Demons, devils and witches: the occult in heavy metal music

Heavy Metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer-good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, Heavy Metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, Heavy Metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British Heavy Metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British Heavy Metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analysis of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of Heavy Metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analysis that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture

Engaging prisoners in education: Reducing risk and recidivism

Engaging prisoners in education is one of a range of measures that could alleviate security risk in prisons. For prisoners, one of the main challenges with incarceration is monotony, often leading to frustration, raising the risk of injury for staff and other prisoners. This article suggests that prisoner engagement in education may help to alleviate security risk in prisons through relieving monotony and reducing re-offending by promoting critical thinking skills. It discusses some of the challenges to accessing higher levels of education in prisons and argues that if education was considered for its risk-reducing potential and measured accordingly, then some of those challenges could be reduced. It concludes with a discussion of projects undertaken in Australia and the UK that introduce digital technologies into prisons to allow greater access to the self-paced higher levels of education which could help realize the benefits of reduced risk and decreased recidivism rates

From ‘hands up’ to ‘hands on’: harnessing the kinaesthetic potential of educational gaming

Traditional approaches to distance learning and the student learning journey have focused on closing the gap between the experience of off-campus students and their on-campus peers. While many initiatives have sought to embed a sense of community, create virtual learning environments and even build collaborative spaces for team-based assessment and presentations, they are limited by technological innovation in terms of the types of learning styles they support and develop. Mainstream gaming development – such as with the Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Wii – have a strong element of kinaesthetic learning from early attempts to simulate impact, recoil, velocity and other environmental factors to the more sophisticated movement-based games which create a sense of almost total immersion and allow untethered (in a technical sense) interaction with the games’ objects, characters and other players. Likewise, gamification of learning has become a critical focus for the engagement of learners and its commercialisation, especially through products such as the Wii Fit. As this technology matures, there are strong opportunities for universities to utilise gaming consoles to embed levels of kinaesthetic learning into the student experience – a learning style which has been largely neglected in the distance education sector. This paper will explore the potential impact of these technologies, to broadly imagine the possibilities for future innovation in higher education

A Prisoners\u27 Island: Teaching Australian Incarcerated Students in the Digital Age

While incarcerated students have always faced many obstacles to full and effective participation in university study, the global shift toward paperless e-learning environments has created new challenges for prisoners without direct internet access. Based on prison focus groups with Australian incarcerated students and direct participant observation while tutoring tertiary students within four Queensland correctional centres, this paper explores the obstacles and constraints faced by incarcerated students in light of the increasing digitisation of materials and methods in higher education. This paper also reviews the outcomes, limitations and challenges of recent Australian projects trialling new internet-independent technologies developed to improve access for incarcerated tertiary students. This paper argues that technology-centred approaches alone will not adequately address the challenges of access for incarcerated students unless such interventions are also informed by an understanding of the sociocultural nature of learning and teaching within correctional centres

Facilitating immersion, engagement and flow in multi-user virtual environments

Virtual worlds are providing myriad opportunities for the development of innovative curricula for tertiary educators. They provide a virtual meeting space for those students and lecturers who are geographically remote from one another, rendering distance irrelevant and facilitating the formation of community. This paper will look at those factors - physical, social, virtual and those related to pedagogy - which facilitate immersion in virtual worlds; that suspension of disbelief which generates the feeling of presence or 'being there', crucial to promoting student engagement and ultimately, flow

A prisoners' island: teaching Australian incarcerated students in the digital age

While incarcerated students have always faced many obstacles to full and effective participation in university study, the global shift toward paperless e-learning environments has created new challenges for prisoners without direct internet access. Based on prison focus groups with Australian incarcerated students and direct participant observation while tutoring tertiary students within four Queensland correctional centres, this paper explores the obstacles and constraints faced by incarcerated students in light of the increasing digitisation of materials and methods in higher education. This paper also reviews the outcomes, limitations and challenges of recent Australian projects trialling new internet-independent technologies developed to improve access for incarcerated tertiary students. This paper argues that technology-centred approaches alone will not adequately address the challenges of access for incarcerated students unless such interventions are also informed by an understanding of the sociocultural nature of learning and teaching within correctional centres

