Putting textbooks to work: empowering religious education teachers

In 2002 a paper entitled Writing Church‐sponsored Religious Education Textbooks by Engebretson was published in the British Journal of Religious Education. This paper reported on and analysed some aspects of the development, by the Catholic Archdiocese in Melbourne, Victoria, of a series of religious education textbooks to be used in all Catholic schools in the Archdiocese. The paper contextualised the series, entitled To Know, Worship and Love, in the field of literature on textbooks in the classroom. It discussed some local issues that had led to the decision to produce religious education textbooks, explained and justified the choice of content for the middle secondary books, and discussed the presentation of the books. In the final section of the paper, it was indicated that future papers would report on the evaluation of the series and its implementation, as a three‐stage research project was completed. The first stage of the research project collected responses from teachers and Religious Education Co‐ordinators (RECs) to the Years 7 and 9 books, that is those books written for students of 12 and 14 years respectively. This paper discusses a significant finding that emerged from this stage of the research, that is the relationship between textbook use and level of qualifications and experience in the teaching of religious education. This major finding is of interest in relation to a range of educational issues in religious education, including the role and use of resources, the mandation of resources by Church hierarchies, creativity and flexibility in teaching religious education, teacher confidence and experience and the important issue of content knowledge. Further papers will explore evaluations of the Years 8 and 10 books, and overall issues that have emerged from this Archdiocesan curriculum project.     

SNS use by the Korean government: a case of Me2Day

This study examines the debates and discussions surrounding the Korean government's Me2Day, the largest social networking and microblogging site in the country used by 26 government bureaus, including the Blue House. Me2Day users post messages composed of up to 150 characters and establish links with other users through multimedia-based information and knowledge obtained from their browsers, desktop computers, e-mail messages, and mobile phones. This study provides a better understanding of the characteristics and structures of cyberspace communication between the Korean government and citizens. The results indicate that although each bureau had different goals in terms of using Me2Day, users were more likely to use the service if their bureau actively posted messages or responded to user comments. Users tended to have critical attitudes toward the Korean government when they were allowed to freely post messages and share information.     

A comparison of the TV audio and radio coverage of a special event

The ever‐increasing length of broadcast coverage of the orbital flights of our Astronauts is only one example of the ever increasing use of the radio and television media to capture the “here” and “now.” Although audiences are large for this sort of programming, it is unlikely that it will be large enough to provide sufficient revenue to pay for the enormous cost of major special events coverages. Richard Lindheim, a graduate student in the Department of Telecommunications of the University of Southern California, has performed a pilot investigation which leads to the conclusion that some of broadcastings effort at the coverage of special events may be redundant.