Building student employability through interdisciplinary collaboration: an Australian Case Study

Abstract

Given that graduate employment is a clear outcome of education success, there is an urgent need to conceptualize course design strategically to maximize students’ chances of employment. In this paper, we present an Australian case study in which we used a structured career information literacy learning approach to build employability in a biological sciences capstone course, through collaboration between the university library, academics, and career service. We report the context, method, measurement, outcomes of collaboration, and roles of contributors in this partnership. This case study lends itself to potential ways of incorporating career information literacy into an academic context.     

Citations and RefWorks

ABSTRACT

A practicable approach to meta-assessment is reported involving the use of online research guides as an outreach tool at Western Kentucky University. A series of such guides has been produced that cover each department on campus; this approach lends its way to assessment efforts by identifying discrete and quantifiable target populations across campus. A multiple-regression model is used to predict usage rates on the basis of surrogates for size of potential usership, and variations in quality and size of the guides themselves. The “badness of fit” of the regression model can be used to suggest ways of improving the outreach effort, as the residuals left from the analysis arguably identify related lapses in coverage or promotion. If carried out on an annual basis, the approach provides an almost ideal services assessment tool, since various measures can be taken to improve those guides that during each period are identified as “underachievers.”     

Radio production courses: A survey of current practice

With the domination of broadcasting by television in the 1950s and since, academics of both teaching and research persuasions have tended to ignore the older and larger (in number of stations) medium of radio. Courses in radio announcing and production, usually the oldest in most schools’ curricula, were summarily suspended or simply faded away for lack of student and faculty interest. Meanwhile, of course, radio continued to grow, and with the resurgence of FM and interest in high‐fidelity sound in the mid‐sixties, students in both film and broadcasting courses began to request more audio training and practice. In the following article, the author surveys current practices in radio production based on returns to a nationwide request for data. Throughout, comparison is made with the APBE composite course outline for such a course, published in 1970. Dr. Martin is associate professor in the department of radio‐TV at California State College—Long Beach.     

Forum: Canonical correlation: Response to Wimmer

Although there has been concern about sex and violence on television since the 1950s, little is known about the determinants of public opinion concerning the regulatory response to “inappropriate” television content. Here the Annenberg National Health Communication Survey (ANHCS) is used to predict support for fining television stations for violent and sexual content from a set of precursor demographic, attitudinal, political affiliation, and television exposure variables. The results show that support for fining television stations is primarily a result of the beliefs that sex and violence on television causes sex and violence in teenagers.     

Movie Performance and Recent Trends in Music and Video File-Sharing

This article introduces a theoretical framework that can serve as a conceptual basis for media economics research of the development of media industries. The framework incorporates dynamic expansion and contraction processes and the constant interaction between strategy, structure, and government policy. The focus in this article is on strategic behavior of firms in the communications industry. I posit that these organizations are part of a system of organizations. As a part of this system the communications firm changes and affects the structure of the system, but at the same time the organization is affected by this same environment. The capability of media organizations to develop, augment, structure, and adapt a bundle of internal and external competencies is the central organizing concept.     

Three Times a Study: Business Students and the Library

Revisiting a study performed 30 years ago, researchers at three institutions surveyed undergraduate and graduate students in marketing courses to determine their attitudes toward and knowledge of library services and collections. Results found that 21st-century students are more likely to believe in the importance of library research, to have had library instruction, and to use Web sites and Internet search engines to begin their research. However, they are less likely to read business periodicals. Faced with a list of information sources, they are generally able to pick out a useful resource, although not always the most efficient. Implications for library service to business students are discussed.     

Reading against culture in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism

Edward Said is the literary critic most cited by American anthropologists, but there has been relatively little anthropological examination of his concept of culture. Apart from an isolated attempt by Lila Abu‐Lughod to ‘write against culture’, most anthropologists have ignored Said’s approach. In Culture and Imperialism, Said draws on Matthew Arnold’s ‘best of the best’ definition, while American anthropologists owe their holistic culture to fellow Victorian Edward Tylor. Claude Levi‐Strauss is praised by Said, but other major anthropological approaches to culture are ignored. Said assumes anthropology is on the wrong side of the colonial divide, although he holds out hope for those who are now reading the work of literary and cultural critics. In this essay I compare Said’s reading of anthropology, exemplified by Kipling’s Colonel Creighton, to the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas on ethnographic method.     

Rap as a Social and Political Revealer: Diam's and Changes in French Value Systems

Abstract

In 2006, a young female rapper named Diam's released an album that became the best‐selling CD in France: her CD and its reception is treated as a social phenomenon and examined against the backdrop of political arguments which developed in France in 2006–2007. Musical analysis shows that the sonic backgrounds of Diam's rap illustrated the importance of combinations and hard work in the symbolical production of a new order. Her texts manifested new combinations of social values which brought into the public debate changes in value systems that were just becoming developed enough to be taken up by political organisations and leaders. This is why the main themes in Diam's CD converged with topics engaged by the two main candidates in the French 2007 presidential election. This paper, combining the resources of musicology, literary analysis and political sociology analyses how Diam's put in aesthetic and emotional forms combinations of values that had been brewing underground for the past 30 years. It invites a reconsideration of the interpretation of rap as an expression of rebellion, or even as an element of counter‐culture, and apprehends it as a ‘social revealer’ that brings new values and representations into public debate and stimulates discussion around them. Diam's album was an ‘unidentified political object’ that shed original light on the way politics and politician are perceived by ordinary citizens, or specific groups among them, such as the youth.