Day four of the ascilite 2008 conference offers a variety of interesting presentations commencing with a keynote presentation from Associate Professor Gary Poole.
Please note that morning tea, afternoon tea and lunch are included in the registration fee.
Tony McDonald
Learning Technologies for Medical Sciences, The Medical School, Newcastle University, UK
"Integrity is the essence of everything successful" (Richard Buckminster Fuller)
How can individuals behave in an online environment that enables them to keep and enhance their integrity and reputation, fills colleagues with confidence, allows for free exchange of information and yet still manage to keep private those things that they wish to keep private? The Internet is a largely anonymous world, with flame-wars, spamming, phishing and distrust being the order of the day, but I will argue that by allowing some carefully controlled non-anonymity to 'leak out', mutual trust can be built up. I will outline some existing authentication and authorisation systems, and will touch upon identity management issues in general. I will discuss some initiatives such as Shibboleth, OpenID in general and discuss in particular how OpenID might be used in practice to allow individuals to have a greater say in what information is held about them, and how this information is used by third parties.
Keywords: integrity, persona, authentication, authorisation, shibboleth, openid, identity management, privacy
Shirley Gibbs
Lincoln University, New Zealand
This study reports an analysis of IT use by undergraduate university students. The term 'computer literacy' is as widely used now, as it was previously, but the meaning has changed as has how and why computers are used. Thirty years ago computer literacy meant the ability to program in a main frame environment then moved to meaning using computers to manipulate data. Now computer literacy seems to mean a number of things, including being comfortable using on-line tools.The findings of this study indicate that there is little relationship between how a person rates their overall computing ability and how they rate their ability in specific areas. However, a paired samples t-test, between on-line and off-line activities, returned a significant (p < 0.05) mean difference between these two activities. This suggests further investigation is warranted.
Keywords: on-line computer literacy; off-line computer literacy; undergraduate; IT use
Bill Anderson and Mary Simpson
University of Otago
Online sites support complex discourses and multiple relationships; they cross physical, cultural and linguistic boundaries. In a discussion of the practices and welfare of staff and students we highlight ethical issues related to matters of equity and diversity, surveillance and consent, identity and confidentiality. Rather than attempt to resolve issues raised in this discussion, we pose questions to encourage exploration of those issue.
Keywords: ethics, online education, equity
Colin Dalziel
Pebble Learning, UK
Plagiarism is a growing issue of concern for the academic and wider community. Much is made of plagiarism detection software but it is widely held that detection software cannot be the only, nor even the principle preventative measure. ePortfolios are growing in popularity in universities and professional organisations where ePortfolio presentations allow users to present collections of evidence that support a particular intent; from job application to professional accreditation. Within well designed assessment, eportfolios can be used to present the outcomes of learning as well as the process by which that learning arose: the plans, draft notes, feedback comments, peer reviews, sketches and research blog. Some systems allow these learning artefacts to be presented as links from a narrative account; an example of meta-reflection, organising the individual items into a story of learning. This paper principally concerns a work in progress where eportfolio developers are working alongside academic colleagues to align plagiarism-suppressing eportfolio approaches with plagiarism detecting services to militate against cheating and improve learning.
Nona Muldoon and David Jones
Division of Teaching and Learning Services, Central Queensland University
Jennifer Kofoed
Faculty of Business and Informatics, Central Queensland University
Colin Beer
Division of Teaching and Learning Services, Central Queensland University
This paper discusses a novel use of Second Life to produce a series of 'machinimas' to support a cognitive apprenticeship model of learning in accounting education. In this paper, the notion of 'second life' has dual meaning: first, it is about curriculum renewal; and second, it pertains to the widely talked about social software. The paper describes both meanings of 'second life' in this context, shows how when combined they have resulted in a significant increase in the quality of student learning outcomes and argues that technology only becomes transformational when it is used to enable alignment across all curriculum elements.
Keywords: cognitive apprenticeship, constructive alignment, accounting, second life, machinima
Trish Andrews
TEDI, The University of Queensland
Robyn Smyth
School of Rural Medicine, The University of New England
Belinda Tynan and Deb Vale
Faculty of the Professions, The University of New England
Richard Caladine
CEDIR, The University of Wollongong
Rich media technologies are commonly defined as technologies that enable users to engage in interactive communication, with the ability to see, hear and interact with multiple communication streams synchronously or access them asynchronously. Rich media technologies are also characterised by their ability to support non-verbal communication such as body language and vocal inflection. The rapidly increasing access to rich media technologies such as video and web conferencing both commercially available and as open source, provides a wealth of opportunities for education. This is a rapidly changing landscape as existing and emerging technologies increase both access and expectation in regards to communication. Coupled with this is the growing recognition that new generations of students have greater expectations of media rich learning opportunities and in many cases institutions are poorly placed to respond to this demand.
