Profound changes are under way in university learning and teaching. Online education is taking hold as never before, catalysed in no small part by the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), free university units offered online to anyone with an internet connection. MOOCs appear to be intensifying the trend towards 'flipping' the classroom, which involves students engaging with course materials online -usually short videos and readings -then coming to classes constructed as workshops or symposia in which they are invited to practically apply their new knowledge in a variety of ways. This article reports on the ways in which MOOCs have allowed us to critically re-examine pedagogy and practice in the sociology classroom and to test our own assumptions regarding effective pedagogy via an action research project interrogating student reception of a flipped sociology class. Based on preliminary surveys, participant observation and formal interviews gauging student perceptions and initial reception to this particular class, the research reported here offers important correctives to debates that are usually based more on supposition than empirical evidence.

ABSTRACT. The long established distinction between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism is useful heuristically to understand different dimensions of nationalism and perhaps track a movement from ethnic forms to civic allegiances, though some have challenged its empirical veracity and others question the normative implications of such a distinction. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the two are elided in everyday discourses about migrants in Australia. We argue suspicion of cultural difference, identified more than three decades ago as the new racism, has given way to talk of the need for migrants to 'follow the law'. This serves rhetorically to reinforce the notion that migrants, often implied to overlap with the category 'Muslims', are insisting on breaking the law and/or changing it and are therefore culturally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy. We argue that since ethnic nationalism, like racism, is out of favour normatively, ethnic nationalist arguments are now superficially concealed beneath the acceptable language of civic nationalism. The manner in which this occurs is mapped discursively using data from a corpus of twenty seven focus groups conducted around Australia.

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Using the place-naming practices in the small settler society of Norfolk Island, the home of Anglo-Polynesian descendants of the Bounty mutineers, we advance a linguistic argument against Saussure's claims concerning the arbitrariness of signs. When extended to place names, Saussure's claims about language in general imply place names in themselves hold no significance for how people interact with places. In contrast, we use ethnographic examples to show that people of Norfolk Island interact with the significance of the names themselves. Arguments for an integrated approach to toponymy in which place names are considered alongside other relational (cultural, economic and historical) factors that influence their use and meaning are put forward. We propose 'toponymic ethnography' as a useful methodology for understanding the connectedness of toponyms to people, place, and social networks.

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