Tauel Harper

Introduction
A key challenge for many academics is designing learning activities that are constructively aligned and effectively enhance students’ appreciation of their learning outcomes. This study investigates the impact of integrating active and blended learning strategies into a game design unit that had historically suffered from low student engagement and poor alignment with unit outcomes.

Methods
To address this issue, we introduced a series of active and blended learning activities, including an interactive design project, group work, the use of an online peer assessment tool, and online assessments requiring independent critical reflection and feedback on students’ learning experiences. A mixed-methods approach was employed. An online survey was administered via the LMS to 137 enrolled students, with 101 responses collected over a four-week period. Quantitative data were analyzed using ANOVA and linear multivariate analysis to assess the impact of these interventions.

Results and discussion
The findings suggest that the introduction of active and blended learning strategies—particularly those that increased student participation in lectures and group discussions—enhanced overall engagement and improved student satisfaction with the unit. Students appreciated the availability of online tools and resources; however, online engagement alone did not consistently lead to improved learning experiences. The data indicated that the effectiveness of online learning was significantly influenced by the presence of consistent and clear feedback.

Conclusion
Active and blended learning strategies, when supported by thoughtful learning design and timely feedback, are effective in engaging students with their learning outcomes and enhancing the overall student experience. These findings underscore the importance of integrating interactive and reflective components into course design to foster deeper student engagement.

Technologies are situated within a particular cultural context, and the car plays a particularly prominent role in Australian culture. We assembled these papers to observe a point of potential technological and cultural bifurcation, as the rise of the Electric Vehicle (EV) threatens to end the dominance of Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) in Australia. The papers in this issue are all situated at this moment, confronting the immanent challenges and opportunities presented by technological and cultural change. What follows, therefore, is an attempt to explain the political and cultural context at the point where Australia started to seriously consider whether we could embrace electric vehicles...

Within one week of April in 2024, the city of Sydney was rocked by two separate violent stabbing attacks. In one case, after the stabbing of two Coptic clerics by a young Muslim man, the government and media were quick to establish that this was a terrorist attack. In the other case, where five women and one man were killed in a shopping centre by a man who targeted women, the blame was not levelled at ideological extremism but rather ‘psychological problems’ and was not considered a terrorist incident. In this paper, we examine the relative framing of these two events by politicians and the media. We highlight how framing violence against women in episodic, individualistic, and situational ways, as opposed to an expression of a thematic, public, and pervasive issue, diminishes the capacity to respond effectively to misogynistic violence.

Background:
Our interdisciplinary team initiated a project to inform the COVID-19 vaccination programme. We developed a novel research co-creation approach to share emerging findings with government.

Aims and objectives:
We critically assess the ‘Functional Dialogue’ (FD) programme for future research translation practices in time-limited policy-making scenarios. We identify what factors helped us to put the FDs together and consider their effects on all aspects of the research programme. We draw out key moments of impact, weaknesses and challenges and identify how future FDs might be enhanced.

Methods:
Between January 2021 and June 2022, we conducted 14 FDs with state and federal government, exploring attendees’ attitudes, beliefs, experiences, roles and observations regarding our research. FDs and research team debriefs were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically.

Findings:
FD processes proved invaluable to the timeliness, impact and flow of our research project by creating systems that helped to bridge the evidence–policy gap. Relationships and reciprocity helped, but other professional commitments of our government partners posed challenges and produced fluctuating engagement. FDs built the capacity of the research team, strengthening communication skills and creating opportunities to contribute to pandemic policies.

Discussion and conclusion:
We struggled to quantify the impact of FDs on policy decisions due to the ethical requirements of academic research, barriers for policy makers in isolating and/or acknowledging impact, and the collaborative nature of dialogue. Nevertheless, the structures of knowledge transfer that we foresaw as necessary to ensure impact became the central plank of the project’s broader success.

The media's central role in the policy process has long been recognised, with policy scholars noting the potential for news media to influence policy change. However, scholars have paid most attention to the news media as a conduit for the agendas, frames, and preferences of other policy actors. Recently, scholars have more closely examined media actors directly contributing to policy change. This paper presents a case study to argue that specific members of the media may display the additional skills and behaviours that characterise policy entrepreneurship. Our case study focuses on mandatory childhood vaccination in Australia, following the entrepreneurial actions of a deputy newspaper editor and her affiliated outlets. Mandatory childhood vaccination policies have grown in strength and number in recent years across the industrialised world in response to parents refusing to vaccinate their children. Australia's federal and state governments have been at the forefront of meeting vaccine refusal with harsh consequences; our case study demonstrates how media actors conceived and advanced these policies. The experiences, skills, attributes, and strategies of Sunday Telegraph Deputy Editor Claire Harvey facilitated her policy entrepreneurship, utilising many classic hallmarks from the literature and additional opportunities offered by her media role. Harvey also subverted the classic pathway of entrepreneurship, mobilising the public ahead of policymakers to force the latter's hand.

