Kitty Vigo

Manningham On-Line—Using Global Technologies for Building Local Electronic Commerce Business

The extraordinary increase in internet access and the growth of internet purchases in countries such as Australia over the last five years would suggest a significant culture shift is occurring at the grassroots level in communications, information access and purchasing practices. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at August 1999 home Internet access had increased by 27% in the 12 months previous to August 1999, with nearly 23% of all Australian households (1.6 million) being online. Further, an estimated 5.6 million adults—or 41% of Australia’s total adult population—accessed the Internet at some time between August 1998 and August 1999. The survey also indicated an increase in internet-based e-commerce transactions, with nearly 5% of Australian adults (652,000) using the Internet to purchase or order goods or services for their own private use in the 12 months to August 1999 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1999).

ELECTRONIC DELIVERY OF CURRICULUM: PREPRODUCTION OF CYBERSCRIPTS

New systems for delivering curriculum are creating new challenges for academics. The continuing development of new electronic concepts and approaches produce new literacies. These relate to new ways of `writing’ curriculum, new relationships between the learner and the teacher and new paradigms of discourse. This paper looks at how academics might go about transforming their print-based materials so as to explore the opportunities offered by the new writing technologies. It proposes that electronic textuality and discourse, like all writing, has a structure and form. Even the fluid and singular writing for the new multilayered virtual spaces provided by the emergent electronic culture needs concept planning and preproduction scripts. It argues that the fluidity provided by the new electronic textuality itself still needs to be approached through a process of planning, trying out, imagining, conceiving and communicating to oneself and to others. It investigates how this involves writing a multi-layered script and explores the possibilities offered by electronic texts such as: the provision of immediate information; an interplay of the seen, the heard and the read; the introduction of virtuality, interactivity, IMMediacy and self-authority. In doing so, it establishes a process which will enable academics to construct their curricula fully by exploiting the differences offered by new writing technologies