From product centricism to systems-wide education design: making corporate technology systems work for the learning organisation

Deakin University has established a major integrated corporate technology infrastructure in the last two years to enhance and bring together its distance education and on-campus education. This environment has been called Deakin Online. With Deakin Online rapidly developing, efforts are beginning to focus more fundamentally on how the potentials of the environment can be realised to create enduring teaching and learning value. This search must be understood in the context of the University’s commitment to the values of relevance, responsiveness and innovation. The question is: how can these values be realised in the digitally-based evolving educational enterprise using the new corporate technologies and new concepts of organisational structure and function? We argue for the transforming role of the academic teacher and new forms of open academic collegiality as being critical to realise strategic and enduring educational value. Moreover, change in role and process needs to be grounded in more systemic organisation and program-wide approaches to designing and working within the new contemporary learning environments. We believe the shift from the dangers of product centricism to system-wide education design modelling situating e-learning within broader curricular and pedagogical concerns represents the best strategy to create enduring educational benefits for all stakeholder groups (notably academic teachers and their learners) while preserving teachers’ sense of agency in the changing learning environments of higher education.

Redefining teacher education through a `multiple space` model: examining the forgotten spaces that teachers work in

This paper maps the current debates surrounding school-based and university-based teacher education models, and presents a ‘multiple-space’ model of teacher education that both explores and values the many ‘forgotten’ spaces that teachers work in. It draws from a variety of research studies, including my own doctoral work, to argue for a new approach to teacher education programs. I suggest that in order for teacher education to move beyond separatist, binary models, we need to adopt a ‘multiple-space’ view of learning to be a teacher that embraces the notion that teachers do not learn about theory in a university space, nor do they simply work in a classroom space.

Personal values of international postgraduate students from Asia : a cross cultural study

Australian universities face a challenging task to service an increasingly diverse international student community in the globally competitive education market. The pressure on universities to successfully negotiate cultural diversity arising from nationality differences and to improve service quality will continue to increase with further expansions in the international student market. Such a scenario requires insights into the individual backgrounds of students. Personal values are one way in which insights can be gained of students, particularly with regard to their needs and preferences. Using Factor Analysis, ANOVA and MANOVA, this study analyses the national differences on the basis of underlying value domains of Selfefficacy, Power, Inner harmony, Aspiration and Hedonism. The results indicate significant differences in personal values amongst the student cohorts, which suggest that universities may need to adopt different approaches in servicing international students.

IES 4 - ethics education revisited

In 2003, the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) issued a set of International Education Standards (IES). IES 4 Professional Values, Ethics and Attitudes aims to equip candidates for membership of an IFAC member body with the appropriate professional values, ethics and attitudes to function as professional accountants. This paper explores the implications of IES 4 and analyses some of the challenges arising from an international professional accounting body prescribing ethics education. It concludes with an overview of considerations to be addressed to ensure that the implementation of IES 4 is successful.

Mediators of the relationship between maternal education and children's TV viewing

Background: Maternal education is consistently found to be inversely related to children’s television viewing and is associated with aspects of the family television environment. This study investigates whether family television environment mediates the relationship between maternal education and children’s television viewing.

Methods: Parents of 1484 children reported maternal education, time their child spends watching television, and 21 aspects of the family television environment (potential mediators) during 2002 and 2003. Separate regression analyses were conducted in 2006 for each potential mediator that met two initial conditions for mediation (associated with both maternal education and children’s television viewing (p<0.10)), to assess whether inclusion reduced the association between maternal education and children’s television viewing. Multivariable regression assessed the combined impact of all mediators.

Results: Twelve of 21 potential mediators met the initial conditions for mediation. Inclusion of each resulted in decreased β values (3.2% to 15.2%) for the association between maternal education and television viewing. Number and placement of televisions in the home appeared to have the greatest mediating effect, followed by frequency of eating dinner in front of the television with the child and rules about television viewing during mealtimes. Together, the 12 mediators accounted for more than one-third of the association between maternal education and children’s television viewing time.

