Enhancing the content and experience of Interactive Childrens Television. Interactive television (iTV) as a participatory, on-demand communication provides a unique opportunity to significantly engage, entertain and educate preschool children. Through considerable industry partner collaboration and participation, this project will evaluate three distinct interactive options produced from selected children's television programs with proven success in Australia. Usability studies employing a vari ....Enhancing the content and experience of Interactive Childrens Television. Interactive television (iTV) as a participatory, on-demand communication provides a unique opportunity to significantly engage, entertain and educate preschool children. Through considerable industry partner collaboration and participation, this project will evaluate three distinct interactive options produced from selected children's television programs with proven success in Australia. Usability studies employing a variety of surveillance techniques will evaluate content design and user response. Children's viewing habits will be evaluated within a social context (the home) and a mobile lab setting using qualitative and quantitative assessment. The results will identify effective ways to produce meaningful interactivity and will encourage future industry based research.Read moreRead less
Production Challenges in the On-Line Learning Environment. The shift of responsibility from teacher-centred learning to learner-centred learning has raised important questions of access for diverse groups in Australia and overseas. The project seeks to investigate new delivery mechanisms that respond to worldwide trends in virtual communities and self-directed learning. This research will explore the relationship between content pedagogy, use of technology, and work-related issues and expectatio ....Production Challenges in the On-Line Learning Environment. The shift of responsibility from teacher-centred learning to learner-centred learning has raised important questions of access for diverse groups in Australia and overseas. The project seeks to investigate new delivery mechanisms that respond to worldwide trends in virtual communities and self-directed learning. This research will explore the relationship between content pedagogy, use of technology, and work-related issues and expectations. It will adopt a qualitative and quantitative research methodology in identifying opportunities, producing a learning prototype, testing and trialing that prototype and applying research outcomes in the context of emergent new educational models that draw upon convergent media.Read moreRead less
Online Money and Fantasy Games - an applied ethnographic study into the new entrepreneurial communities and their underlying designs. Modern social and fantasy games using online money are multi-billion dollar business, but little is known about them, their developers, or impacts on privacy, identity and monetisation of relationships. This is the first study to investigate these concerns and to relate fieldwork results to the simultaneous building of a social gaming platform.
Play it again: creating a playable history of Australasian digital games, for industry, community and research purposes. This project provides a unique account of the role played by computer games in familiarising the public to new technologies. The computer game industry grosses billions of dollars each year, and yet game technology is quickly superseded. This project redresses this gap by writing histories of the early digital age, and preserving key artefacts.
Play it again: preserving Australian videogame history. This project aims to demonstrate and evaluate the emulation of obsolete operating systems and programs in a cloud-based environment to document, preserve, and exhibit digital cultural heritage. The challenge of preserving and accessing complex digital cultural heritage such as software is one that collecting institutions worldwide are facing. This project will address this challenge by recovering the history of Australian made videogames of ....Play it again: preserving Australian videogame history. This project aims to demonstrate and evaluate the emulation of obsolete operating systems and programs in a cloud-based environment to document, preserve, and exhibit digital cultural heritage. The challenge of preserving and accessing complex digital cultural heritage such as software is one that collecting institutions worldwide are facing. This project will address this challenge by recovering the history of Australian made videogames of the 1990s, preserving significant local digital game artefacts currently at risk, and investigating how these can be exhibited as playable software using the newest emulation techniques. The project expects to generate new knowledge needed by government, museums and industry to inform future strategy and infrastructure investment aimed at making a range of digital cultural heritage available to the public.Read moreRead less
Designing, implementing and evaluating a youth mobile help-seeking tool-kit. This project aims to design, implement and test a novel model of integrated mental health service that links a new mobile interactive tool-kit for self-directed help-seeking with existing traditional helpline services for young people. In partnership with Australia’s largest youth counselling service, Kids Helpline, the project seeks to investigate mobile technology in youth counselling and develop new understandings of ....Designing, implementing and evaluating a youth mobile help-seeking tool-kit. This project aims to design, implement and test a novel model of integrated mental health service that links a new mobile interactive tool-kit for self-directed help-seeking with existing traditional helpline services for young people. In partnership with Australia’s largest youth counselling service, Kids Helpline, the project seeks to investigate mobile technology in youth counselling and develop new understandings of blended traditional and mobile mental health interventions. It aims to design and evaluate an interactive tool-kit that provides credible health information through mobile devices, improving the quality and credibility of digital services to benefit the wellbeing of young Australians.Read moreRead less