Prince Charming has Perfect White Teeth: Performativity and Media Education

This paper argues that Judith Butler’s post structuralist theory of performativity provides a valuable tool for understanding how students might contest prevailing hegemonic gender discourses in media education classrooms. It suggests an alternative to structuralist "empowerment" and "critical pedagogy" approaches, which continue to motivate many media educators, despite serious questions being asked about their effectiveness. The paper draws on data collected from a unit of work about video games, completed by year ten students at an all boys’ secondary school in Brisbane. It argues that many media related activities fail to elicit genuinely "critical" responses because they are complicit in the regulation of hegemonic discourses. It suggests that teachers are more likely to create the potential for variation in their students’ gender performances if activities are dialogic and open-ended and avoid placing emphasis on discourses of excellence and competition

The Art of Knowledge Exchange: A Results-Focused Planning Guide for Development Practitioners

Designing and implementing knowledge exchange initiatives can be a big undertaking. This guide takes the guesswork out of the process by breaking it down into simple steps and providing tools to help you play a more effective role as knowledge connector and learning facilitator

Not Created Equal: The Effectiveness of Two Types of Educational Computer Games

The purpose of the study is to compare two types of educational video games based on Malone’s (1984) theory of challenge, curiosity, and fantasy. The participants were 136 students from a community college in the southeastern United States. The study used a quantitative approach with participants randomly divided into two groups, one playing each of the two games. Participants were given a brief introduction to a list of French phrases and words, took a pre-test, played the selected game, and then took a post-test to assess content knowledge gain. Brockmyer et al.’s (2009) Game Engagement Questionnaire was used to assess game engagement, a demographic questionnaire to address whether gender, minority status, or socio-economic status affected content knowledge or engagement, and an open-ended question to allow for any additional responses. MANCOVA and follow-up ANCOVA found no significant differences in content knowledge gain or engagement between participants playing the two games, regardless of gender, minority status, or socio-economic status. Additionally, there were no significant differences between pre-test and post-test scores, indicating that neither game proved effective for teaching the material. Although not effective as a teaching tool, the games could be a tool for study and practice to reinforce material that had already been introduced. Additionally, the difficulty of the games may have frustrated the participants, causing them to learn less and eliminating any differences in engagement. Implications for educators include the importance of providing ample practice time to learn the mechanics of learning games, providing sufficient time or repeated exposure to learning games for them to be effective, reserving drill-and-practice games for reinforcement rather than teaching, and ensuring that games’ difficulties are in line with student expectations and abilities. Further research could be conducted comparing two short casual games played repeatedly over the course of a semester comparing multiple class sections, testing a multi-platform mobile game for effectiveness and participants’ willingness to play outside of class time, comparing two longer-playing, user-directed games of the sort championed by Gee (2005) and Harel and Papert (1991), or comparing shorter, casual learning games to longer, in-depth learning games

Growing Up Online: Identity, Development and Agency in Networked Girlhoods

Young women\u27s digital media practices unfold within a postfeminist media landscape dominated by rapidly circulating visual representations that often promote superficial readings of human value. Meanwhile the dominant framing within educational policy and practice of digital media literacy insufficiently captures young people\u27s motivations for engaging in multimedia production, online gaming and blogging. In addition to using digital media for social purposes, and to navigate dimensions of social difference like race, class and gender, working class young women of color also use digital media to develop internal awareness of their selves. The processes of documenting the self, reflecting on the documented self, and laying claim to the intrinsic value of the self are expressions of identity, development and agency. These practices can thus be understood as projects of self-making operating on multiple levels: 1) as articulations of agency against contexts that suppress this agency; 2) as documentations of and reflections on change and growth over time; 3) as explorations of relationality and related themes of care and obligation; 4) and as a means of critiquing structures of power

Pressure, Threat, and Fear in the Classroom: Pupils' and Teachers' Perceptions of Soft Failure in an 11+ Context

This thesis concerns both pupils’ and teachers’ perceptions and reactions to soft failure. Whilst there is widespread agreement that errors and impasses in the classroom can be pedagogically useful, pupils do not always respond positively to soft failure, potentially limiting their learning. Teachers, whilst keen to support pupils experiencing temporary academic setbacks, can unintentionally cement perceptions that errors should be avoided, leading to a co-construction between teacher and pupil of a classroom climate that is unfriendly to error making. In taking a bio ecological and interdisciplinary approach, this thesis addresses a gap in error climate studies through examining the intersection of sociocultural and psychological factors that impact perceptions of, and reactions to, soft failure. This thesis argues that pupils’ reactions to soft failure are imprinted, not only with immediate classroom proximal processes, but also from processes within the home, wider values, and ideologies. Drawing upon the case study genre and bound by the entry and exit points of a selective education system, findings from observations and interviews with Y7 and Y5 pupils suggest the facilitation of classroom peer ecologies orientated towards performance and demonstrating success. Through conceptualising gender as heteroglossic, Y7 grammar school girls were seen to enact masculine, highly competitive performances which reinforced a pressured climate where negative evaluation and soft failure was feared. However, these findings are complicated by pupils’ divergent and fluctuating responses and reactions to soft failure, situated and contextualised by teachers’ error handling, classroom organisation and school processes. Therefore, to establish when soft failure matters for pupils, this thesis explores the interplay of competing values, goals, and interactions. In doing so, the antecedents of soft failure adaptivity are identified, with the perceived threat to pupils’ dignity – which I reason must be understood in an adolescent context — argued as the fulcrum on which soft failure appraisals are made

Advances in Technology Enhanced Learning

‘Advances in Technology Enhanced Learning’ presents a range of research projects which aim to explore how to make engagement in learning (and teaching) more passionate. This interactive and experimental resource discusses innovations which pave the way to open collaboration at scale. The book introduces methodological and technological breakthroughs via twelve chapters to learners, instructors, and decision-makers in schools, universities, and workplaces. The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute and the EU TELMap project have brought together the luminaries from the European research area to showcase their vision of the future of learning with technology via their recent research project work. The projects discussed range widely over the Technology Enhanced Learning area from: environments for responsive open learning, work-based reflection, work-based social creativity, serious games and many more

The People Inside

Our collection begins with an example of computer vision that cuts through time and bureaucratic opacity to help us meet real people from the past. Buried in thousands of files in the National Archives of Australia is evidence of the exclusionary “White Australia” policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were intended to limit and discourage immigration by non-Europeans. Tim Sherratt and Kate Bagnall decided to see what would happen if they used a form of face-detection software made ubiquitous by modern surveillance systems and applied it to a security system of a century ago. What we get is a new way to see the government documents, not as a source of statistics but, Sherratt and Bagnall argue, as powerful evidence of the people affected by racism