This article examines the positive impact of overseas study tours on the teaching philosophies and classroom strategies used by the professors running the tours. While education scholars have identified long term benefits of overseas study tours for students, less attention has been paid to flow on benefits for teachers. This article aims to address this gap in the literature by having five Australian professors describe how their international study tour experiences changed and improved their teaching in the classroom. The article shows that in the process of developing a successful overseas study tour, professors can learn lessons about teaching that they can use productively in the classroom.

The concept of the public intellectual has always been a somewhat contested term. This article serves as both an introduction to the debates around what it constitutes and an entry point into how the new media environment is producing a different configuration of the public intellectual. Through key thinkers who have addressed the idea of the public intellectual internationally and those who have focused on the Australian context, this essay positions the arguments made by the authors in this special issue. Via a short case-study of TED, the conference and online idea-spreading phenomenon, it argues that the contemporary moment is producing and privileging a different constellation of experts as celebrities that match the exigencies of online attention economy. A shifted conception of the public intellectual is beginning to take shape that is differently constituted, used and situated, and this article helps to define the parameters for further discussion of these transformations.

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