Offline inmates denied education and skills that reduce re-offending

Technology has found its way into virtually every aspect of our daily lives. But for those who don’t have access to the internet and other technologies, how are they expected to keep up? One group for whom this may present a problem is prison inmates. Technology in prison is highly restricted. But, once outside prison, digital literacy skills — the awareness of, knowledge about and ability to select and use digital tools — are necessary to function effectively in 21st-century society

Introduction to the 2014 Digital Rural Futures Conference Special Edition in association with the Regional Universities Network (RUN)

[Introduction]: In June, 2014, the Digital Rural Futures Conference, an initiative of the Regional Universities Network (RUN), was held at the University of Southern Queensland’s Toowoomba campus. RUN, a network of six universities with headquarters in regional Australia, was established in October 2011. The foundation members are CQUniversity, Southern Cross University, Federation University Australia, University of New England, University of Southern Queensland and University of the Sunshine Coast. The RUN member universities play an important and distinctive role in advancing Australia’s national prosperity, productivity and identity through their educational and research contributions to regional economic, social, cultural and environmental development

Digital skills in healthcare practice

The healthcare industry is rapidly evolving in tandem with a demand for increased flexibility in the delivery of education in our fast-paced society. As a result, the passive reception of content by students, delivered by an expert from the front of the class, is becoming increasingly redundant. Students are now being taught, ubiquitous connectivity allowing widespread access to online materials (Collier, Gray, & Ahn, 2011). Programs such as nursing are often offered in an external, online delivery mode (Wright, 2013). Due to an increasingly aging population, healthcare is by far one of the fastest-growing industries, and graduate job seekers choosing to enter healthcare, will need to ensure they have developed sound digital literacies, particularly as they apply to professional communication. It is imperative that students develop and leverage emerging communication technologies as part of their portfolio prior to seeking employment (Clark, 2009; Hargittai & Litt, 2013)

Tackling indigenous incarceration through engagement with higher education

Amnesty International has identified soaring Indigenous incarceration rates as one of the most significant social justice and policy issues for the Australian criminal justice system. Indigenous Australians are 12 times more likely to be in custody than other Australians. A high rate of recidivism for Indigenous offenders contributes significantly to this figure. A tertiary qualification can significantly decrease recidivism rates post-release. However, higher education institutions are increasingly relying on digital technologies that require internet access to support learning and teaching. As a result, students from low socio-economic status backgrounds, particularly Indigenous students, are being progressively excluded from higher education due to their inability to access appropriate technologies and internet access. These factors are greatly exacerbated for Indigenous incarcerated students. This paper reports on an Australian government HEPPP-funded project, Making the Connection, which facilitates participation in digital higher education at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in prisons with a view to reducing recidivism, particularly for Indigenous Australians. Participation in education can help those incarcerated to develop critical thinking skills, digital literacies and the capacity for self-reflection. In addition, it promotes the prospects for employment on release and promotes positive connection to community and families. This helps reduce the risk of reoffending upon release, by equipping people with the cognitive tools to engage constructively with families, communities and an increasingly digital society. Acknowledging that many incarcerated offenders are from low socioeconomic backgrounds and are unlikely to possess all of the skills necessary to successfully undertake higher education, this project facilitates access to the USQ’s Indigenous Higher Education Pathways Program (IHEPP) for Indigenous offenders. Successful completion of this program grants immediate entry to USQ’s Diploma of Arts (Social Sciences) program, Diploma of Business Administration program, or Diploma of Sciences program, all of which can articulate into degree programs. This combination of programs provides multiple entry points into the pathway for Indigenous incarcerated students, facilitating participation for students with varying degrees of experience, education and digital literacy. This is significant given that Indigenous students are half as likely as non-Indigenous students to complete year 12. Low levels of education remain a key part of the ongoing cycle that leads to the over-representation of Indigenous people in Australian prisons. Most correctional jurisdictions prohibit the use of the internet by prisoners, yet most universities are increasingly reliant on the online provision of programs. This often results in the further marginalisation of those who are already marginalised, including prisoners. The Making the Connection project is developing internet-independent digital technologies and a suite of higher education programs that will facilitate participation of incarcerated Indigenous Australians with higher education