Microsoft Word - conts20-3.doc Australasian Journal of Educational Technology Volume 20, Number 3, Spring 2004 ISSN 1449-3098 Contents Editorial ................................................................................... iii-viii A spreadsheet based simulator for experiential learning in production management ......................................................... 275-294 Chuda Basnet and John L. Scott An instrument to support thinking critically about critical thinking in online asynchronous discussions ............................... 295-315 Elizabeth Murphy E-learning compared with face to face: Differences in the academic achievement of postgraduate business students ........... 316-336 Rick Ladyshewsky Computer skills development by children using 'hole in the wall' facilities in rural India .................................................... 337-350 Parimala Inamdar Classroom computer climate, teacher reflections and 're-envisioning' pedagogy in Australian schools ........................ 351-370 Margaret Robertson, Andrew Fluck, Ivan Webb and Barton Loechel Relationship between learning outcomes and online accesses ...... 371-387 Pannee Suanpang, Peter Petocz and Anna Reid A study of educational technology project management in ........... 388-404 Australian universities John Kenny © 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this journal may be reprinted or reproduced without permission from the publishers. The Australasian Journal of Educational Technology is a refereed research journal published three times per year jointly by the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education and the Australian Society for Educational Technology. Members of ASET, ASCILITE and ISPI (Vic) receive AJET as a part of their membership benefits. i i Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2004, 20(3) For details on submission of manuscripts, subscriptions and access to the AJET online archives, please see http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ For review inquiries, contact the Editor, Associate Professor Catherine McLoughlin, School of Education (ACT), Australian Catholic University, PO Box 256, Dickson ACT 2602, Australia. Email: C.McLoughlin@signadou.acu.edu.au, Tel: +61 2 6209 1100 Fax +61 2 6209 1185. For production matters and subscriptions contact the Production Editor and Business Manager, Dr Roger Atkinson, 5/202 Coode Street, Como WA 6152, Australia. Email: rjatkinson@bigpond.com, Tel: +61 8 9367 1133. AJET is managed by an Editorial Board nominated by ASCILITE and ASET. The 2004 Editorial Board comprises: Catherine McLoughlin (Editor), Australian Catholic University Roger Atkinson (Production Editor) Trish Andrews, University of Queensland Carolyn Dowling, Australian Catholic University Mike Keppell, Hong Kong Institute of Education Lori Lockyer, University of Wollongong Mary Jane Mahony, University of Sydney Elizabeth Stacey, Deakin University Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education http://www.ascilite.org.au/ Australian Society for Educational Technology http://www.aset.org.au/ Copyright in individual articles contained in AJET is vested in each of the authors in respect of his or her contributions. Copyright in AJET is vested in ASET (1985- 86), AJET Publications (1987-1996), and ASET and ASCILITE (from 1997). Desktop publishing and HTML by Roger Atkinson. Printed and bound by Pilpel Print, 148 Beaufort Street, Perth WA 6000, Australia. Supporting Societies Supporting societies obtain bulk supplies of printed copies of AJET at the same cost as applicable for ASCILITE and ASET members, and access to AJET online articles during the period of restricted access for each issue. Inquiries about supporting society status may be directed to the Production Editor. ISPI Melbourne Chapter http://www.ispimelb.org.au/ Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2004, 20(3) iii Editorial Idle Moments Idle Moments, we regret, are becoming rarer, and therefore more precious, though on our galactic time scale [1], Idle Moments are ensured. Since t h e last Moment [2], we have seized idle moments to consider two topics t h a t we very rarely feature, Copyright and Internationalisation. Idle Moment No. 7: Copyright Take time for a browse through copyright policy statements made by publishers of scholarly journals. This is very easy to do, because these statements are almost invariably free to the Internet on the publisher's website, unlike the substantive content in a publisher's holding, the full text articles. There are several important questions that warrant occasional browsing by the Editors into copyright policy statements. What are the trends, and is AJET up with, or ahead of these, or going in a dead end direction? Is AJET's own policy a good policy for authors and readers? Is intellectual property derived from academic endeavour becoming more like private property or more like communal property? AJET does have a venerable, simple and progressive policy on copyright. Since foundation in 1985, "Copyright in individual articles contained in Australian Journal of Educational Technology is vested in each of t h e authors in respect of his or her contributions". In 2004, Australian became Australasian. Apart from that, no changes were made, no justification ever given, no arguments ever arose, and, as far as we can determine, t h e policy has never been questioned by an author or a reader. Consider t h e question of 'justification', absent in AJET's copyright policy, but usually specified by other publishers in terms of protection and dissemination. Here are three examples, from a commercial publisher and a society: ASCILITE 2004 The University of Western Australia 5-8 December 2004 http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/ iv Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2004, 