Protecting a threatened coastal fish species through regional collaboration

Rainbow smelt (Osmerus mordax) are small anadromous fish that live in nearshore coastal waters during much of the year and migrate to tidal rivers to spawn during the spring. They are a key prey species in marine food webs, as they are consumed by larger organisms such as striped bass, bluefish, and seabirds. In addition, smelt are valued culturally and economically, as they support important recreational and commercial fisheries. The Atlantic Coast range of rainbow smelt has been contracting in recent decades. Historically, populations extended from the Delaware River to eastern Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Buckley 1989). More recent observations indicate that rainbow smelt spawning populations have been extirpated south of Long Island Sound, and evidence of spawning activity is extremely limited between Long Island and Cape Cod, MA. In the Gulf of Maine region, spawning runs are still observed, but monitoring surveys as well as commercial and recreational catches indicate that these populations have also declined (e.g., Chase and Childs 2001). Many diverse factors could drive the recently noted declines in rainbow smelt populations, including spawning habitat conditions, fish health, marine environmental conditions, and fishing pressure. Few studies have assessed any of these potential threats or their joint implications. In 2004, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) listed rainbow smelt as a species of concern. Subsequently, the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts were awarded a grant through NMFS’s Proactive Conservation Program to gather new information on the status of rainbow smelt, identify factors that affect spawning populations, and develop a multi-state conservation program. This paper provides an overview of this collaborative project, highlighting key biological monitoring and threats assessment research that is being conducted throughout the Gulf of Maine. (PDF contains 4 pages

Discovering Design Possibilities through a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies

Research and educational policies have alerted teachers to the importance of multiliteracies. Communication in society today is characterised by rapidly changing and emergent forms of meaning-making in a context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. This paper responds to these imperatives, releasing key findings of a critical ethnography concerning interactions between pedagogy and access to multiliteracies among culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Data collection involved 18 days of lesson observations over 10 weeks using field and journal notes, continuous audiovisual and audio recording, and the collection of cultural artefacts. Semi-structured interviewing was also conducted with the teacher, principal, and four students. Data analytic tools included low and high inference coding and pragmatic horizon analysis. Findings concerned the use of overt instruction and situated practice in the teacher’s enactment of the multiliteracies pedagogy. This had a significant influence on the learners’ability to access claymation movie designing. Comparisons are made between the learning that occurred for students of the dominant, Anglo-Australian, middle-class culture, and for those who were not. The conclusion addresses relevant literature concerning how to apply the multiliteracies pedagogy to enable meaningful designing

Parsing the Australian English curriculum: Grammar, multimodality and cross-cultural texts

The release of the Australian Curriculum English (ACE) by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has revived debates about the role of grammar as English content knowledge. We consider some of the discussion circulating in the mainstream media vis-à-vis the intent of the ACE. We conclude that this curriculum draws upon the complementary tenets of traditional Latin-based grammar and systemic functional linguistics across the three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy in innovative ways. We argue that such an approach is necessary for working with contemporary multimodal and cross-cultural texts. To demonstrate the utility of this new approach, we draw out a set of learning outcomes from Year 6 and then map out a framework for relating the outcomes to the form and function of multimodal language. As a case in point, our analysis is of two online Coca-Cola advertising texts, one each from South Korea and Australia

Book Review: New learning: Elements of a science of education

This book review for the Australian Educational Researcher (in press) reviews the promising new title: New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, by Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope (2008)

What are the threats and potentials of big data for qualitative research?

