Utilising second life machinima-facilitated narratives to support cognitive and imaginative engagement across an undergraduate curriculum

This chapter provides a case study of a unique learning experience developing in the Queensland University of Technology Law School. It outlines initiatives across the undergraduate law curriculum which successfully utilise Second Life machinima in different modes to enhance student engagement and promote authentic learning. They use blended learning environments involving narratives, facilitated by machinima and linked by threads of a common storyline running through all of the programs, in diverse areas of laws and skills. The chapter discusses the pedagogical basis for the use of machinima as a component of a learning and teaching approach, discusses student responses and identifies important lessons concerning the use of connected narratives as a means of engaging students and enhancing their learning across multiple subjects in a curriculum, whether in law or some other discipline. It thereby showcases a successful use of Second Life which does not involve students actually entering the virtual world

Towards new sources of resistance to the currant-lettuce aphid (Nasonovia ribisnigri)

Domesticated lettuce varieties encompass much morphological variation across a range of crop type groups, with large collections of cultivars and landrace accessions maintained in genebanks. Additional variation not captured during domestication, present in ancestral wild relatives, represents a potentially rich source of alleles that can deliver to sustainable crop production. However, these large collections are difficult and costly to screen for many agronomically important traits. In this paper, we describe the generation of a diversity collection of 96 lettuce and wild species accessions that are amenable to routine phenotypic analysis and their genotypic characterization with a panel of 682 newly developed expressed sequence tag (EST)-linked KASP™ single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers that are anchored to the draft Lactuca sativa genome assembly. To exemplify the utility of these resources, we screened the collection for putative sources of resistance to currant-lettuce aphid (Nasonovia ribisnigri) and carried out association analyses to look for potential SNPs linked to resistance