Rachel Buchanan

FYI…Virtual Space Has a Context: Towards an Alternative Frame for Understanding Cyberbullying

Whether we like it or not, computer-generated realities are networked into our everyday lives. From simple financial transactions and communicating via email to participation in social networking sites, writing personal blogs, video posting on YouTube and the formation of avatars to navigate online or as new identities for virtual worlds such as Second Life, digital communication and online participation is ubiquitous. The popularity and currency for young people of having an online presence suggests that there is something motivating them to shift their social space and relationships into the virtual. Whilst often these connections or networks offer opportunities for friendships to flourish, they also provide a platform for negative and distressing relationships, sometimes dominated by persistent and aggressive communication — or cyberbullying.

University student perspectives on institutional non-disclosure of disability and learning challenges: reasons for staying invisible

ABSTRACT Students with disabilities (SWD) in Australian higher education need to disclose to their institution to access a range of ‘reasonable adjustments’ to support their learning. Nationally, 5.8% of the university population disclose their disability to their institution. It is suspected that there is a much larger population of students who choose non-disclosure, and therefore decide not to access support. Very little is known about the reasons for non-disclosure as this group represents a hidden population in higher education. The research reported here is based on a survey of undergraduate students in one regional Australian university where disability was reframed as ‘learning challenge’. This identified the institutionally non-disclosed group. This research identified that there were sound reasons for non-disclosure, students continually weigh up potential disclosure during their study, and students have difficulty with the disclosure process. We conclude that institutions need to understand that they have an invisible group of non-disclosing SWD in their student populations and that, to meet their learning challenges, universities need to support changes to policies, procedures and curriculum design.

The global and the local: taking account of context in the push for the technologization of education

Education in Australia, it could be argued, has undergone a “digital turn” (Buchanan, 2011). That is to say, digital technologies are no longer simply something that students learn “about,” but are now something that they increasingly learn “with.” It is a common expectation that digital competencies are embedded in all areas of teaching across all years of education. The push for the increased use of technology in education can be understood as a product of the globalization of education, evident not only in the Australian education system, but in education systems worldwide. Within this global context, the nature of research into educational technology is also undergoing a shift and an expansion in focus. Selwyn highlights the need for researchers in this area to be “looking beyond learning” (2010, p. 65). He calls for a critical research approach, one that incorporates a richer account of the contexts in which educational technologies are employed; one that examines wider political, social, and cultural contexts of the use of digital technologies, and one that queries the implications for social justice and democracy.

Post no photos, leave no trace: Children’s digital footprint management strategies:

Given that today’s children are prolific users of the internet, concern has been raised about the future impact of the digital footprints they are currently generating. Here, we report on the Best Footprint Forward project which utilised focus groups to investigate the digital footprint awareness of 33 children (ranging in age from 10 to 12 years old) from three primary schools in regional Australia. The children were very aware of their digital footprints and cyber safety but had little awareness of the positive potential of digital footprints. Instead, they exercised their agency through the use of strategies to minimise their digital footprint. We offer an alternative perspective to the dominant discourse that insists that a digital footprint is primarily a liability and seek to counter the positioning of children as naïve, passive consumers of digital culture. We conclude that 10–12 years old is an appropriate age to begin to educate for positive digital footprint curation as this would build on children’s demonstrated knowledge of cyber safety and supplement their existing digital footprint management strategies with beneficial alternatives.

Institutional statements of commitment and widening participation policy in Australia

This article describes ways in which the equity agenda, as outlined in the Bradley Review of Higher Education (Bradley et al., 2008), is translated into action in one Australian university. Drawing on the conceptual work of Ahmed (2012) to elaborate institutional life, we investigate the effects of the widening participation policy. Ahmed (2012) provokes us to consider institutional commitment as a non-performative in order to examine the association between names and effects as central to institutional cultures. This is achieved through a focus not only on what documents circulating within institutions say but what they do from the perspective of those working with them. The paper draws on three statements of commitment made by various Australian universities in the form of publicly available mission statements and strategic plans to explore how universities value, construct and authenticate their role in widening participation. It then proceeds by supplementing these texts with qualitative data gathered through semi-structured interviews with academic and professional staff in one Australian university to examine how such statements of commitment inform us of the extent to which they are practised or utilised as demonstrations of action in and of themselves. Drawing on Rizvi and Lingard’s (2011) work on social equity in Australian higher education, we argue that statements of commitment to equity and widening participation from universities in the current neoliberal policy assemblage can function to mask the ways in which universities continue to redefine educational values in terms of economics (Rizvi and Lingard, 2011).