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Social media are widely seen as having transformational potential in school education. However, there is a surprising lack of empirical research in schools about pedagogical designs using social media and particularly the factors that facilitate or hinder desirable outcomes. Consequently, this article offers a review of the limited empirical research literature, and is unique because it not only focuses on school contexts, when the literature is dominated by the tertiary sector, but also because it carefully excludes uses of social media that do not leverage its particular affordances, that is, social interactivity. A synthesis of the literature resulted in a series of design principles for educators, including three broad conclusions that social media for collaborative purposes is best utilised when: (a) social media is not redundant to current practices but offer something new, (b) strategies are in place to help students learn how to work collaboratively, and (c) the tasks are appropriate.

Despite massive funding from the Australian government, the literacy achievement of Australian Indigenous children remains significantly lower than for non-Indigenous. With the aim of identifying innovative ways to improve Indigenous children's literacy achievement, this study explored the social practices surrounding everyday mobile phone use by Indigenous people in a remote Australian community. Informed by the notion of "placed resources", which highlights the understanding that digital literacies are best considered as resources situated by social practices that have local effect, the study surveyed 95 people living in a remote Indigenous community about their mobile phone practices. The study also examined a video of a literacy event between a mother and her child around the use of a mobile phone. The findings revealed the strong relational aspects of phone use in remote communities. Integral to the concept of placed resources is a respect for the practices communities find important as they adopt artefacts for their everyday communication. (Contains 3 tables, 3 figures, and 2 notes.)

While schools have taught media literacy for many years, new challenges are raised by the growth of digital media and the sophistication of marketing techniques aimed at children. In response to a moral panic over the dangers posed by new media, schools have focused on cyber-safety education to reduce the incidence of phenomena such as cyber-bullying. However, also requiring attention are new platforms such as smart phones and tablets that enable marketing campaigns to target children with personalised messages even more covertly than before. This article examines how digital technologies and marketing are entwined in the everyday lives of children by drawing on the findings of an exploratory cross-disciplinary study of three grade 6 students in a primary school located in Melbourne's south-east. The findings indicate that educational understandings of how marketers collect and use data through digital channels for commercial purposes are limited. Further research is needed to examine the impact on children of digital marketing in social media spaces where digital profiling, data mining and peer-to-peer endorsements of products are rife. Such research will inform English teachers' work aimed at building children's critical marketing literacy.

The research interrogates the connections between information and communication technologies' (ICTs') use and change processes in Australian higher education. The empirical investigation focuses simultaneously on three domains of practice: the educational, the technological and the organizational, with a particular interest in their overlaps and intersections. There were 15 case studies, covering three discipline clusters (Medicine/Health Sciences, Economics and Business, English/Cultural Studies/Communications) in each of five different types of Australian university. The main research technique was semi-structured interviews with academic, executive and administrative staff, supplemented by focus groups with students and the study of curriculum and strategy documents. The main findings of the study were that the most effective use of ICTs in universities occurs when educational and organizational objectives are in harmony; when ICTs innovations are dominated by corporatist objectives at the expense of pedagogical objectives, benefits are limited and tensions evident; and pedagogical initiatives by discipline-based ICTs "champions" require central support if they are to add value on a sustained basis. The optimal conditions for ICTs innovations in teaching and learning are disciplinary independence and capacity, conditions present in only one of the 15 case studies.

This paper discusses the concept of the network organisation in relation to the technologised university. Drawing upon the early findings of a study that examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on both organisational and teaching and learning issues in five Australian universities, the authors discuss the way in which discourses of network technology have become articulated to a range of at times paradoxical agendas within higher education. The introduction of new technologies into organisations tends to be portrayed in either transformative or oppressive terms. The complexity of the university experience foregrounds the important role played by pre-existing organisational practices and narratives in determining the uses and meanings of ICTs in the organisational setting. These observations place into question the notion that the network organisation is a single coherent entity driven by a particular technological logic. Instead, it suggests that network technologies are socially embedded and therefore highly variable in their expression.

Concentrates on cases of family engagement with information communication technologies (ICTs) at a very local level. (EV)

Examines the complex connections among literacy practices, the use of information, and communication technologies (ICTs) and disadvantage. Reports findings of a year-long Australian study, which investigated ways that four families use ICTs to engage in formal and informal literacy learning in home and school settings. (BT)

Discusses important characteristics of the new communication order, providing a context for an overview of research in the field of literacy and technology studies consistent with the New Literacy Studies view of literacy as a set of social practices. Particular attention is given to theoretical and empirical aspects of the Australian Digital Rhetorics study, which investigated the interface between literacy, technology, and student learning. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the way multimedia developments are challenging established literacy practices and skills. Suggests that the traditional dominance of verbal representation is progressively giving way to new visual forms, and that the relationships between the verbal and the visual are being negotiated. Implications for English-as-a-Second-Language education are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Describes and explores a collaborative classroom research project between a secondary English teacher and a university education faculty member. Examines shifting power relations in the classroom, competing agendas, constraints imposed by the study's design, and differences in interpretation. (SR)

Literacy educators need to pay attention to shifts in the perceived relationship between literacy education, the use of new technologies and learning, as exemplified in national and state P-12 policy [...]