A Conversation with His Honour Chief Judge Michael Rozenes AO

In the last decade, increasing attention has been paid to understanding the components of care that might contribute to the stroke unit effect. Early mobilization, in its many guises, is one component of care proposed to contribute to the survival and recovery benefits of stroke unit care.1 This topical review provides an overview of the current evidence, research, and practice recommendations for early mobilization after stroke. As a term, early mobilization is problematic. There is no common understanding of the meaning of early (eg, hours, days, weeks, months) or mobilization (movement of, eg, cells, joints, limbs, people). A recurring theme in this review, inadequate definition currently limits our ability to synthesize information on the topic. For example, in some clinical trials of mobility interventions started soon after stroke, mobilization is used to describe a program of task-specific standing and walking retraining (rehabilitation) delivered by therapists or nurses and continued throughout the acute hospital stay.2,3 In other cases, mobilization refers simply to moving a patients’ limbs in bed or sitting them out of bed. The timing of commencement of activity is also highly variable and often hard to determine. As both what we do (intervention type, intensity, frequency, amount), and when we do it, may confer benefit or harm, we highlight variations in definition where relevant. We have focused our review on out-of-bed interventions commencing in the first 24 to 72 hours after stroke, as this is the period of greatest clinical uncertainty. Early mobilization was first discussed at a Swedish consensus conference on stroke care in the mid-1980s (Bo Norving and Bent Indredavik, personal communication, 2014) with several local guidelines in Norway and Sweden recommending the practice. Early mobilization became more prominent in the literature in the early 1990s when Indredavik and colleagues reported their clinical …

The effect of caralluma fimbriata extract on metabolic parameters in high-fat fed wistar rats

Students at Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne, Australia, undertake their study in an English language context and they have a range of support options to assist with English language development. VU has partner universities in China (Sichuan University, Henan University and Liaoning University). VU’s programs in China often have fewer language support options than programs in Melbourne. The Australian Government’s Transnational Quality Strategy requires that educational programs on- and offshore provide students with a comparable learning experience. Given the relative lack of English speaking opportunities available to VU’s students in China, the university is exploring how technologies might achieve a greater comparability of the student experience. This paper reports on a pilot program that uses Elluminate to conduct English conversations between students in China and Australia. The perceived lack of English competence of international students has been an ongoing issue in Australian higher education while the ‘English corner’ is ‘a characteristically Chinese approach to informal practice’ (Jin & Cortazzi, 2002) that helps students learning English in a foreign context to develop their English language proficiency. How might the idea of ‘English corner’ be used with educational technologies to encourage international students to practise and develop their English? This paper discusses a pilot program at VU that combines the idea of the English Corner together with the online conferencing tool Elluminate and a blog developed in WordPress, to engage Chinese students offshore in English language conversations. Through Elluminate and the Global English Corner blog, a pair of student peers in Melbourne conducts semi-structured conversations with groups of students offshore. In Elluminate, students can both hear and see each other – and they can simultaneously txt chat, share documents, images and websites and use the collaborative whiteboard function of Elluminate – to have dynamic conversations in real time. Preliminary findings of this pilot that uses technology to emphasise the societal aspects of learning – including language learning – will be presented. The discussion will consider how a more widespread English Corner program could aid the transition of international students in Australia, encourage the interaction of local students and international students, increase opportunities for international students to practise English and achieve a greater comparability of language support options on- and offshore.

This paper reports on research conducted at Victoria University in Melbourne. It looks at factors that influence women's entry into Computer Science, their journey through their studies, and issues that engage women on their way to becoming computer scientists. Of particular significance is the finding that women enrolled in Computer Science are successful, and perceive no major barriers to their success. However, despite the fact that Victoria University has created a range of initiatives to encourage participation, the percentage of female enrolments in Computer Science has declined significantly in recent years. Barriers continue to exist to limit the participation of women in Computer Science. The challenge remains to identify the nature of these barriers.