While rich media technologies such as videoconferencing have been available for some considerable time, the adoption of these technologies is often problematic, resulting in ad hoc usage and little ability to cater to unexpected demand. Few institutions have adopted successful approaches to sustainable or scalable use of these technologies. This paper explores some of the reasons why sustainable and scalable adoption of rich media often fails, including the need to involve all stakeholders in decision making processes. It outlines an Australian Teaching and Learning Council funded project on leading rich media implementation collaboratively which seeks to address some of the issues faces by the sector and reports on progress to date.
Ailsa Haxell
Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University
When integrating new technologies into practice, we tend to think of ourselves as designers or directors of our own practices. In contrast, this paper considers how technologies may be shaping practices and/or shaping us. In studying change as communication and computer technologies are integrated within a community youth counselling centre, I explore the web of relations where human and non-human actors have influence. The research presented in this paper is informed by actor-network theory (ANT), an approach investigating the material semiotics of what shapes, and is shaped. In this paper the particular and peculiar effects of text messaging for counselling are considered. The effects are not considered in terms of being good or bad. To this author, attempting such normative evaluation is like asking: is talking to strangers good or bad? The answer must be: it depends. Whether the changes that occur are anticipated, desirable, able to be enhanced or moderated requires a fuller picture of processes involved. Initial findings suggest there are implications for educators considering this medium whether providing pastoral care or in integrating text messaging as a medium for learning.
Keywords: mobile technology, SMS messaging, text messaging, text counselling
Ian Knox and Deirdre Wilmott
Institute for Professional and Organisational Learning, University of Ballarat
Virtual teams are a relatively new phenomenon. A number of studies have focused on the description of team development and the group process of virtual learning teams as they form. This paper is a study of how Australian and American undergraduates worked together in virtual teams to respond to ethical and business practice problems for a given scenario. The study specifically examined the communication methods, task completion methodology and cultural differences exhibited by two undergraduate classes from the University of Ballarat, Ballarat Australia and Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, Alabama, United States. Both synchronous and asynchronous communications methods were used with differing levels of enthusiasm and acceptance. Although the study was based on a small sample, which limits its generalisability, there are implications to inform those who are considering similar methods in their teaching.
Naomi Augar
Institute of Teaching and Learning, Deakin University
Annegret Goold
School of Engineering and Information Technology, Deakin University
The ability to communicate effectively as part of a virtual team working in the online environment is a valuable skill to have in the modern e-workplace. Such skills can be difficult to develop in undergraduate students. This paper reports on a professional practice unit situated in a web 2.0 environment that aims to develop students' teamwork skills. The paper also reports on research that sought to gain understanding of the student experience of interacting online in virtual teams. The results showed that students value the virtual teamwork experience, finding it useful and relevant for their future careers. The student perceptions of various aspects of virtual teamwork have improved with each subsequent offering of the unit.
Keywords: Virtual teams, problem-based learning, authentic learning environment.
Benjamin Kehrwald
College of Education
Massey University
This paper reports on the preliminary results of a heuristic evaluation of one learner support community in the BEd(Teaching) Primary programme in the College of Education at Massey University. It examines the use of an online community structure to support a programme delivered in blended modes for both internal (face-to-face) and external students. The presentation includes a description of the context for the case, the development of a learner support community including key feature of the community design and development process and issues arising in the early phases of implementation of the design.
Keywords: online community, learner support, community development
Rachel Sale
Instructional Design for Online Learning, Lincoln University
Roderick Sims
Instructional Design for Online Learning, Capella University
A conundrum exists when examining online learning and young adults who live in generational poverty. As informal learners these individuals gain and practice communication skills such as synchronous chat, uploading files, and frequent posting habits as members of social networking sites, yet typically do not succeed in formal online learning. This study examined how a sample of young American adults living in generational poverty participated in online social networking sites in order to identify cognitive styles used to develop knowledge or share knowledge, and to consider the implications of these approaches for the design of online learning for students at or near the poverty level. A case study strategy was employed to investigate online activities of Midwestern (USA) young adults who identified their families as living for at least two generation in a poverty level economic status defined by the U.S. Bureau of Census. The group was of mixed gender, and the same questions were posed to a like group of self-identified middle class adults to assess responses that were not unique to income level. Five usage perceptions or patterns were identified as unique to the generational poverty participants: (a) how the individual perceives life as a member of the virtual world; (b) life in the responders' real world; (c) language register; (d) use of millennium learner cognitive styles; and (e) preference for synchronous versus asynchronous activity. These patterns suggest designers can cater for generational poverty through community interaction as a survival tool, casual language and tackling projects or problems with a sense of immediacy.
