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New literacies research offers valuable insights into young people's everyday literacy practices. Teachers can use the kinds of research outcomes reported here to build on new literacies in appropriate ways for academic purposes.

The Internet is becoming an interactive and collaborative experience. Popular social software used to interact with the Internet includes blogs and microblogs for keeping track of things that interest you or for letting others know what you're up to (www.blogger.com, www.livejournal.com, twitter.com) and sites like Facebook for bringing together online networks, announcement spaces, group members, and interest affinities in one online location (www.facebook.com). In this Digital Literacies column, the authors focus on one of these Web resources: the wiki. (Contains 1 figure.)

This article reports findings of a national online survey of Australian women employed in Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-related careers. The Women in ICT Industry Survey was the culminating stage of a larger Australian Research Council Linkage Grant project investigating factors associated with low and declining female participation rates in professional-level ICT pathways. The survey comprised a mix of forced-choice and open-ended short-response items, and was completed by 272 Australian women. Application of K-means cluster analysis to forced-choice item responses revealed three discrete groupings of female ICT professionals. Overall, respondents reported that their ICT career was rewarding, provided opportunities and challenges, and was beneficial to society. Respondents generally disagreed with Queensland high school girls' perceptions that ICT is boring, sedentary, and not relevant to their future career directions. They also disagreed that the industry fits the prevailing negative stereotype of being populated by "geeks" and "nerds". Divergent opinions centered mainly around participants' confidence in their own technical ability, whether they would encourage young women to enter the ICT industry, and how they perceived and responded to industrial issues of equality and management approachability. These findings support suggestions for a range of policy and curriculum initiatives designed to enable more positive experiences of computing in school, and to optimize ICT career pathways in tandem with furthering wider educational ends. (Contains 5 figures and 7 tables.)

"Remix" means to take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends. In this sense, remix is as old as human cultures, and human cultures are themselves products of remixing. Since the late 1980s, however--originating with highly contrived forms of music remix by dancehall DJs--remix practices have been greatly amplified in scope and sophistication by recent developments in digital technologies. These make it possible for home-based digital practitioners to produce polished remixes across a range of media and cultural forms. This has in turn strengthened remix culture, encouraging seemingly endless hybridizations in language, genre, content, technique, and the like, and raised questions of legal, educational, and cultural import. This article samples remix culture and identifies some key implications remix practices have for literacy in general, and literacy education in particular.

The current paper details results from the Girls and ICT survey phase of a three year study investigating factors associated with low participation rates by females in education pathways leading to professional level information and communications technology (ICT) professions. The study is funded through the Australian Research Council's (ARC) Linkage Grants Scheme. It involves a research partnership between Education Queensland (EQ), industry partner Technology One and academic researchers at ("affiliation removed for review purposes"). Respondents to the survey were 1453 senior high school girls. Comparisons were drawn between Takers (n = 131) and Non Takers (n = 1322) of advanced level computing subjects. Significant differences between the groups were found on four questions: "The subjects are interesting"; "I am very interested in computers"; "The subject will be helpful to me in my chosen career path after school"; and "It suited my timetable". The research has demonstrated that senior high school girls tend to perceive advanced computing subjects as boring and they express a strong aversion to computers.

This article argues that "new literacies" is a useful construct for recognizing and understanding the extent to which changes in the current conjuncture are extending social practices of using codes for making and exchanging meanings in directions that warrant serious rethinking of how and why we research literacies. It provides a conceptual definition of "literacies", according to which literacies can best be described as "new" when they are constituted by "new 'technical' stuff" and "new 'ethos' stuff". On the basis of this account of new literacies the article advances a framework for envisaging new literacies research agendas and briefly discusses two cases of current research that illustrate this framework.

This article focuses on some ideas from social and political philosophy concerning the ideal of freedom that may be useful for thinking about issues associated with the rise of network societies. The tendency for "freedom" to mean very different things to different people has carried over to the context of thinking about issues associated with new technologies and network societies. This elasticity needs to be managed if "freedom" is to do useful work in substantive debate about the issues that arise. This article considers three analytic tools that seem applicable to issues arising under the contemporary condition of network societies. They are, respectively, the "opportunity-exercise" analysis of "freedom", the "positive-negative freedom" distinction, and the "triadic relation" analysis of freedom. Each is discussed by reference to familiar current issues. (Contains 1 note, 1 table, and 1 figure.)

This paper reports preliminary work in an ARC Linkage Project involving collaboration among James Cook University, Education Queensland, and Technology One (a Queensland based company). The project aims to identify and interpret factors associated with low female participation rates in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) professional level occupations and education pathways. Data is being collected using qualitative and quantitative methods. A survey is being administered to over 6,000 year 11 and 12 female high school students in Queensland to provide a comprehensive database that will be augmented with individual and focus group interviews. An online survey will be administered to women working in ICT industries. Reference groups representing EQ and ICT industries have been established to provide consultative advice and feedback throughout the project, and to function as working groups during the data analysis and interpretation phases. Project results will inform the development of strategic response options for education systems and ICT industries and suggest further research and industry-based initiatives designed to enhance female participation rates. (Contains 2 endnotes.)

The first two issues of E-Learning featured monographs by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, which they generously made available for publication. Both of these works, "Designs for Learning" and "Text-Made Text", are artifacts grounded in a larger shared project to which the two authors have been committed throughout more than two decades of sustained intensive activity as academics and public intellectuals. This interview by Colin Lankshear pursues an insider view of this larger project and how it relates to e-learning as an emerging theme of the present historical juncture.

Interviews with 39 workers over 40 addressed their conceptions of work (job, challenging experience, personal empowerment, life-structuring device) and of learning at work (acquiring survival skills, observing/experiencing, taking courses, learning lifelong, and changing personally). Their conceptions were mostly incongruent with their levels in the Australian Qualifications Framework. (Contains 32 references.) (SK)