How Much Does the Distance in Distance Education Matter? Our Students Speak

Distance learning programs in social work education have been growing exponentially throughout the United States. This study interviewed Master of Social Work (MSW) students enrolled in two synchronous distance-learning courses that employed a blended pedagogy, and evaluates their insights about the learning experience. For these two courses, material was presented via video conferencing and supplemented with online media at two campuses at a large school of social work. In order to give students a voice about their experiences, data were collected using semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Common themes included: autonomy, emotional connectedness, technological challenges, and knowledge acquisition. Both the strengths and challenges related to distance learning are discussed.     

Out of the Blue: the dark side of creative enterprise

This paper draws on an archive of media texts that document the making of the film Out of the Blue. Within these media accounts are statements made by a group of residents resisting the film project, and the film‐makers responding to this resistance. We employ a Foucauldian informed discourse analysis to read these statements of resistance as a starting point to examine the power relations within contemporary knowledge generation processes of creative industries. We theorise creative industries as a discursive object located at the intersection of three discursive formations: ‘creativity’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘place’. Through analysing the particular place–identities of Aramoana engaged by the resisting residents and the film‐makers, we are able to suggest how this film project came to be discursively constituted as creative enterprise. In so doing, we find that the resisting residents’ statements work to disrupt the taken‐for‐granted ‘goodness’ of film enterprise, and creative industries more generally.     

Law Consumers Association N.S.W.

Despite recent trends away from the traditional medical model of service delivery, there appears to be a continuing reluctance among some rehabilitation professionals to fully enable people with disabilities to co-manage their own rehabilitation programmes. These same professionals may remain unaware that their behaviour discourages their clients from taking greater responsibility for solving problems and achieving goals of living. Contradictions in the beliefs and behaviour of service providers is, at grass roots level, perhaps exemplified by their adherence to formal case-team meetings which exclude service recipients. The need to re-define and alter the format of these conferences is the focus of this paper.     

On comparing cost of living of cities using expatriate price survey

Commercial cost of living indexes, which are nominal Laspeyres price indexes derived from expatriate price surveys, are increasingly used in policy debate. However, these indexes contain two systematic errors – (1) using nominal exchange rate, instead of the purchasing power parity equivalent, cause upward biases in high income cities and (2) using a fixed basket causes upward biases in cities with different consumption pattern – that make them unfit for the purpose of policy debate if the errors are serious enough. Using a real Fisher index corrects these systemic errors. We showed high congruence in pair-wise comparison between these two indexes, but substantial differences in ranking arising from the systematic errors. Commercial indexes are useful for designing expatriate compensation, but we need a real Fisher index to calculate and rank the cost of living among cities.     

Student debt and wellbeing: a research agenda

ABSTRACT

With levels of student debt unprecedented and rising in many democracies, growing attention has been given by academics and practitioners to its possible effects for student wellbeing. This article makes three contributions to this debate. First, it offers a critical review of literature that considers the relationship of student debt and wellbeing to open up discussion about the dimensions, limitations and possibilities of the field. Second, the paper points to potential avenues for future research about student debt and wellbeing by considering indicative comments made by New Zealand university students as part of a series of in-depth interviews. Third, the article makes a practical contribution to current debates about the tuition ‘fees free’ policy in New Zealand. We argue that developing a more robust understanding of how student debt affects wellbeing may help to broaden and reinvigorate academic and public debate about student debt.