Conclusions: This study suggests the strong inverse relationship between maternal education and children’s television viewing is partly mediated by aspects of the family television environment.

Personal-organizational values fit and organizational commitment in Australian domestic and international students

This study examines the relationship between affective organizational commitment and the personal and perceived organizational values of international and domestic students in an Australian university. Results provide support for the values factors found by Abbott, White & Charles, 2005), and consistency with Schwartz's (1992) pan-cultural values hierarchy. Both groups of students rated their personal values as consistent with the rankings of the major pan-cultural values and perceived organizational values were drivers of affective commitment. This study highlights the need for higher education institutions as well as global organizations to address profit for values such as benevolence, self-direction, and universalism to encourage higher levels of student and employee commitment to their organizations and increase effectiveness.

Playing a critical role: experiential learning resources and analytical media studies in higher education

This article compares two Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) used in the Faculty of Arts, Deakin University Australia, and investigates the relationships between technology, pedagogy and key issues in the teaching and practice of public relations, in a media studies context. The online role-play ‘Save Wallaby Forest’ and the e-simulation ‘PRessure Point! Getting Framed (GF), in their different ways, afford learning  environments with capabilities that present public relations and media students with opportunities to discover a critical consciousness, break out of naturalised world-views, and explore alternative approaches to organisational communication. Furthermore, they present students with complex ethical issues to investigate based around the idea that media industries are powerful discursive producers and reproducers of social norms, values and beliefs which in turn shape notions of identity and influence the formation of public opinion in society (Fairclough 1999; Habermas 1995). This article explores the intersections and differences between these distinct ICTs in their relationships to a constructivist learning approach and ethical questions about how public relations both produces and reproduces world views through practice. This interacting nexus – between technology, pedagogy and theme – is significant because “what happens in the learning process” relates to the learning outcome and therefore has the potential to develop holistic reflexivity in studies of public relations (Laurillard 2003, p.42).

Preparing Australia's future lawyers: an exposition of changing values over time in the context of teaching about ethical dilemmas

This study investigated what values may be influential to decision making in relation to ethical behaviour for early career lawyers. It adopted a longitudinal approach to investigate how values develop or degrade over time as final year law students move into their first two years of employment or further study. To this end, the study investigated the role that tertiary education and employers fulfill in building and perpetuating ‘appropriate’ professional values? Results demonstrate that, in general, ethical behaviour was not uniformly reinforced over time in the workplace. The undertaking of pro bono work stands out here. Results suggested that certain behaviour relevant values may develop or degrade over the early years of the Australian lawyer's career. The implications of results are discussed in the contexts of ethics education in a tertiary context and the continuing education and regulation of the legal profession.

Zero impact: are lawyers' values affected by law school?(Survey)

In 2001 approximately 700 Australian final-year undergraduate law students were surveyed as the first part of a three-year study of Australian lawyers' values. This study is being undertaken in an effort to understand what values are important in determining lawyers' attitudes to difficult behavioural choices confronting them in legal practice. It is hoped that knowledge of the actual values held by lawyers (in the context of critical professional choices) will enable better targeted values awareness education in both pre- and post-admission contexts.

The main quantitative survey employed a number of hypothetical scenarios. These were designed through the use of ethical dilemmas to examine issues of conflicting loyalties within a context of self-interest and lawyers' perceived obligations to the community, employers, family, friends and clients. (1)

Our approach in this paper is to set the scene by providing basic frequencies to responses in each scenario, followed by an analysis of themes elicited from respondents during the focus groups. Our immediate objective is to provide representative interviewee (that is, respondent) commentary designed to throw some light on the major choices of those respondents in the first year of the main quantitative survey. (2) Note that these focus groups were conducted some months after the quantitative analyses, and in particular after respondents had left law school. All respondents were, by that stage, working within a variety of legal workforce environments. In this analysis, it must be stressed, we have not attempted to match and compare individual respondents' comments with their earlier choices in the quantitative survey. That task awaits the longitudinal analysis now under way for the whole period of data collection during the three-year study.