Amid the big claims of big data, analytics, datification, and data mining, this article answers central questions for qualitative research. In the debates about the enormity and ubiquity of data in the digital world, qualitative research endeavors are seemingly threatened. But is big data necessarily better? Can big data answer the fundamental questions that qualitative researchers ask? This article interrogates the key issues for qualitative researchers in the big data era, positioning big data in its historical context. This article offers a critique of assumptions about access to big data, and uncovers the dark side of big data and privacy in a risk society. The potentials of big data for qualitative research are examined, providing recommendations to bring together complementary research endeavors that map large scale social patterns using big data with qualitative questions about participants’ subjective perceptions, rich expression of feelings, and reasons for human action

Big Data for Qualitative Research

Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges. The data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments. Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other networked data, and can provide valuable evidence for study of phenomena. This book explores the potentials of qualitative methods and analysis for big data, including text mining, sentiment analysis, information and data visualization, netnography, follow-the-thing methods, mobile research methods, multimodal analysis, and rhythmanalysis. It debates new concerns about ethics, privacy, and dataveillance for big data qualitative researchers. This book is essential reading for those who do qualitative and mixed methods research, and are curious, excited, or even skeptical about big data and what it means for future research. Now is the time for researchers to understand, debate, and envisage the new possibilities and challenges of the rapidly developing and dynamic field of big data from the vantage point of the qualitative researcher

Big Data for Qualitative Research

Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges. The data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments. Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other networked data, and can provide valuable evidence for study of phenomena. This book explores the potentials of qualitative methods and analysis for big data, including text mining, sentiment analysis, information and data visualization, netnography, follow-the-thing methods, mobile research methods, multimodal analysis, and rhythmanalysis. It debates new concerns about ethics, privacy, and dataveillance for big data qualitative researchers. This book is essential reading for those who do qualitative and mixed methods research, and are curious, excited, or even skeptical about big data and what it means for future research. Now is the time for researchers to understand, debate, and envisage the new possibilities and challenges of the rapidly developing and dynamic field of big data from the vantage point of the qualitative researcher

Race, the senses, and the materials of writing and literacy practices

This chapter argues that the changing materiality of writing and literacy practices has an inherently cultural dimension, requiring shifts in dominant writing practices and countercolonial literacy pedagogies. Such a shift requires relevance to the ecological world of Indigenous culture and experience, as well as mobile and creative digital environments where the materials of writing and literacy practices are constantly changing

The multimodal construction of race : A review of critical race theory research

Issues of race periodically rupture in the national and internationalconsciousness, while at other times, there is a false belief thatsociety has arrived at a post-racial era. Either way, there remainsimpetus for the critical interrogation of the racialisation ofmultimodal literacies in education, and critical race theory (CRT) is aleading approach. This article reviews original studies thatcollectively analyse multimodal texts and practices to understandthe construction of race in education. Multimodal texts haveproliferated in online textual ecologies due to the ease ofproduction and rapid global dissemination of image-based texts inthe twenty-first century. Such texts combine two or more modes,such as images, words, sounds, and gestures. Sites for thecirculation of multimodal literacies–online and offline–serve todisrupt, reify, or perhaps even exacerbate racial identities, prejudice,and subordination in education. The review highlights the prevalentthemes: (a) Discursive construction of race in the spoken mode, (b)Anti-racist and multimodal counter-narratives, (c) The racialisationof multimodal literature for children and adolescents, and (d) Racein music, visual and performing arts, and digital media. Gaps in CRTresearch and challenges are posed for future research of race in thecontext of cultural and technological change

Introduction : Digital diversity, ideology, and the politics of a writing revolution

This chapter outlines some key theoretical directions important for studying writing and literacies in digital cultures. Digital Futures articulates new perspectives concerning the ethical, sensorial, and critical elements of writing and literacies, and contemporary debates at the nexus of literacies and digital rhetoric that have direct relevance to the social construction of authorial identities for youth and other writers in education contexts. Digital Diversity brings together the work of scholars from around the world to address issues of inclusion in contemporary writing and literacies research, from race to gender, and to the geographical displacement of refugees. Digital Spaces shifts the focus to social spaces that discursively shape, and which are shaped by, writing and literacies practices. Digital Ethics debates current ethical concerns associated with the social and ethical risks of children and young people's access to information on the Internet