Rebecca Johinke

Employing Wikipedia for good not evil: innovative approaches to collaborative writing assessment

Wikipedia is an open educational resource that connects writers and editors to diverse discourse communities around the world. Unwarranted stigma is attached to the use of Wikipedia in higher education due to fears that students will not pursue rigorous research practices because of the easy access to information that Wikipedia facilitates. In studies referred to in this paper, undergraduate writing students are taught about the need to interrogate any information they find on Wikipedia just as they would other online source material. They are inducted into fact checking, editing and creating Wikipedia articles as a means to analyse source material critically and to advance their research, writing and digital literacy. Meanwhile, in a postgraduate course in magazine studies, instead of writing essays, students are promoting Australian magazines and print culture by writing Wikipedia entries about Antipodean magazines and their editors. These courses experiment with new approaches to formative and summative assessment; promote group research, collaborative and participatory writing, writing across networks and negotiating discourse communities; and challenge students’ perceptions about peer review and the legitimacy of Wikipedia.

Not quite Mad Max: Brian Trenchard-Smith's Dead End Drive-In

Abstract This article suggests that Dead End Drive-In (1986), Brian Trenchard-Smiths little-known Ozploitation film, deserves reconsideration from Australasian film scholars because it offers a valuable contribution to discussions about Australian masculinity, car culture, phobic narratives and the White Australia Policy. It is argued that the drive-in as detention centre foreshadows later Australian anxieties about immigration and border protection. Clearly a ‘phobic narrative’ full of ‘white panic’ (Morris, 1989, 1998), it exhibits many of the anxieties about Australians and ‘auto-immobility’ that Catherine Simpson (2006) discusses, and fits neatly into Tranters (2003) discussion of cars and governance and Bodes (2006a) arguments about whiteness and Australian masculinity in crisis.

The Pleasure of Losing One’s Way: Adapting Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”

The fact that Edgar Allan Poe’s life and work remain a popular source text for adaptation is well established. Any search of a movie database like IMDB or a simple Wikipedia search using “Poe” and “adaptations” or “Poe” and “popular culture” provides ample evidence to support this claim.1 Immediately after Poe’s death in 1849, the process of adapting his life and work began with Rufus W. Griswold’s famous obituary.2 As Kyle Dawson Edwards describes, “By the end of the nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe was enmeshed in [a] self-perpetuating rhetorical machination that used his life story as fodder to fuel further scrutiny, speculation, intrigue, and adulation” (5). Moreover, Poe himself was clearly fixated on mythologizing his own life and writing, which contributed to the blurring between his fiction and his life and is played out in many Poe adaptations. Poe’s self-reflexive writing, along with his scathing reviews of other writers’ work, his interest in the creative process, and his habit of hoaxing, ensured that Poe was central to discussions about American letters during his lifetime. His fascination with hoaxes and plagiarism also demonstrate that Poe himself was alert to the possibilities of adaptation as, what Hutcheon would describe as, a “process” and a “product” (xiv). In this chapter I want to explore how adaptations of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) can help us grapple with broader questions about adaptation studies and what Linda Hutcheon describes as the pleasures of “repetition” and “change” across a range of media from films to video games (9).

Take a walk on the wild side: Punk music walking tours in New York City:

Walking tours on the streets of cities like New York offer music fans the opportunity to tread in the footsteps of their punk rock idols. Music lovers seek a tourist experience that constructs intra- and inter-personal authenticity as a ‘true fan’ as they seek to see for themselves where their idols lived, worked, recorded, and performed in New York City. Music walking tours are situated as a form of embodied music tourism or psychogeographic practice as they connect fans with the soundscape and the cityscape. When fans document their walking experience, they contribute to a history of music culture and to the practice of music tourism as an embodied social practice. This article engages with popular media through tourism and tells the story of one of many cultural communities with a special tie to the Lower East Side.

“Get Swiping!”: The magazine editor's role in guiding readers from print to new media

This paper argues that in the period between 2010 and 2014, magazine production and consumption practices changed so dramatically that the question about where and how we read magazines now redefines how we conceptualise what a magazine is and what it means to “read” one. This paper engages with Chris Peters’ contention that space, speed, and convenience are critical factors to consider when we interrogate how audiences consume media across transmedia platforms. This study makes a case that the magazine editor plays a crucial role in educating readers how to navigate this new reading environment. It also argues that high-quality custom (public relations) magazines, like the Fitness First magazine, should not be ignored in discussions about magazine culture and the place of magazines in journalism studies.