Vivien Silvey

The text matching software Turnitin is now used in one form or another by over 90% of Australian universities. Unfortunately, both educators and students commonly view Turnitin as a plagiarism detection tool. We argue that this focus limits the effectiveness of Turnitin by contributing negatively to staff and students’ anxiety and may incongruously lead to poor academic practice. In line with emerging research, we advocate a literacy approach to using Turnitin that harnesses its potential to develop students’ academic writing. However, unlike this research which has tended to focus on discipline-specific courses rather than academic language and learning courses, our study developed teaching resources and activities designed for use by students of all disciplines and programs. The resources were evaluated in month-long preparatory academic skills programs with 46 international students. Our approach not only reduced students’ anxiety; importantly, it assisted students to develop their authorial voice and better understand appropriate citation practices. Our results demonstrate that Turnitin has potential to assist students with their writing, particularly if it is primarily viewed as a tool that is inextricably connected to academic writing, and intersects with timely and constructive academic learning resources.

The multinational film Babel (2006) and the Australian film Lantana (2001) dwell on controversies surrounding international and multicultural relationships. They belong to a genre termed network cinema, which focuses on social problems and responds to the paradigm of network society. Babel and Lantana aim to represent cultural pluralism, yet their narrative politics compromise this aim. Although they seek to decolonize the marginalized and give equal voice to broad cross sections of society, these two films rely on narrative tactics which colonize, stereotype and essentialize cultural others. This paper argues that the ways in which the two texts reterritorialize multicultural and gendered relationships undermine their thematic concern with the need for cross cultural understanding and trust. In many ways these narrative tactics align with those popular in Hollywood films, which challenges the notion that world cinema consists of oppositional film industries. Nevertheless, the production and distribution of these two films reveal concretely asymmetrical power relationships. These findings suggest that the common notion of a clear divide between Hollywood and national art cinemas (implicit in the term “world cinema”) requires revision.

Michael Haneke’s "Code Unknown" and the multi-director "Paris, je t’aime" belong (the latter at least in part) to a recently emerged cinematic form described as the network form, which represents changing spaces and plural perspectives in multicultural societies. Reflecting Rosalind Galt’s concept of “anti-anti-Eurocentrism”, they represent discursive and referential spaces of Parisian society. Through a comparative analysis of how they frame space with regard to borders and transnational relationships, it becomes apparent that some of the approaches these films take to representing Europe are problematic. In contrast, others encapsulate key concerns surrounding the constantly changing relationships between Europe and its others. While "Code Unknown" challenges discourses of identity, home and belonging, "Paris je t'aime" tends to reinstate and validate divisive social hierarchies despite its appearances of pluralism.

In this paper we explore how Fatih Akin's film "Auf der anderen Seite" ("The Edge of Heaven") situates Turkish-German transnationalism within historical and contemporary frameworks. The film reconfigures paradigms of Eastern and Western relationships, positioning Germany and Turkey (and beyond) within each other‟s sights/sites, rather than following the traditions which cast Turks as Germany's cultural others. Throughout the film references to the Koran and the Bible, the Gastarbeiter programme, Turkish and German literature and music, and Turkish history triangulate the Jewish, Christian and Islamic roots of German and Turkish culture. Also rooted in cinematic intertextuality, Akin's film comments on and inverts traditions of the representation of Turkish-German relationships, repositioning Turks and Turkish Germans as constitutive of German culture and vice versa. Beyond blurring these borders, it places transnational cinema in a global context. Auf der anderen Seite belongs to a recently emerged class of films whose structures emphasise pluralistic perspectives and whose themes revolve around globalisation's effects upon national borders. As such it remaps relationships between the European Union and the rest of the world, putting Turkey under the spotlight politically and geographically, which widens the periphery of European and global mediascapes.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (Michel Gondry, 2004) is not your average love story. It has more in common with arthouse films like "Punch-Drunk Love" (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002) and "Garden State" (Zach Braff, 2004) than it does with glossy and predictable Hollywood romantic comedies like "What Happens in Vegas" (Tom Vaughan, 2008) or "Made of Honor" (Paul Weiland, 2008). The innovative use of narrative, mise en sc ne, cinematography, editing and the soundtrack in "Eternal Sunshine" all serve to convey the tenderness, confusion, miscommunication, pain and hope that accompany romantic endeavours. They underscore the film's message that when you have loved and lost, it is better to remember, mourn and honour that loss than to remain in ignorance of pain and the happiness you once had.

To cite this article: Silvey, Vivien. Anti-hero Jr: Eagle vs Shark and Indie Cinema's Regress to the Permachild [online]. Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, No. 158, Sept 2008: 142-145. Availability: <http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn= ...

Over the past three decades (1980s-2000s) there has been a boom in films which present collections of strangers whose lives coincidentally intersect, in ways unbeknownst to them but revealed to the audience. Love Actually (Curtis 2003), Babel (Iñárritu 2006), Crash (Haggis 2005), and Magnolia (Anderson 1999) are  among the most internationally well known examples of such films. While a fair amount of academic attention has been paid to such films, very little work has  investigated whether these types of films constitute a genre in distinction to ensemble films. Furthermore, while some cross cultural comparison has been made of such films, few have considered how the films and the concept of a global genre might relate to discursive terms such as “world cinema” and “art cinema”. Drawing on the genre theory of Rick Altman (1984, 1999) and Paul Willemen‟s endorsement of comparative film studies (2005), I conduct a comparative genre study of seven network films: Babel, Crash, The Edge of Heaven
(Akin 2007), Love for Share (Di Nata 2006), Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Haneke 2000), Lantana (Lawrence 2001), and Mumbai My Life (Kamat 2008). I argue that these seven examples of network films, which show numerous similarities despite their international origins, share generic qualities. Simultaneously, I conduct analyses of their narrative politics in order to discuss how such a global group of films reframe notions of “world cinema” and “art cinema”.

Academic integrity is of primary concern to Australian universities. Turnitin has become the text matching software of choice across the higher education sector to assist universities to police their academic honesty policies. Whilst Turnitin can now integrate with many popular eLearning platforms with added assessment tools, it is still predominantly viewed by both educators and students as a plagiarism detection tool. This initiative argues that by viewing Turnitin in this way, we miss the opportunity to use this rapidly progressing technology as an invaluable tool to help students to write with academic integrity and, in turn, develop their authorial voice. We draw on research from a trial with international graduate coursework students in their first year at The Australian National University undertaking a preparatory course. This research informed our collaborative and integrated approach to support students’ learning through a suite of resources and teaching activities for staff and students.