Using self- and peer assessment at honours level: bridging the gap between law school and the workplace

Growing awareness and interest in pedagogical issues permit greater experimentation with the design and delivery of law teaching. While employability skills are now commonplace within the law curriculum, the development of graduate attributes can also be enhanced through assessment methods requiring students to apply clearly understood criteria to their own performance. Where students are allocated work-related tasks, moderated self- and peer assessment can also help replicate the sense of “real” situations and act as an even more powerful stimulus to learning. The article considers staff and student perceptions of group-based learning in which assessment is considered both a means to “deep learning” and an end in itself insofar as students are allocated the task of formally recommending grades for coursework. Recognising that student-led learning and student-driven assessment are still relatively unorthodox in law teaching, the article concludes that this form of assessment method can clearly assist learning and the enhancement of graduate attributes and moreover can be justified objectively by reference to standard assumptions of validity, reliability, convenience and integrity.     

Cracking Hegemony in Thailand: Gramsci,Bourdieu and the Dialectics of Rebellion

Gramsci's notion of “hegemony,” like Bourdieu's concept of “habitus,” seems designed to explain accommodation to existing social structures, rather than resistance. In this paper, however, I draw from the Prison Notebooks some arguments that contribute to a Gramscian understanding of how hegemony may break apart under the weight of the same uneven development processes central to hegemony. Drawing also from Bourdieu, I argue that the conceptions of “hegemony” and “habitus” inscribe the possibility of resistance within the embodied experience of accommodation to class rule. I then elaborate a dialectical, Gramscian-Bourdieusian account of the Red Shirt movement in Thailand, showing that the seeds for the destruction of royalist hegemony in Thailand have been sown in the embodied processes of accommodation to ruling class hegemony. The breadth and depth of challenges to this hegemony, moreover, are evident not only from the activities of the Red Shirt movement and regional discontent in Northern and Northeast Thailand but from the resistance of working class women to attempts to police their sexuality and limit their consumerism. The refusal of Thai elites to accept the breadth and depth of Thailand's dispositional transformation has legitimised – in their eyes – the brutal crackdown on Red Shirt protestors that resulted in the April-May 2010 massacres. Yet repression can only kill off political leaders and specific parties; it will not likely derail the growing resentment of ordinary Thais over elitist class rule.     

The ‘punk anarchisms’ of Class War and CrimethInc.

ABSTRACT

Many of the connections between punk and anarchism are well recognized (albeit with some important contentions). This recognition is usually focussed on how punk bands and scenes express anarchist political philosophies or anarchistic praxes, while much less attention is paid to expressions of ‘punk’ by anarchist activist groups. This article addresses this apparent gap by exploring the ‘punk anarchisms’ of two of the most prominent and influential activist groups of recent decades (in English-speaking contexts at least), Class War and CrimethInc. Their distinct, yet overlapping, political approaches are compared and contrasted, and in doing so, pervasive assumptions about the relationship between punk and anarchism are challenged, refuting the supposed dichotomy between ‘lifestylist’ anarchism and ‘workerist’ anarchism.     

An evaluation of Internet use policies of Victorian local government

The Internet has provided employees and organisations with many benefits. However, employee misuse of Internet services has also become increasingly common. A solution to combating this problem is the implementation of an Internet Use Policy (IUP) within an organisation. This study developed IUP guidelines that were used to evaluate existing Victorian local government authority (LGA) IUPs. The number of LGAs without policies was then determined in February 2001. The findings revealed 36 per cent of Victorian LGAs did not have an IUP implemented. Fifty-one per cent of rural LGAs were found not to have IUPs. Furthermore, policies when compared with the IUP guidelines revealed deficiencies in many areas. A follow-up review was then conducted in 2004. It revealed that only 6 per cent of LGAs now lacked policies.