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Based on the presupposition that visual literacy skills are not usually learned unaided by osmosis, but require targeted learning support, this article explores how everyday encounters with visuals can be leveraged as contingent learning opportunities. The author proposes that a learner’s environment can become a visual learning space if appropriate learning support is provided. This learning support may be delivered via the anytime and anywhere capabilities of mobile learning (m-learning), which facilitates peer learning in informal settings. The study propositioned a rhizomatic m-learning model of visual skills that describes how the visuals one encounters in their physical everyday environment can be leveraged as visual literacy learning opportunities. The model was arrived at by following an approach based on heuristic inquiry and user-centred design, including testing prototypes with representative learners. The model describes one means visual literacy could be achieved by novice learners from contingent learning encounters in informal learning environments, through collaboration and by providing context-aware learning support. Such a model shifts the onus of visual literacy learning away from academic programmes and, in this way, opens an alternative pathway for the learning of visual skills.   Implications for practice or policy: This research proposes a means for learners to leverage visuals they encounter in their physical everyday environment as visual literacy learning opportunities. M-learning software developers may find the pedagogical model useful in informing their own software. Educators teaching visual skills may find application of the learning model’s pedagogical assumptions in isolation in their own formal learning settings.

This chapter illustrates the potential of mobile social media to be used as a catalyst for collaborative curriculum redesign. The authors critique a case study implementing a mobile social media framework for creative pedagogies and draw out the implications of this framework for wider educational contexts. They conclude that an effective mobile social media framework for collaborative curriculum redesign must meet three goals: model the building of learning communities, explore the unique affordances of mobile social media to enable new pedagogies, and establish a supporting technology infrastructure.

This paper explores how the Royal New Zealand Ballet's (RNZB's) website is used to construct the organisation's identity. Recent changes to the New Zealand government's cultural policy regarding accessibility, accountability, and funding have seen arts organisations need to consider economic sustainability. We posit that the changing demands placed on elite arts organisations to accommodate both artistic and commercial values may create conflicting messages and tensions that impact on their identity. To explore these tensions, we applied Dryzek's discourse analysis to the RNZB's website. The study uncovered the key entities constructed on the website as the audience, sponsors, and dancers, then considered the power relationships between these entities as well as the explicit and implicit reasons the website had been constructed. The results of the study highlight that the RNZB has chosen to emphasise its normative identity as a creative arts organisation, which inevitably had to meet utilitarian needs of financial support in order to have longevity. By making money, access, excellence, and national identity a part of their overall identity, the RNZB have perhaps inadvertently created contradictions and ambiguity in their wider identity scheme. We conclude that the until the RNZB can run sustainably without government support, and the contradictions in their presented identity will most likely remain.

This study attempted to problematise and partially clarify digital media as a professional practice in New Zealand by analysing job advertisements. There were three key outcomes of the study. First, digital media was found to suffer from ambiguity as a practice. Second, six core facets of digital media as a professional practice were identified and help clarify what a digital media practitioner does. These are 'digitisation', 'content', 'communication', 'technology', 'management', and 'strategy'. Third, interdisciplinary skills, especially T-shaped skills profiles, were re-confirmed as beneficial to those seeking employment in fields that involve digital media. The outcomes of this study are of use to those currently studying or seeking first time employment in digital media, as the results may help them connect their education to potential employment. Likewise, it may help educators tailor lessons and programmes. Academics may find the research purposeful, as it problematises digital media as a practice and helps define it.