The primary health professional education : current models and barriers to participation

Introduction
Continuing Education (CE) for health professionals is a life-long process which endeavours to update or enhance knowledge, refine skills, reinforce professional values and support the delivery of professional practice. It plays a pivotal role in the maintenance of professional competence and in the past decade participation in CE has become an expectation of, rather than an option for, practising health professionals. The time and resources required from organisers and participants in
CE and the need to ensure practical outcomes justifies a review of current models being used for its delivery. This entails an understanding of the purpose of CE, a consideration of how it should be delivered, and the role played by assessment in achieving the goals of CE.
Aim of Report
The overall aim of this study is to identify important considerations and subsequently make recommendations for the development of an ideal model(s) of CE for community pharmacy.
Goals of Report
1. Define CE and its role.
2. Identify and assess current CE delivery models.
3. Examine the current status of continuing education and registration requirements for pharmacists.
4. Identify barriers to participation in CE.
5. Identify components and considerations for developing a model of CE delivery.
Methods
The following methods were employed for this project:
1. Literature review
A number of electronic databases were systematically searched in order to profile current trends and concepts in CE. CE structures currently in use were investigated by directly accessing the websites of appropriate associations.
2. Stakeholder interviews
A series of semi-structured interviews were completed with stakeholders from CE delivery organisations across a range of professions including pharmacy.
3. Community pharmacy focus groups
A series of focus group teleconferences were held with groups of pharmacists thought to have distinct CE needs: experienced pharmacists (qualified more than 5 years), recently-qualified pharmacists (5 years or less), rural/remote pharmacists, and pharmacists with specialist training
needs (such as Home Medication Reviews). These focus groups asked about participants’ experiences and opinions in relation to many aspects of CE including its delivery and its assessment.

How schooling, and particular schools, make a difference: values, identities and futures in longitudinal study

Just over a decade ago the authors set out to select and follow a range of young people from the age of 12 and their end of primary or first days in secondary school, to the age of 18 when most of them had embarked on the first steps of the post-school lives. Students from four different types of schools were chosen: a Melbourne high school, a high school in a Victorian regional city, a large non-government school, and a secondary school that had once been a technical school. The students were interviewed twice a year about their views of self, of school, of the future. In this article the authors discuss two aspects of the study: what sense did they get of schools and their effects on the subjectivities being formed by young people today? And, what sense did the authors get of how gender is working in young lives now? The article outlines some of the findings in relation to these two issues.

Futures in education

Futures education (FE) in a rapidly changing world is critical if young people are to be empowered to be proactive rather than reactive about the future. Research into young people's images and ideas of the future lead to the disturbing conclusion that, for many, the future is a depressing and fearful place where they feel hopeless and disempowered. On the other hand, as Richard Slaughter writes, 'young people are passionately interested in their own futures, and that of the society in which they live. They universally 'jump at the chance to study something with such intrinsic interest that also intersects with their own life interests in so many ways'. FE explicitly attempts to build on this interest and counter these fears by offering a profound and empowering set of learning strategies and ideas that can help people think and act critically and creatively about the future, without necessarily trying to predict it. Futures educators have, over the past decades, developed useful tools, ideas and a language for use with students of all ages to enable them to develop foresight literacy. Most of us tend to view the future as somehow beyond the present and rarely consider how decisions and choices made today profoundly affect not just one fixed future but any number of futures. The underlying goal of FE is to move from the idea of a single, pre-determined future to that of many possible futures, so that students begin to see that they can determine the future, that they need not be reactive and that they are not powerless. How does one do that? Ideas include, but are not limited to: timelines and Y-diagrams, futures wheels and mind maps, and 'Preferable, possible and probable' futures - a.k.a. the 3Ps. Current Australian curricula present education about the future in various implicit or explicit guises. A plethora of statements and curriculum outcomes mention the future, but essentially take 'it' for granted, and are uninformed by FE literature, language, ideas or tools. Science, the humanities and technology tend to be the main areas where such an implicit futures focus can be found. It also appears in documents about vocational education, civics and lifelong learning. Explicit FE is, as Beare and Slaughter put it, still the missing dimension in education. Explicit FE attempts to develop futures literacy, and draws widely upon futures studies literature for processes and content. FE provides such a wide range of ideas and tools that it can be incorporated into education in any number of ways. Programs in two very different schools, one primary and one secondary, are described in this article to provide examples of some of these ways. The first school, Kimberley Park State Primary School in Brisbane, operates with multi-age classrooms based on a 'thinking curriculum' developed around four organisers: change, perspectives, interconnectedness and sustainability. The second school, St John's Grammar School in Adelaide, is an independent school where FE operates as an integrated approach in Year Seven, as a separate one-semester subject in Year Nine and in separate subjects at other levels. Teachers both at Kimberley Park and St John's are very positive about FE. They say it promotes valuable and authentic learning, assists students to realise they have choices that matter and helps them see that the future need not be all doom and gloom. Because students are interested in the Big Questions, as one teacher put it, FE provides a perfect opportunity to address them, and to consider values that are fundamental for them and the future of the planet. Like any innovation, the long-term success of FE in schools depends on an embedding process so that the innovation does not depend on the enthusiasm and energy of a few individuals, only to disappear when they move on. It requires strong leadership, teacher knowledge, support and enthusiasm, and the support and understanding of the wider school community.