Keywords: instructional design, online courses, social networking, generational poverty
Kanishka Bedi
Universitas 21 Global and Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
Blended programs have gained immense popularity due to the synergy derived out of online and face-to-face pedagogies. However, in blended programs, at times students tend to compare the utility and value of the online component vis-à-vis face-to-face component. This comparison may escalate to the teaching presence of faculty especially if the professors facilitating the online and face-to-face components happen to be two different individuals. This study reports such an issue faced in a blended program for entrepreneurs and family businesses, where the students complained about less than expected teaching presence of the faculty on the online asynchronous discussion boards (DBs). The taxonomy proposed by Blignaut & Trollip (2003) was utilised by including two more dimensions namely, the DB topics and length of the faculty postings to measure the teaching presence in four completed courses of the program. The findings uncovered various dimensions of the teaching presence including an over emphasis of the faculty on informative postings while neglecting the corrective postings, lack of comprehensiveness and a declining trend in the number of faculty postings, thus impacting the student engagement on the online DBs. The utility of this simple yet effective method of measuring the teaching presence can be extended beyond the completed classes to the ongoing classes for aiding the faculty in conducting mid-course corrections to improve student engagement.
Keywords: blended program; entrepreneurs; teaching presence; online faculty
Juliana Mansvelt, Gordon Suddaby and Duncan O’Hara
Massey University
This paper reports on the findings drawn from a New Zealand research project (Professional Development in e-Learning PDeL) which is producing a sector-wide framework for professional development in tertiary e-Learning. The findings indicate that staff engaged in e-learning in tertiary institutions are not making use of the formal professional development opportunities available to them. Rather they seem to gain their knowledge and support from a variety of informal means. This is despite an emphasis on the provision of formal professional development opportunities by both the New Zealand government and institutions themselves. The conclusion drawn from the findings is that institutional approaches to e-Learning professional development do not yet fully reflect the demands and constraints that working in a digital context impose.
Robyn Benson
Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University
Gayani Samarawickrema
Institute of Teaching and Learning, Deakin University
Recent views on the scholarship of teaching and learning have conceptualised the work of teachers as a form of inquiry, drawing on scholarly discourse about teaching and learning and communicating new understandings back to the scholarly community for peer review and evaluation. Knowledge about teaching may be based on a variety of forms of evidence, including research, evaluation, reflection, review, and the discussion or development of theoretical perspectives, ideas and concepts. This raises questions about the quality and forms of evidence about teaching which contribute to scholarship, whether these are the same in relation e-teaching and learning as they are for teaching in other contexts, and the implications of different forms of evidence for the relationship between research and teaching. In this paper we examine articles from three recent issues of three journals (two of them relating to e-learning and one to higher education in general), in order to draw some preliminary conclusions about the kind of contributions to discourse about e-learning which may be regarded as valuable in advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Keywords: e-learning, evidence, scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)
Gloria Pickar
Compass Knowledge Group
Stephen Marshall
University Teaching Development Centre, Victoria University of Wellington
As online courses and programs continue to grow at exponential rates and provide global reach, e-learning student completion, retention and persistence are areas of great concern to faculty and administrators. In response to this need the IMS Global Learning Consortium, an international e-learning technology standards and best practices organisation, is developing an evidence-based methodology to improve e-learning student persistence by identifying and defining best practices around three phases of the new student's introduction to the e-learning experience: expectations, preparation, and induction. These practices are under active development and this paper provides a progress report of work to date and an invitation to contribute to the development of this IMS standard.