Higher education has great capacity to build ongoing partnerships with community groups to address a range of issues associated with social disadvantage. In early 2004, Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, established a Community Engagement Working Party to clarify the principles and objectives underpinning the university’s approach to community engagement. As a result of that process a new Learning in the Workplace and Community (LiWC) policy was established and is now a key feature of all teaching programmes at Victoria University in vocational education and higher education. LiWC provides a good opportunity to develop partnerships that will be ongoing and developmental. The aim of this paper is to discuss the unique partnership between a community centre and a university that would see, in 2009, over 100 students from eight different disciplines across the university working in teams, on projects and individually with young people in the heart of Melbourne’s west as a part of their own undergraduate course work. A case study approach has been used to explore the features of the partnership, which has produced educational and community outcomes. This partnership evidences the important role that a university can play in partnering community change, building the capacity of the teaching programmes among their own students and staff and building social capital in a community.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore business students' views about using ePortfolios at Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne. It also examines the extent to which students present ePortfolios to prospective employers in applying for jobs.Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws on the literature on ePortfolio use and the role of ePortfolios in the recruitment process together with results from an online survey of Professional Development students about the use of ePortfolios and the PebblePad platform.FindingsAn analysis of online responses examines student views about the usefulness of ePortfolios, the PebblePad platform, and the relevance of an ePortfolio assessment task. The findings suggest that few students use or expect to use ePortfolios beyond the assessment requirements and highlight students' polarised views about the usefulness of PebblePad.Research limitations/implicationsVU's Business Faculty needs to adopt a whole‐of‐course approach to embedding ePortfolios in the curriculum.Practical implicationsAt VU, ePortfolios are promoted to students as a personal learning system and as a creative means of communicating their employability skills. The findings suggest a need to review how ePortfolios are used, promoted and assessed in VU's programs.Originality/valueEPortfolios offer a structured, digital space where students can present evidence of employability skills and reflective capacity. While VU's Business students develop an ePortfolio to showcase their skills in one mandatory subject, ePortfolios must be better promoted as offering a medium for students to develop, store, and creatively present themselves to potential employers in a whole‐of‐course approach.

This article has been adapted from the 4th Michael Kirby Justice Oration, delivered at the College of Law & Justice, Victoria University, Melbourne, on 7 October 2014.

This article has been adapted from the 3rd Michael Kirby Justice Oration, delivered at the College of Law & Justice, Victoria University, Melbourne on 7 March 2013.
 
 Ireland has been overwhelmed in the past two decades by what the Catholic Church itself has called ‘a tsunami’ of revelations of clerical child abuse – physical as well as sexual – of the meticulous concealment of abuse and abusers and of a long-established, and almost universal policy of protecting the assets and reputation of the Church, in preference to exposing the abusers. Between 2006 and 2009 Judge Yvonne Murphy chaired a Commission of Inquiry into the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin.

This article has been adapted from the 8th Michael Kirby Justice Oration, delivered at the College of Law & Justice, Victoria University, Melbourne, on 26 September 2018.

This article has been adapted from the 7th Michael Kirby Justice Oration, delivered at the College of Law & Justice, Victoria University, Melbourne, on 27 September 2017.

This article has been adapted from the 9th Michael Kirby Justice Oration, delivered at the College of Law & Justice, Victoria University, Melbourne, on 27 August 2019.

This article has been adapted from the 10th Michael Kirby Justice Oration, delivered at the College of Law & Justice, Victoria University, Melbourne, on 25 August 2021 via video-link.

The law is increasingly being displayed to its practitioners and subjects in new forms and through new media. Some of this technological change simply permits easier access to information and faster recording processes. However students are at the forefront of the attempt to provide new ways of representing legal dilemmas, problems and issues. How do students imagine and represent the law? This paper describes an experiment in which undergraduate students from quite different backgrounds examined topical legal issues and presented reports in visual form, choosing between three formats: CD-ROMs, videos and web pages. Participants came from two universities in Victoria; students from Victoria University were multimedia students, students from the University of Melbourne were criminology research methods students. They formed small teams, pooling their skills to carry out research projects on aspects of the law, including busking, football violence and how images of blood should be shown on film or TV. This article reviews the lessons of this collaborative exercise for understandings of the law.

The subject of quality is an important one for early career university teachers. To give you a broad understanding of this subject, the chapter starts with a brief outline of national approaches to assessing quality assurance and enhancement. It then focuses on institutional quality management frameworks and their implications for individual academic staff. In your teaching, it will be important to understand the links between quality and standards in university teaching. The chapter exemplifies these connections by drawing on the example of the Quality and Standards Framework at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Such frameworks are helpful to guide university teachers in thinking about the range of ways in which academic standards apply in teaching, assessment practices and student learning support. Strategies are presented for monitoring and assuring quality and standards in your teaching. Ultimately, the focus in all such activities is the impact on student learning and outcomes. Practical suggestions for gathering and documenting evidence of the quality of your teaching are considered, including peer observation of teaching and formative, qualitative data to complement the existing use of summative student feedback surveys.

ON THE COVER: Associate professor Kerry Dickson and biomedical science students at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia are showing the miming actions used as mnemonics for teaching each of the 12 cranial nerves. In this issue of ASE, Kerry Dickson and Bruce Stephens describe these actions (for example, CN II: hands forming tunnels in front of the eyes to represent vision) and the effect of their use on student performance. The authors found that learning was improved with miming, and that students perceived the miming classes to be more interactive, engaging, effective and motivating to attend than traditional didactic lectures.