The Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) asserts that community radio should promote a culturally diverse society by representing those sections of the community much less visible in the mainstream media. This echoes the Australian Federal Government’s vision of social inclusion/cohesion in a society in which all Australians are valued and are able to participate fully. There are those, however, who are marginalised by mainstream culture and can find themselves alienated as a result of, for example, their language, religion, ethincity, sexuality or niche interests. Societal participation for those groups can be challenging and may mean some members feel a sense of isolation and lonliness. The incidence of loneliness in Australia is growing. The personal and social consequences of loneliness are significant for those affected but also for policy-makers. Community broadcasting is uniquely positioned to provide opportunities for volunteering, community participation, and sociability for niche community groups, all of which contribute towards countering the effects of loneliness. In this regard, community radio can be described as rhizomatic. It has the potential to generate social capital for the participants and the listeners via its many community entrance points and social pathways. Community radio is often a two-way street with content producers and consumers occupying the same position, thus blurring the line between the traditional professional broadcaster and the passive listener. The generated niche communities of interest expand away from a station towards the audience, and simultaneously, into the community station from the listeners. Overall, this article argues that community broadcasting in Australia should be valued as a medium that can reduce social isolation and enrich community cohesion.

Testing creativity in tertiary learning activities is a young field of research, and current assessment methods are difficult to apply within the diverse context of media production education, where disciplines range from journalism through to video game production. However, the concept of remix is common across this wide range of media, and offers practitioners ‘endless hybridizations in language, genre, content, technique and the like’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2008, p. 22). The conceptual commonality of remix indicates that the study conclusions will have useful implications across a range of media production disciplines. This study aims to consider new methods for testing creativity in media production learning activities and to provide better assessments for learning design. This study focused upon a learner cohort of music technology students that were undertaking a work-integrated learning programme with a record label. To make the students more work-ready and inspire greater creativity, they remixed tracks recorded by professional music artists as part of a unit assessment. Subsequent self-report surveys (N = 29) found that the process of creating a ‘remix’ enhanced their creativity and provided suggested improvements to the design of the learning experience. Importantly, we found no relationship between the survey responses and objective assessments, indicating that the self-reported improvements in creativity were not simply a measure of how well the students performed the formally assessed tasks. Although more research is needed to establish effective measures of creativity, these findings demonstrate that self-report survey tools can be a powerful tool for measuring creativity and supporting improved iterative learning design.

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This article examines what "value" means in relation to community radio broadcasting, summarizing the development of a theoretical framework of value for community radio from the existing literature. Moreover, this article outlines the findings garnered from testing that framework at three community radio stations in Perth, Western Australia particularly the perceptions of value by the study participants. Finally, this article discusses the importance of one key research finding: that study participants from all stations perceived the value of community radio participation as not necessarily an altruistic activity. This indicates that community radio's value is significantly more about the benefits of participation for volunteers rather than the benefits for the listening community.

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