Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDwelling with media stuff: latencies and logics of materiality in four Australian homes(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2011-08)Extending research into material, media, and cultural geographies of the home, our interest turns to the spatiotemporality of dwelling with information and communication technologies. We pose a number of questions: How do inhabitants and their media stuff adapt to the more rigid physical spaces of a building? How does the building respond to the more rapid changes to dwelling produced by this media stuff? And how are these differing times synchronised? In answer to these questions we present four case studies of homes in Melbourne, Australia, each representative of a particular strategy of synchronisation. They are: the found home, the imagined home, the designed home, and the renovated home. We identify logics informing these homes: the first naturalises the choices made, the second rationalises choices, and the third is one in which dwelling and (re)building are intertwined.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNational, local and household media ecologies: The case of Australia's National Broadband Network(RMIT-SCH MEDIA & COMMUNICATION, 2013)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCHILDREN AND DIGITAL WELLBEING IN AUSTRALIA: ONLINE REGULATION, CONDUCT AND COMPETENCE(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2012)
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ItemNo Preview Available'You do the math': Mathletics and the play of online learning(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2012-11)This article reports on a case study of the web-based educational maths application, Mathletics. The findings are drawn from an ethnographic study of children’s technology use in Melbourne, Australia. We explore the experience, governance and commerce of children’s Mathletics use, and offer insights into the developing possibilities and challenges emerging through the adoption of Web 2.0 applications for learning and education. In analyzing the interaction between students and this software, this article deploys two key concepts in technology studies – affordance and technicity – to develop a relational understanding of Mathletics play. This conceptualization of play, which accounts for the playability or give of a technology, helps to illuminate some ways in which the aesthetics, functionality, and materiality of this online application accommodate a number of – and often competing – uses, interests and values: parental anxieties, pedagogical concerns and corporate stakes.
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ItemNo Preview Available‘MYBus’: Young People's Mobile Health, Wellbeing and Digital Inclusion(University of Waterloo, 2013)As part of an ethnographic study researching the role of information and communication technology use in mediating young people’s social inclusion in an outer urban growth area of Melbourne, Australia, this paper reports on a case study of a community mobile youth centre, named MYBus. The MYBus is a converted passenger coach that operates as a mobile youth centre for young people aged 12-25. It aims to provide young people with up-to-date youth-specific information and resources, especially access to health and wellbeing information and services. The bus has been fitted with laptop computers, Internet access, Wii games, D.J. console and other gaming devices to support this engagement. This paper examines how the aggregation of digital media on MYBus not only has direct healthcare benefits, but also enables a broader approach to young people’s wellbeing by providing resources for digital access and participation. In particular, the mobilisation of these technologies operates to redress geographic and socioeconomic inequities for young people living on the urban fringe. We discuss this digital inclusion through research findings related to young people’s digital access, mediation, and mobility in the use of the MYBus technologies. This empirical work is situated theoretically by connecting this mobile digital inclusion with literature on young people’s social capital, to develop the concept of children’s e-mobility capital.
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ItemASYNCHRONOUS SPEEDS: DISENTANGLING THE DISCOURSE OF 'HIGH-SPEED BROADBAND' IN RELATION TO AUSTRALIA'S NATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK(UNIV QUEENSLAND PRESS, 2014-05)This article analyses the substantive problems related to the term ‘high-speed broadband’ in relation to the implementation of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). It argues that an understanding of speed in relation to broadband must take into account a complex assemblage of infrastructure networks, communication devices, software, location, user subjectivity and political input. Within this assemblage are varied definitions, discourses and materialities of speed that do not necessarily synchronise. Instead, speed is subject to asynchronous perceptions and implementations, which impact on the potential of the NBN. With the aim of contextualising and problematising the understanding of speed in relation to the NBN, this article explores four key points: first, how the perception of speed is dependent not so much on technical performance, but on the subjectivities of internet experience; second, how the term ‘broadband’ is politically shaped, especially in the context of the Coalition government's alternative multi-technology mix plan; third, how the assemblage of different social, technical and political actants that constitute high-speed broadband determines the perception of speed; and finally, how asynchronous speeds of broadband implementation and adoption may impact on the potential benefits of the NBN.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableReciprocal Habituation: A Study of Older People and the Kinect(ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2014-06)We explore relationships between habits and technology interaction by reporting on older people's experience of the Kinect for Xbox. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understandings of habits in the use of technology to inform understanding of the habitual qualities of our interactions with computing technologies, particularly systems exploiting natural user interfaces. We situate ideas of habit in relation to user experience and usefulness in interaction design, and draw on critical approaches to the concept of habit from cultural theory to understand the embedded, embodied, and situated contexts in our interactions with technologies. We argue that understanding technology habits as a process of reciprocal habituation in which people and technologies adapt to each other over time through design, adoption, and appropriation offers opportunities for research on user experience and interaction design within human-computer interaction, especially as newer gestural and motion control interfaces promise to reshape the ways in which we interact with computers.