Research Reviews

Wikipedia as an online web information source has been controversial in scholarly circles since it began in 2001. As an internet service, Wikipedia receives more than 79 million visitors a month and has published over 17 million articles of which over 3 million are written in English. It is accessible in 270 languages and has over 91,000 active contributors. The success of Wikipedia is controversial in itself without discussing credibility because it is quite a new phenomenon to have such a rich information source universally accessible online. In the past such information sources would have been in a print format with restricted access. The impact of Wikipedia on scholarly publications has recently been examined in an interesting and revealing research article by Dr Taemin Kim Park entitled The visibility of Wikipedia in scholarly publications published in the open online journal First Monday.

This week’s research review about Training and internet access complements last week’s research review of Children and internet access about the access, use and impact of digital technologies for children from 5 years to 14 years. The training sector has long led education and training in Australia in the use of digital technologies in courses and has been encouraged by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework (AFLF) and its sub-committees. The AFLF, since 2005, have undertaken a number of E-Learning Benchmarking Surveys seeking the views of training institutions, employers, teachers and students. In 2011, the AFLF has produced a report titled 2011 E-Learning Benchmarking Survey: Final Report. The report is based on an online opinion based survey of 6000 student respondents of which nearly 4000 were used in a balanced analysis about the access, use and impact of digital technologies in Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) including Registered Training Organisations (RTOs).

The use of computers and the internet is almost ubiquitous among Australian children between the ages of 5 years and 14 years according to a recent research report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Using information gathered in 2006, 2008 and 2009, ABS has produced a very interesting summary of research about the digital habits of Australian children.

Reading has long been regarded as an essential skill for learning and knowledge building, and the more frequent and skilled readers often became successful in gaining university entry. However, in the last decade libraries, and especially university libraries, as repositories of literature and reference works, have undergone significant changes with the introduction of online information access. Is there a difference between reading text in a book and reading online? Although there have been several claims that students who operate online are better readers than those who do not, the evidence remains ambiguous and contestable. Recent work in examining online reading behaviour, evidence from neuroscience research and research into the library habits of students and their reading preferences has shed some light on the differences between reading from printed texts and reading online.

Mathematics is a school subject where the use ICT is often reported to be less than in other subjects in school learning programs. The Project K-Nect program operating in Onslow County schools aims to ‘increase student achievement and decrease the digital access gap amongst students’ (p. 1) in learning math through the use of additional resources accessed by cell/mobile phones. The 2010 results, according to an evaluation report by Project Tomorrow were very positive. This DERN review examines the evaluation results of Project K-nect, one-year on, that is, in its third-year of operation. Project Tomorrow has undertaken a further evaluation of Project K-nect following consultations with 59 students and 3 teachers engaged with Algebra l, Algebra ll and pre-calculus courses in two secondary schools. As part of Project K-nect, which is a demonstration project highlighting the curricular uses of smart phones, each student was given a smartphone and 24/7 access to the internet.

The use of digital technologies outside of schools and learning at school has often been featured as a topic in the media and by social commentators. This week's research review returns to the theme of connectedness between the school and the home, especially in the context of digital literacy learning and practice. A research report by Futurelab in the UK about 'the connections and discontinuities between children's digital literacy practices at home and in school' analyses the information provided by teachers and students in two primary and two secondary schools. The report titled Connecting digital literacy between home and school provides four very rich case studies describing the views of teachers towards the use of ICT in the curriculum and student practices using ICT. The case studies are an absolute delight to read and give insights into the practices and beliefs of teachers about the use of ICT in the curriculum.

Research about teaching and learning using ICT is often undertaken when the subjects are familiar with the ICT devices, so from time to time a good idea is to take stock of what ICT is being used and what could be used in education. Audits of ICT usage can be very illuminating to gain an understanding of perspective. For example, Edudemic reported recently about the number of users of social networks. The overwhelming number of Skype and Facebook users and the rise in usage of the Chinese Qzone retail service is fascinating. However, the number of cell phone active users (5.3 billion) is amazing. The Speak Up National Research Project from Project Tomorrow in the US has produced a thought provoking report The New 3E's of Education – How Today's Educators are Advancing a New Vision for Teaching and Learning. The three E's are 'enabled', 'engaged, and empowered.' The report about educators use of ICT follows a report on student ICT usage.

Teachers in small schools often feel the effects of isolation in both social life and professional learning communities. In Western Australia, Australia's largest state comprising one-third of the continent and the second largest subnational entity in the world, the population is sparse, outside of the capital city Perth, with over 300 rural schools and 120 schools in small communities. Broadband for these schools and their communities can help to alleviate many of the barriers of distance for students and teachers in rural, remote and regional schools. In an interesting article Connecting and collaborating in regional, rural and remote Australia, Trinidad and Broadley describe two broadband projects and their effects in outback schools.

DERN has reported on research into the mix of pedagogy and technology previously citing the 2010 OECD report Inspired by Technology, Driven by Pedagogy: A systemic approach to technology-based school innovations. The OECD report examines a systematic approach to school innovation by utilising the opportunities that Web 2.0 affords for pedagogy. However, the question that arises from this report is, 'What are the learning theories about which pedagogy can be developed for using ICT?' This question is elegantly addressed by Terry Anderson and Jon Dron in their recent and succinct paper Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy in a special issue on Connectivism of the refereed online journal The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Education. Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy is an important overview for educators about the strength and weaknesses of pedagogies developed from generations of learning theories.

The use of blogs in education is increasing, if the use of Edublogs can be regarded as an indicator. Are blogs or 'grey publishing', as some people refer to blog writing, useful in education and training, and if so, how? There is very little research about blog users and how blogs are used, and even less in education and training. Blogs or weblogs, as they were originally called, 'can be described as a form of a personal, easy-to-manage Web sites with content presented in reverse chronological order', (p. 1) quote Larsson and Hrastinski in their interesting article Blogs and Blogging: Current Trends and Future Directions published in the online journal First Monday. The researchers studied research articles about blogs by examining those stored in the ISI Web of Science database with a specific focus on the social sciences, and arts and humanities, where education can also be found.