Chad Habel

‘I can do it, and how!’ Student experience in access and equity pathways to higher education

Alternative pathways and enabling courses such as foundation programmes are well-established in some tertiary institutions and are likely to be broadened and enhanced across the sector. If such a course is designed along the lines of Biggs’ constructive alignment, it would be hoped that students would be likely to adopt a ‘deep approach’ to learning through their course of study. In addition, it is often assumed (but rarely properly demonstrated) that such courses promote the confidence of students to achieve well in their academic studies. This study explored changes in approaches to learning and academic self-efficacy in the first topic of a Foundation Course, using Biggs’ R-SPQ-2F and a newly developed academic self-efficacy scale. While the findings on approaches to learning were inconclusive, analysis showed a substantial and statistically significant increase in academic self-efficacy.

Agency mechanics: gameplay design in survival horror video games

This article proposes the notion of ‘agency mechanics’ as an innovative design element of video games. It begins by exploring the well-documented interactive elements of horror cinema, and goes on to explore how strategies such as the sadistic/masochistic gaze and narrative perspective have been further developed in video games. It then explores work to date on the manipulation of interactivity in video games before closely analysing how agency and control are managed in the survival horror franchise Dead Space. It concludes with reflections on further research in the nexus between film and games, and further possibilities for game design through the explicit management of agency mechanics.

Opening Spaces of Academic Culture: Doors of Perception; Heaven and Hell.

ABSTRACT Academic culture is a distinct and unique field, and perhaps may best be conceptualised as a space. Although access to university has traditionally been restricted, recent efforts on a number of fronts have attempted to ‘open’ the space of the academy. In particular, enabling programmes such as Preparatory Programs and Foundation Courses aim to provide both access and enabling experiences to students who have found the doors of the university closed to them. The research reported here combined a Bourdieuian framework with a phenomenological methodology to explore the lived experience of students who were most of the way through such a programme at a Go8 Australian university. Thirteen students were interviewed and the data were analysed for experiences of enculturation and positive transformation, as well as alienation and negative transformation. The results showed that while in general the students are able to adopt the habitus of academic culture this was a painful and difficult process, and not entirely successful in all cases. This, combined with the inherent limitations of much research of this kind, gives us reason to pause in the overarching story of social mobility that usually surrounds these types of programmes.

Little Big Learning: Subversive Play/GBL Rebooted

Game-based learning is a buzzword heard with increasing frequency in educational technology circles, but these discussions often proceed with an insufficient understanding of the nature of play in a social and cultural context. This chapter problematises some common approaches to game-based learning by exploring social dynamics and relations of power to propose a more critically disruptive model of game-based learning. Using the Little Big Planet franchise as a case study, it argues that game-based learning serves little purpose if it replicates authority-centred, transmissive ideas of learning, and that focussing on players/students as the producers (not just consumers) of digital texts for learning is significantly more productive.

From Learning Adviser to Coordinator: A Professional Career Arc

A colleague and good friend once remarked to me that as a child, no-one ever plans to grow up to be a Learning Adviser. Indeed, our careers are often haphazard and ad hoc, but it is often easier to impose some semblance of order on them part-way through. A professional vision often has 20/20 hindsight, as well.