Assuring best practice in technology-enhanced learning environments

This paper documents the development and findings of the Good Practice Report on Technology-Enhanced Learning and Teaching funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC). Developing the Good Practice Report required a meta-analysis of 33 ALTC learning and teaching projects relating to technology funded between 2006 and 2010. This report forms one of 12 completed Good Practice Reports on a range of different topics commissioned by the ALTC and Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT). The reports aim to reduce issues relating to dissemination that projects face within the sector by providing educators with an efficient and accessible way of engaging with and filtering through the resources and experiences of numerous learning and teaching projects funded by the ALTC and OLT. The Technology-Enhanced Learning and Teaching Report highlights examples of good practice and provides outcomes and recommendations based on the meta-analysis of the relevant learning and teaching projects. However, in order to ensure the value of these reports is realised, educators need to engage with the reports and integrate the information and findings into their practice. The paper concludes by detailing how educational networks can be utilised to support dissemination.

Different views on Digital Scholarship: separate worlds or cohesive research field?

This article presents a systematic review of the literature on Digital Scholarship, aimed at better understanding the collocation of this research area at the crossroad of several disciplines and strands of research. The authors analysed 45 articlesin order to draw a picture of research in this area. In the first phase, the articles were classified, and relevant quantitative and qualitative data were analysed. Results showed that three clear strands of research do exist: Digital Libraries, Networked Scholarship and Digital Humanities. Moreover, researchers involved in this research area tackle the problems related to technological uptake in the scholar's profession from different points of view, and define the field in different – often complementary – ways, thus generating the perception of a research area still in need of a unifying vision. In the second phase, authors searched for evidence of the disciplinary contributions and interdisciplinary cohesion of research carried out in this area through the use of bibliometric maps. Results suggest that the area of Digital Scholarship, still in its infancy, is advancing in a rather fragmented way, shaping itself around the above-mentioned strands, each with its own research agenda. However, results from the cross-citation analysis suggest that the Networked Scholarship strand is more cohesive than the others in terms of cross-citations.

A systemic model for differentiating school technology integration

School technology integration rarely begins with school or educator choice. It is part of a wider context where external and internal factors have direct influence on the goals and tools that are adopted over time. The objective of this study is to investigate the systemic conditions that contribute or inhibit the development of different activities by teachers making use of new media. We compiled a list of well-known conditions for technology integration success and mapped these in the historical and culturally bound perspective of activity theory (cultural historical activity theory). We conducted a multiple case study analysis of four schools, public and private. The results point to unique and distinctive scenarios even when homogeneity would be expected, reinforcing the argument that material conditions do not determine pedagogical outcomes nor do they determine changes in practice. Beyond this, the study proposes a methodology that can help elicit tensions in technology integration, pointing to avenues for school development.