Teacher perceptions of the role and value of excursions in years 7-10 geography education in Victoria, Australia

Excursions are extremely important to the education of students in the geography curriculum. However, personal observations demonstrated a lack of readiness to conduct excursions in secondary schools. This apprehension of the teachers in this school to implement excursions in geography education was the basis for this study. The study addresses the importance of excursions in education and the roles and values that teachers place on excursions in years 7-10 geography curriculum. Quantitative research was conducted in the form of a questionnaire on a wide range of Study of Society and Environment (SOSE) teachers in secondary schools. The research population consisted of 60 teachers from both rural and urban schools across Victoria. The findings of this study showed that teachers conduct on average one to two excursions per class per year, teachers understand the importance of excursions in geography education and they find planning difficult, but work collaboratively with other teachers to overcome these issues. Other barriers include transportation, student behaviour and cost. With a firm grounding in the conceptual theories and state-level policies of geography education, the conduct of excursions was found to be both difficult and rewarding by teachers in Victoria.

Ethics education for accounting students - a toolkit approach

In 2006, the International Accounting Education Standards Board (IAESB), an independent standard-setting board of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) released an information paper entitled Approaches to the Development and Maintenance of Professional Values, Ethics and Attitudes in Accounting Education Programs. The information paper stems from a global research project on ethics education in the accounting profession. The paper is designed to stimulate discussion and debate on the subject of ethics education and includes the provision of an Ethics Education Toolkit to encourage and assist accounting educators and member bodies of IFAC to implement ethics education programmes. Through a review of the literature, this paper considers why we should teach ethics, the types of ethics interventions that have been undertaken and the issues in teaching ethics to accountancy students. The paper then describes in detail the Ethics Education Toolkit and provides some evidence on the positive reaction of a group of students who are taught ethics, based on the principles and practice included in the toolkit.

Physical education, sport and hyper-masculinity in schools

Among widening social anxieties about practices and performances of contemporary masculinity are questions about the place of hyper-masculine (contact) sports, such as games of football. Foremost are concerns about some of the values and attitudes that appear to circulate within such contexts. With their historical leaning towards character attributes aligned to hardness, solidarity and stoicism, there is growing pressure on coaches and teachers to manage and mediate the participation of young males in this arena. Against this backdrop, this paper explores some of the tensions that emerge in schools when the codes and mores frequently associated with a hyper-masculine sporting identity are seen to flourish. Foremost here is the emergence of cultures of entitlement, abuse and exclusion. Following the illumination of such cultures across three research narratives, this paper discusses the sorts of reforms that are needed to promote more educative and responsible engagement with hyper-masculine sports in, and beyond, schools.