Virtual experts : who's online?

There will be between 30 and 80 million online students in the world by 2025. Globally, school systems are investing huge resources in the development of online education programs in order to meet this demand. Related implications for online teaching have been largely ignored despite evidence of the greatly increased workload for online teachers and widespread student dissatisfaction with online leaming experiences. Opportunities for improving the online experience for both leamers and teachers revolve around minimizing procedural inefficiencies in dealing with large numbers of individual students, as opposed to a single class, and of enhancing students' social and cognitive engagement with leaming. Intelligent software agents that can automate many routine online tasks and some aspects of leamer interaction have enormous potential to facilitate this. These agents that can act as a personal online coach, mentor or tutor to increase the individualisation of learning. The development of evidence-based agent personas is essential if agents are to fulfil specific educational roles. CUITently there is little progress being made in this area because of the lack of an agentrole model that can be used to implement specific educational personas in agents. In this paper we discuss key foundational elements of the nature and basis for implementing elements of educational expertise in software and how this could be used in developing agent persona models for specific educational roles and a model for implementing pedagogical constructs in intelligent educational software.

Knowledge sharing through virtual layers in regional sustainable development networks

Our research examines how the organisational structure facilitates knowledge sharing within the group. This case study examines a Victorian regional sustainable group using interviews and social network analysis to identify the group’s organisational structure and its effect on knowledge sharing between the members. Our findings indicate that while the mixed membership, lack of hierarchy and layered structure are complex, these elements work together to provide members with a rich body of knowledge. The diversity and differences in membership are complimentary and combined can provide a more in-depth understanding of the regional sustainable development issues.

The Virtualopolis archipelago: creatively interconnecting work-based virtual scenarios

One of the key elements of a quality student experience in higher education, outlined in the 2008 Bradley Report on the review of Australian higher education, is access to well-designed and engaging courses that lead to good vocational outcomes. 1 The Virtualopolis project concerns the development of a virtual city or platform which can encompass a community or vocational context for learning resources, linking these to engaging course delivery across disciplines and faculties. It is a virtual community with great potential to scaffold the imaginative immersion of the modem net generation learner. It was designed to incorporate virtual scenarios which were already in use, such as the country town of Bilby and the Pacific-style island of Newlandia, and has expanded to provide a virtual city of Virtualopolis across faculties and disciplines. One of the key strengths of this form of virtual environment is its capacity to focus on graduate attributes across disciplines. Virtualopolis provides access and a virtual city context to an interactive teamwork scenario, to develop attributes related to working with others, interrelating virtual business entities across all faculties. The teamwork scenario has multiple applications, with capacity to be a hurdle requirement, assessment item or training activity depending on the needs of the faculty's Work-integrated Leaming (WIL) policy. By developing the online virtual framework or platform of Virtualopolis, work-integrated team assessment can be used as skills preparation for experiential learning units such as internships, professional experience and workplace-based projects university-wide. It also provides the opportunity to repeatedly reuse the virtual city context for resources to support other courses. The Virtualopolis city and its interactive team scenario will be transferable for future cross-faculty and interdisciplinary virtual developments. Plans are already made for content areas as diverse as community health, nursing, creative arts, international relations and management.

An obligate beach bird selects sub-, inter- and supra-tidal habitat elements

Few habitat models are available for widespread, obligate, high-energy sandy shore vertebrates, such as the Eastern Hooded Plover Thinornis cucullatus cucullatus. We examined habitat attributes which determined the difference between sites where plovers breed and randomly-selected absence sites (determined from long-term systematic monitoring). A variety of habitat variables were derived from aerial photography and bathymetric and terrestrial Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data. Logistic regression against eight candidate variables, in a model selection framework, revealed considerable support for four variables with respect to explaining the presence of breeding territories. In particular, the amount of unvegetated dune and foredune which was unvegetated, and the amount of intertidal and sub-tidal reef were positively associated with the presence of breeding territories. Thus, plovers apparently select certain habitat in which to breed, involving sub-tidal, intertidal and supra-tidal habitat elements. The model also helps explain the virtual absence of breeding plovers from long sections of superficially suitable habitat, such as the fourth longest continuous beach in the world.