Marketing researchers have devoted considerable attention to marketer-generated content (MGC), social media engagement behaviour (SMEB) and online relationships. Prior studies, however, do not integrate these critical elements of social media marketing. Our study, which is underpinned in the Elaboration-Likelihood Model, offers evidence that MGC leads to SMEB, which has a positive impact on relationship quality. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study, which comprises a content analysis of the official Facebook pages of American political parties and semi-structured interviews with voters who engage with political MGC, reveals that peripheral cues are the primary drivers of SMEB. Based on the quantitative and qualitative evidence, we demonstrate that shares are a higher-involvement activity than likes. We recommend that political marketers should rely on distinct sets of MGC cues to elicit shares and likes.

Objectives: To trace the emergence and dissemination of the most prominent rumours about potential adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines.

Methods: We use a weekly Google Trends search to gather information about what alleged adverse events are being associated with COVID vaccines by the general population. We then use CrowdTangle and Factiva searches to examine how discussions about the five most prominent adverse events have spread through traditional media channels and Facebook.

Results: Traditional mass media reporting remains crucial in both promoting and moderating discussions around alleged adverse events. While some cases illustrate that social media networks can synthesise and amplify rumours about adverse events, traditional media coverage remains crucial as a forum for exploring and debunking spurious claims.

Conclusion: Traditional media stories still bear signficant responsibility as credibility markers for rumours about vaccine adverse events. Journalists should therefore be encouraged to be particularly earnest when reporting such stories, and the scientific community should aid journalists in this task by clearly responding to any rumours emerging online.

This article considers players’ experiences seeking out new games to play, and their use of the Australian National Classification Scheme in doing so. The global video game industry is booming, with hundreds of games being released each month across numerous platforms. As a result, players have an unprecedented number of games available when choosing what games to purchase. However, a number of confounding issues around the emergent content of games and the subjective nature of game reviewing makes it difficult to relate what kinds of experiences a given game will facilitate. In this study, we surveyed game players in order to find their game platform and acquisition preferences; strategies and experiences when choosing games; and attitudes towards classification systems. Our findings suggest that players find it difficult to choose what games to purchase, and that existing classification systems are mostly only beneficial when choosing games for minors.

In this article we consider how much control gamers have over game culture and production, arguing that the monopolistic power of corporations has been challenged in many cases by resistant cultures. In the view of the Frankfurt School’s culture industry, ownership and control of the means of production translates into control over culture. Indeed, the high costs of production and platformisation has extended trends of consolidation and control in the video game industry. However, there is also evidence that this consolidation and control can be resisted by digitally native, active, and organised sub-cultures. Such moments occur, we suggest, in part due to the contingent and digital nature of video games, which allows digitally literate players to utilise tools and communities to resist the cultural control of platform owners. In the face of a general tendency to emphasise the winner-takes-all effects of platform technology, our research suggests that technological literacy and enthusiast communities can play a crucial role in governing game production. Examining the games industry, we show that, generally, cultural production is shaped by concerns around profitability, but under some quite particular conditions, the affordances of versatile digital technology can contribute to more idiosyncratic cultural production. We discuss examples such as the Universal Windows Platform (2019), Minecraft (2011) and Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017) to provide insight into ways that gamers have influence over video game production.

This paper uses a 22-country cross-national analysis to test whether high levels of citizen trust in governmental civil servants prompt high levels of confidence in vaccine safety, effectiveness and importance. Because vaccine initiatives have long been the responsibility of national governments and the civil servants who coordinate their development, distribution and implementation, vaccine hesitancy or acceptance can be expected not just to reflect citizens' judgements of the efficacy of the vaccines themselves, but also of the governments who control almost every aspect of the vaccination programs. As existing global surveys on vaccine hesitancy do not include measures of attitudes toward governmental trust, we merge two pre-COVID-19 international datasets - one that measures citizen attitudes toward governmental civil servants and the other that measures citizens' views of vaccines - and find that citizen trust in their civil servants is a significant predictor of citizen confidence in vaccines' safety, effectiveness, and importance.