Keywords: retention, persistence, induction
Helen Correia, Janne Malfroy, Tim Griffin, Jennifer Ireland and Lynnae Rankine
University of Western Sydney
Since the appearance of e-learning in the tertiary education sector a range of approaches have been used to enhance the quality of online learning environments. Building on these approaches, at the University of Western Sydney our approach is one of developing quality e-learning sites in a collegial and developmental manner, as a central part of overall good teaching practice. Our view is that, in order for the process to be truly collegial and developmental, it needs to be supported across all levels of the academic environment and, importantly, it should be adopted by academics rather than being imposed upon them. A central aspect of the collegial and developmental approach is that academics should be provided with the skills and support to be the drivers of quality in the e-landscape. This paper introduces a project that applies this developmental and collegial philosophy to building quality in our online learning environments in a whole of enterprise context.
Keywords: quality, standards, online learning environments, e-learning
Shane Sutherland
Pebble Learning, UK
Alan Paull
APS Ltd, UK
The PortisHEad project developed tools to support applications to UK HE through learner-owned e-portfolios; including the ability to target unique e-portfolios to different institutions. The original demonstration tool helped address the recommendations of the Schwartz report for fairer admissions to HE. However, despite good learner feedback and a strong sectoral imperative, the tool was not implemented by UCAS, the application service. Despite the withdrawal of UCAS from the project the remaining partners developed a generic application toolkit which allows any e-portfolio user to auto-complete educational or employment-related 'application-type' forms using learner-owned data from their e-portfolio. The toolkit is consistent with the 'thin e-portfolio model' propounded by the JISC-funded e-Portfolio Reference Model project. It uses an 'open standard' web-service which is easily implementable by 'form-owners'; access to data is managed by the learners and remains secure. The toolkit is easy to deploy and has already generated significant interest not only from admissions tutors but also for its utility to teachers and staff developers. This paper points to how learner-controlled technologies, and learner-owned data, can be meaningfully utilised to engage with intra- and extra-institutional systems using open standards and web services. It also illustrates that technological difficulties are less critical than organisational ones.
Keywords: e-portfolio, admissions, application, web-services
Julie Hughes
University of Wolverhampton
E-learning research, as an emergent field in the UK, is highly political in nature (Conole & Oliver, 2007, p.6) occupying a complex landscape which houses policy-makers, researchers and practitioners. Increasingly and more interestingly, the landscape is being shaped by the narratives and experiences of the learners themselves (Creanor et al., 2006, Conole et al., 2006) and the use of Web 2.0 technologies. However, as Laurillard (2007, p.xv) reminds us we still, 'tend to use technology to support traditional modes of teaching' and 'we scarcely have the infrastructure, the training, the habits or the access to the new technology, to be optimising its use just yet' (p.48).
Web 2.0 spaces, literacies and practices offer the possibility for new models of education (Mayes & de Freitas, 2007, p.13) which support iterative and integrative learning but as educators and higher educational establishments are we prepared and ready to re-think our pedagogies and re-do (Beetham & Sharpe 2007, p.3) our practices? This concise paper will reflect upon how the use of new learning landscapes such as eportfolios might offer us the opportunity to reflect upon the implications of letting in the e-learning eportfolio trojan mouse (Sharpe & Oliver, 2007, p.49).
Keywords: eportfolio, integrative learning, pedagogy
Philippa Gerbic
Auckland University of Technology
Marguerite Maher
Charles Darwin University
E-portfolios have long been used to support learning and development and to showcase achievement. This paper discusses a new and innovative use of e-portfolios which relates to the ways in which they can support collaborative research. The collaborative self-study which accompanied the implementation of an e-portfolio within a teacher education programme is described and then followed by discussion of three of its features. These were the value of the collaboration for supporting the deep understanding of a new technology, ethical issues for such a research study and the use of the e-portfolio environment as a data collection instrument.
Keywords: e-portfolios, research, collaborative self-study, teacher education, Mahara.
Eva Heinrich
School of Engineering and Advanced Technology
Massey University
The traditional approach to the provision of e-learning systems is one of institutional control and ownership. In the context of electronic portfolio systems in support of lifelong learning this approach needs to be questioned, as the characteristics of lifelong learning are in conflict with institutional ownership and control. Lifelong learning, with its aspects of life-wide and self-directed learning, needs to put the learner in charge of system and data. Institutional learning linkages are still important, but the role of the institution has to be one of support instead of control. To retain the advantages of institutional types of ePortfolio systems while at the same time matching the lifelong learning paradigm the suggestion is made to separate system provision from the educational relationship by hosting the ePortfolio system with an external provider.
Keywords: ePortfolios, electronic portfolios, lifelong learning, tertiary education, ownership