Europe and the Media: Building a New Kind of Europe : Is Mass Media the Key?

The book is a joint effort of eight academics and journalists, Europe specialists from six countries (Australia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, the United Kingdom and the United States). They give sometimes divergent views on the future of the so-called “European Project”, for building a common European economy and society, but agree that cultural changes, especially changes experienced through mass media, are rapidly taking place. One of the central interests of the book is the operation of the large media centre located at the European Commission in Brussels – the world’s largest gallery of permanently accredited correspondents. Jacket notes: The Lisbon Treaty of December 2009 is the latest success of the European Union’s drive to restructure and expand; yet questions persist about how democratic this new Europe might be. Will Brussels’ promotion of the “European idea” produce a common European culture and society? The authors consider it might, as a culture of everyday shared experience, though old ways are cherished, citizens forever thinking twice about committing to an uncertain future. The book focuses on mass media , as a prime agent of change, sometimes used deliberately to promote a “European project”; sometimes acting more naturally as a medium for new agendas. It looks at proposed media models for Europe, ranging from not very successful pan-European television, to the potentials of media systems based on national markets, and new media based on digital formats. It also studies the Brussels media service, the centre operated by the European Commission, which is the world’s largest concentration of journalists; and ways that dominant national media may come to serve the interests of communities now extending across frontiers. Europe and the Media notes change especially as encountered by new EU member countries of central and eastern Europe

Leonardo Bruni, the Medici, and the Florentine Histories

Others, like the prominent humanist and anti-Medicean agitator Francesco Filelfo, would soon join the first wave of exiles.4 Bruni was not only linked to such men by ties of patronage and friendship; he had also for many years acted as the chief ideologue of the preMedicean oligarchy.5 One might logically expect that he too would become a victim of Medici vengeance in 1434, or soon thereafter. Other scholars have stressed that Bruni-despite the occasional flamboyance of his civic rhetoric-was always an advocate of restricted government.8 While the power struggle between the Medici and their adversaries was real enough, the system Cosimo and his associates introduced after 1434 differed from its predecessor only in the consistency with which it was applied

Windschuttle at War: The Politics of Historiography in Australia

Keith Windschuttle unleashed a storm of controversy with the publication of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-1847 (2002; reprinted with corrections 2003). In a series of events unusual for works of this kind, Windschuttle’s book received considerable media exposure: almost immediately it became the focal point of impassioned debate. The debate moreover continues and promises to be with us for some time. The Fabrication is in fact the first of a projected series of volumes in which the author proposes to reexamine the early history of relations between White settlers and the indigenous populations of Australia (Windschuttle, 2003c: 3-4). The title Windschuttle chose for the book says a great deal about its contents. While purporting to rewrite a chapter of early Australian history, Windschuttle is in fact more concerned with examining recent Australian historiography. The Fabrication derives its power from being an act of accusation. Windschuttle’s real intent is to expose what he sees as gross malpractice within the Australian historical profession. His chief accusation is that a number of leading academic historians—including Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds—have falsified the picture of race relations in early Australia. They have, according to Windschuttle, unduly over-emphasized conflict and violence as their main themes in discussing relations between Whites and Blacks. Windschuttle criticizes Ryan for using the term genocide to describe settler behavior towards the indigenous Tasmanians (Windschuttle, 2003c: 4, 13; Ryan, 1996: 255). He chastises Reynolds for depicting the Tasmanian Aborigines as engaged in a guerrilla war to defend their lands against the White invaders. He deplores the way both historians stress that British settlement of Tasmania proceeded through a process of physical elimination of the native populations

Teacher corrective practices in the foreign language classroom: the effect of timing

Since the mid-seventies, research in second language acquisition has studied teacher corrective practices under the name of "feedback." Such research has been regarded as crucial to the language teaching profession, which is faced with the issue of how to react when students make errors in the foreign language classroom. By now, there is a wealth of studies that have described teacher feedback strategies (Chaudron, 1988) or investigated the effect of different feedback types on learner language development (Long, Inagaki & Ortega, 1998; Lyster and Ranta, 1997). Such studies have analyzed teacher feedback during classroom interaction, but only a few of these studies have examined the effect of timing on teacher corrective practices (Loewen, 2004). Timing was nevertheless identified as a fundamental factor in pioneering studies (Hendrickson, 1978). These studies established a distinction between two moments when teachers may choose to deal with correction: Teachers may 1) correct learners immediately after the error or 2) they may decide to delay correction until after an activity is completed. The present paper intends to analyze the second option (delayed feedback) presenting a study designed on the following basis: The practices of three teachers who provided learners with feedback after the performance of a role-play were recorded and transcribed; The transcripts allowed the analysis of 50 sequences, each sequence dealing with the correction of previously emitted error(s). Results showed a contrast between two broad approaches to the management of feedback: The teacher may opt either to review errors without giving students the opportunity to respond to feedback or the teacher may push learners to self-correct and “uptake‿ the correct form (Lyster and Ranta, 1997). The paper discusses the potential value of each approach for language learning by referring to previous research in second language acquisition

Introducing changes in the tertiary language classroom: report on an action research project

Language programs in Australian universities are hiring more and more sessional staff employed on a casual basis to assume the teaching of foreign language courses. Sessional staff include postgraduate students and external staff hired on an hourly basis to teach a specific course. This increase in the number of sessional staff raises the question of their training. Even though some sessional staff are highly qualified and have previous classroom experience, most are at an early stage in their careers and need some help to carry out their language teaching duties efficiently. This paper will report on the initial, exploratory phase of a project aimed at developing a model for the training of sessional staff involved in the teaching of French courses at the University of Queensland. The report will show how contextual constraints such as time and the absence of a formal contract were overcome by introducing an in-service model of teacher training. The main features of the model include the focus on one area of teaching practice, error correction, which has been the object of extensive research in the field of Applied Linguistics, and the use of an action research approach to teacher professional development. The paper will conclude with a discussion on the future of the model. The use of action research combined with the application of findings from academic research may be regarded as innovative aspects of the model. However, further development of this professional in-service training model is very much dependent on the availability of funds to finance mentoring and sessional staff seminars

Re-Thinking Biography

Should biography have a place within a conference like the present one? Does biography have a legitimate role to play in humanities and social science research as conceived and practiced today, in the twenty-first century? Or is biography, as Bourdieu (1986: 69) once claimed, a cheat: “one of those common sense notions that have somehow managed to sneak their way into scientific discourse‿