No abstract

Barbara Adkins is a sociologist whose research focuses on the role of design in social and cultural life. She is an associate professor in the School of Design in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia and was formerly education manager and researcher at the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design.Jennifer Summerville is a sociologist specialising in participatory research and evaluation methods. She is currently the Research and Development Coordinator at the Health and Community Services Workforce Council and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology. Jenny is a keen advocate for building research capacity as a foundation for inclusion and continuous improvement. Her research interests centre on strategies and applications to support workforce planning and development in the health and community services industries.Marie Knox has an extensive background in disability studies research. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the School of Public Health and Social Work at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Disability Studies affiliated with the University of Sydney where she leads the research program.Andrew Brown Andrew R. Brown is a computational artist, researcher and educator. He is Professor of Digital Arts at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Griffith University, in Australia and was previously the Research Manager for the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID). Andrew is an active computational artist working in music and visual domains. His research interests include technology 2 support for creativity and learning, computational aesthetics and the philosophy of technology.Steve C. Dillon Sadly, our colleague and friend, Dr Steve Dillon, passed away on April 1 st 2012. He was a singer songwriter, music educator and musicologist, and a senior lecturer in Music and Sound at Queensland University of Technology. He was director of save to DISC Research Network and project Leader of the Network Jamming Research Group. His research interests were meaningful engagement with music making and designing digital media technologies and relational pedagogies to provide access to cognitive growth, health and well being through music making. He leaves behind an important legacy in researching and developing tools to support participation in music making. AbstractResearch on the aspirations of people with intellectual disabilities documents the importance of alternative zones of inclusion where they can assert their own definitions of ability and normality. This stands in contrast to assumptions concerning technology and disability that position technology as 'normalising' the disabled body. This paper reports on the role of a digital music jamming tool in providing access to creative practice by people with intellectual disabilities. The tool contributed to the development of a spatio-temporal zone to enable aesthetic agency withi...

This paper explores how participative democratic principles, specifically, ideas of community participation in decision-making processes, are framed as community rights and/or responsibilities in sustainable development policy at different levels of government. In doing this, the paper examines the contribution of the governmentality perspective to an understanding of the nature of relationships involved in regulation through community. The paper first briefly reviews key tenets of`Third Way' politics and the alternative view proffered by critiques from the governmentality perspective. It then turns to an analysis of how techniques of rights and responsibilities are implicit in the language of sustainable development policy at three levels: global (Agenda 21), national (Australian national policy^Australian national strategy for ecologically sustainable development), and regional (Queensland regional policyö Draft South East Queensland Regional Plan). Finally, we consider some implications of our application of a governmentality perspective for how we understand government, community and community participation, and sustainable development. In doing so, we argue that neither community, nor sustainable development, can be separated from the techniques of rights and responsibilities that enable`government at a distance'.

For people with intellectual disabilities, there are significant barriers to inclusion in socially cooperative endeavors. This paper investigates the effectiveness of Stomp, a tangible user interface (TUI) designed to provide new participatory experiences for people with intellectual disability. Results from an observational study reveal the extent to which the Stomp system supports social and physical interaction. The tangible, spatial, and embodied qualities of Stomp result in an experience that does not rely on the acquisition of specific competencies before interaction and engagement can occur.

<p>While the Internet has been described as fundamental to higher education students, social and leisure internet tools are also increasingly being used by these students to generate and maintain their social and professional networks and interactions. Rapid technological advancements have enabled greater and faster access to information for learning and education. As such, we sought to integrate interactive, online social media into the assessment profile of a Public Health undergraduate cohort at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The aim of this exercise was to engage students to both develop and showcase their research on a range of complex, contemporary health issues within the online forum of Wikispaces (http://www.wikispaces.com/) for review and critique by their peers. We applied Bandura's social learning theory (SLT) to analyse the interactive processes from which students developed deeper and more sustained learning, and via which their overall academic writing standards were raised. This paper outlines the assessment task and the students' feedback on their learning outcomes in relation to the attentional, retentional, motor reproduction, and motivational processes outlined by Bandura in SLT. We conceptualise the findings in a theoretical model, and discuss the implications for this approach within the broader tertiary environment. <strong> </strong></p><p> </p>