Individualised video screencasts with accompanying narration were used to provide assessment feedback to a large number (n = 299) of first-year Bachelor of Education students at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. An anonymous online survey revealed that nearly three times as many respondents (61%) preferred video feedback to written feedback (21%). The results reflect a clear preference for video feedback among the research participants. Participants commented that video feedback was clearer and less ambiguous than other forms of feedback and improved both the quality and quantity of the feedback received. Participants also felt that video feedback established greater rapport with their tutor and provided them with greater insight into the assessment process

In this paper we develop and test hypotheses around organisations' behaviour on social media and its effect on consumers' responses. We draw on the notion of the market maven to underpin the research and suggest that organisations on social media need to focus on acting in a maven-like manner in order to influence audiences in Twitter. We collected data from the Twitter accounts of the entire brewing industry in Australia, analysing organisational postings and their impact on influence (follower numbers, retweets) of their respective Twitter accounts. In particular, we look at message formulation and language, native platform behaviour, reciprocity and persistency variables. Findings suggest that establishing a larger follower base requires an interactive, one-to-one and reciprocal approach. In order to influence audiences to retweet organisations need to speak the 'native platform language' and employ a soft-sell strategy. Maven-like behaviour tends to reside in the small independent craft breweries. We offer the conclusion that these craft breweries have realised that, on social media, a different approach to marketing is required: the organisations must act in a mavenlike manner.

No abstract

No abstract

This chapter takes as a point of departure the website of the “Voices” project, a large media enterprise on languages in the UK conducted by the BBC in 2003–2005. With the help of the notions of language ideology and the analytical tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis, the paper shows how representations of languages on the website are a discursive terrain on which negotiations of national identities are played out. Essentially, the argument is that there is a constant tension between centripetal (unifying) and centrifugal (particularising) forces which strive for the production of different, concomitant and often conflicting national identities. Whereas the BBC seeks to represent the UK as a happy and unified multilingual nation, the many postings on the website show how multilingualism is not always perceived by speakers as a happy and unproblematic phenomenon, but is a politically-fraught issue that creates strong disagreements about the values of different languages in British society as well as their functions as markers of different national identities.