20(3) Copyright for articles published in these journals is retained by Inderscience Publishers, to ensure both the widest dissemination and protection of material published in Inderscience journals. Authors are asked to assign world-wide copyright in both print and other media in their papers, including abstracts, to Inderscience. This enables us to ensure copyright protection against infringement, and to disseminate your article, and our journals, as widely as possible. International Journal of Learning Technology (IJLT) [1] It is a condition of publication that the authors vest copyright in their articles, in HERDSA. This enables us to ensure full copyright protection and to disseminate the article, and the journal, to the widest possible readership in print and electronic formats, as appropriate. Authors may use the article elsewhere after publication without prior permission from the publisher (Carfax Publishing, Taylor & Francis)… Higher Education Research & Development [2] It is a condition of publication that authors vest copyright in their articles, including abstracts, in The Australian Educational Researcher. This enables us to ensure full copyright protection and to disseminate the article, and the journal, to the widest possible readership in print and electronic formats as appropriate. Authors may, of course, use the article elsewhere after publication providing that prior permission is obtained from the Managing Editor. The Australian Educational Researcher [3] It is interesting that AER, a recent adopter of an open access, free to t h e Internet policy (as discussed in Idle Moment No.1 [4]), shares a key sentence, word for word, with HERD. Your Editors will try to identify the author of this sentence, partly because recognition could be due, and partly because we would like to clarify what was meant by "copyright protection" and "widest possible readership", at the time that sentence was written. Copyright protection is a law [5], and not an action that a publisher has to take on behalf of authors. Whilst the intention to "disseminate… to the widest possible readership" is admirable, the phrase has different meanings for different stakeholders. For a commercial publisher, "widest possible readership" means "obtain more readers by selling more subscriptions". For a society publisher, it means "obtain more members by offering subscription as a membership benefit". For authors it meant, pre-Internet, that obtaining more readers was dependent upon a publisher's success in selling more subscriptions, or recruiting more members. For readers, pre-Internet, there was a similar dependence upon the publisher's success. Post-Internet, after the 1990s revolution in scholarly publishing enabled by the Internet and HTTP AusWeb 2005 2-6 July http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/ Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2004, 20(3) v (hypertext transfer protocol), the term "widest possible readership" h a s become open to a radically new scope. This is all Internet users, if a publisher wishes to take advantage of near zero marginal costs per copy distributed "free to the Internet". In the new scholarly publishing environment, a copyright policy that makes claims about "widest possible readership" whilst not offering "free to the Internet" is flawed to the point of near silliness. The casual reader could be forgiven for perceiving that many strange inconsistencies occur in the topic of scholarly publishing and copyright. Take this example from a major publisher's 'FAQs' on copyright, t h a t indicates a most unusual use of the term 'public domain'. Used, but not actually implemented! All Taylor & Francis journals are now published in simultaneous print and electronic, online editions; the latter is made available to institutional subscribers at no additional cost, on an open site LAN licence, for any number of concurrent users. Thus the electronic version of any paper accepted by and published in the Journal is available in the public domain, as the definitive version. [6] Seriously, whilst we can say with confidence that the intentions of AJET's copyright policy and open access policy are firmly established, and strongly supported by authors [7], we may need to work upon t h e details of how we express these policies clearly, efficiently and purposefully. One approach we intend to keep under review is the use of internationally standardised licencing classes as propounded by t h e Creative Commons [8], now developing in Australia [9]: Creative Commons is an international initiative which is attempting to reconceptualize the way we think about and create and share intellectual property, particularly in a creative context… Creative Commons aims to better identify, negotiate and reutilise content for the purpose of creativity and innovation. [10] Idle Moment No. 8: Internationalisation One purpose for our recently implemented change from Australian to Australasian in AJET's title [11] is to improve our recognition of t h e growing number of authors from the Asia-Pacific region. We are using t h e data illustrated in Figure 1 to help assess our progress, and we look also at kindred journals such as Higher Education Research and D e v e l o p m e n t (HERD). It is interesting to note that in 1997 HERD's Editors stated t h e i r expectation that "… the new publishing arrangements through Carfax will extend internationalisation of the journal still further." (Martin and vi Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2004, 20(3) Ling, 1997). However the data for the 'post-Carfaxing' years shown in Figure 1 suggests that progress in HERD's desired direction has been slow and uneven. