substantial inequities have emerged between and within universities, as they compete more aggressively for higher education markets. Hierarchical line management, with clear divisions between different categories of academic staff, has substantially replaced collegial forms of administration. This paper demonstrates how these processes have worked to undermine the effective implementation of Equal Employment Opportunity initiatives, as women remain concentrated in the lowest paid and least secure positions within universities.     

Sustainable Innovations: Bringing Digital Media and Emerging Technologies to the Classroom

Because traditional schools struggle to effectively understand, implement, and sustain digital learning initiatives, innovating with digital media in classrooms is a difficult endeavor. Practitioners need examples to better understand conditions necessary to move forward with digital media and learning (DML) in schools. This article provides examples and supports research proposing that context and culture matter when innovating in schools. Three classroom cases using Web 2.0, app development, and game design are discussed, offering educators a pathway to consider similar pedagogical and participatory approaches to foster learning. Classroom contexts, teachers' perspectives, district supports, technical requirements, and scalability are highlighted. The examples suggest innovative DML initiatives can flourish within schools when participants are mindful of context and when a participatory culture is supported (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2006).     

The influence of sport goggles on visual target detection in female intercollegiate athletes

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of sport goggles on visual target detection in female intercollegiate athletes. Participants were randomly divided into three groups that varied in goggle use (G) or no goggle use (NG) over a total of three 1-min trials during a visual target detection task. The NG-NG-NG group did not wear goggles for any of the trials, whereas the NG-G-NG group wore goggles for the second trial only, and the G-NG-G group wore goggles for the first and third trials. The task consisted of illuminated targets arranged in five concentric rings from central to peripheral visual angles. The effects of sport goggles on response time to detect targets were most evident in the peripheral rings. Those who did not wear sport goggles showed improved performance from the first to second trials. This improvement was impaired, however, in those who wore sport goggles. Moreover, there was a reversal of the performance improvements achieved without goggles in those who wore goggles on the third trial. Together, these findings suggest the sport goggles not only impaired the expected initial performance but also impaired visual target detection after performance improvements were seen. These findings suggest sport goggles may impair detection of peripheral visual stimuli in athletes.     

Prospective Elementary Teachers’ Analysis of Children’s Science Talk in an Undergraduate Physics Course

We investigated how prospective teachers used physics content knowledge when analyzing the talk of elementary children during special activities in an undergraduate physics content course designed for prospective teachers. We found that prospective teachers used content knowledge to reflect on their own learning and to identify students’ science ideas and restate these ideas in scientific terms. Based on this research, we inferred that analyzing children’s ideas through videos provides a meaningful context for applying conceptual physics knowledge in physics courses. Activities that are embedded within a disciplinary curriculum, such as those studied here, may help prospective teachers learn to use disciplinary knowledge in exactly the type of activity in which their content knowledge will be most useful: listening to and interpreting children’s science ideas.