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 Year Number of AJET articles Rest of world Asia-Pacific Australia 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 Year Number of HERD articles Rest of world Asia-Pacific Australia Figure 1: Number of articles in AJET (upper) and HERD (lower), 1997-2004, by first author's region of institutional affiliation Notes: The classification of countries into the regions Asia-Pacific and Rest of World was based upon Australia Post's charging zones [12]. Data was obtained by inspection of printed copies of the journals. The counts for 2004 are incomplete. In the context of scholarly journals in general, and AJET in particular, what is "internationalisation" and why is it deemed to be an important purpose? The word "international" is common enough in journal titles. For Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2004, 20(3) vii example, in the Taylor and Francis Group's list of about 121 journals classified under education, "international" occurs 21 times in titles [13]. Many journals announce their "international, peer reviewed" status in t h e publisher's description, but reasons for seeking to be "international" are rarely stated. One interesting exception is International Education Journal [14], based at the School of Education, Flinders University of South Australia. This journal's aims include the phrases "examination of educational issues from a cross-cultural or indigenous people's perspective", and "syntheses of research findings from comparative and cross-national studies in education." IEJ seeks to define a different kind of merit and benefit in being "international", when stating that: True to our name, we believe in the value of authors from a wide range of nationalities, cultures and contexts. Although we only currently publish in the English language we encourage contributions from around the world, particularly from the Asian countries. … we do not discriminate against authors from non-English speaking backgrounds. On the contrary, we offer an Editorial Service to improve poorly written papers. [14] Whilst there is an admirable link between "international", and "cross- national" and "cross cultural", viewed as positive features in the aims for a journal, the potential implication that other journals might discriminate and may fail to provide appropriate editorial support for NESB or LOTE [15] authors would be strongly contested by editors of many other journals, including AJET's Editors. Idle Moment No. 9: Web accessibility guidelines An article by Alexander (2004), reporting on a study of the accessibility of Australian university Web sites, provides a final idle moment, though it's not exactly idle. It relates to the serious question of html and p d f , or pdf only? [7] Alexander (2004) summarised as follows: A selection of key pages from all 45 Australian tertiary education Web sites were analysed to assess their compliance with basic accessibility standards, as required by Australian anti-discrimination legislation. The results--98% of sites failed to comply--suggest that Australian university Web sites are likely to present significant barriers to access for people with disabilities. (Alexander, 2004) In the section on text equivalents for PDF content, Alexander (2004) outlined a number of problems for persons with disabilities, and pointed out that "as a result of these limitations, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) have issued the following advice": viii Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2004, 20(3) The Commission's view is that organisations who distribute content only in PDF format, and who do not also make this content available in another format such as RTF, HTML, or plain text, are liable for complaints under the DDA (HREOC 2002). A matter we need to take into consideration. From time to time we check AJET web pages for our degree of compliance with W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [16]; we also use the W3C Markup V a l i d a t i o n Service [17]. Roger Atkinson AJET Production Editor Catherine McLoughlin AJET Editor E n d n o t e s 1. https://www.inderscience.com/papers/submissions.php#copyright 2. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/cherauth.asp 3. http://www.aare.edu.au/indexaer.htm 4. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet19/editorial19-3.html 5. Copyright Act 1968. Commonwealth Consolidated Acts. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/ 6. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/copyright.asp [viewed 24 Aug 2004, verified 3 Oct 2004] 7. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/editorial20-2.html 8. http://creativecommons.org/ 9. http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/au/ 10. Prof Brian Fitzgerald - Head of Law School. [verified 3 Oct 2004] http://www.law.qut.edu.au/about/staff/lsstaff/fitzgerald.jsp 11. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/editorial20-1.html 12. http://www1.auspost.com.au/download/ms160.pdf 13. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/listings/edu.asp [viewed 3 Oct 2004] 14. International Education Journal. http://iej.cjb.net/ 15. In accordance with the recommendation in Style Manual 6th ed, p.56, AJET uses the acronym LOTE in preference to NESB. 16. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ 17. http://validator.w3.org/ R e f e r e n c e s Alexander, D. (2004). How accessible are Australian university web sites? Ariadne, 38. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/alexander/ Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission ( 2002). World Wide Web Access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes, Version 3.2. http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/standards/www_3/www_3.html Martin, E. and Ling, P. (1997). Editorial. Higher Education Research and Development, 16(1), 5-7. Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Publishers (2002). 6th ed. Wiley Australia.