E-Research for Education

A collection of links and short summaries of who is doing what in e-research at Go8 universities. The list is not comprehensive, representative and inheritably not objective. Nevertheless, might be useful.

Last updated: 25-07-2007

This week many politicians have been immersed in the debates about a broadband access in Australia. While the focus of this dispute has been on how many Australians (98% vs. 99%) will (should) have an access to a high-speed broadband network, it was a good motive to read and think about education and how educational research could help to embrace all this “fast stuff”. Thus, this entry is about innovation, education, educational research and e-research.

Note: Picture from the Civil Society Institute website (about the logo).
E-research is about e-rights, e-responsibilities, e-access, e-intellectual property, e-privacy, e-etc. I can’t add much to the Jane’s Anderson’s and Kathy’s Bowrey’s paper, annotated this week in AustralianPolicyOnline, but felt that it would be inappropriate to leave it unnoticed in this blog. By providing a solid review of the literature about indigenous cultural property, open access to knowledge and the gap between them in the modern society, this paper also provides a good source for thinking about other legal and moral aspects of e-research in education, social sciences and humanities.

Below is the extract from the paper and URL. Together some more links related to this topic.

Today I found several articles about three Australian middleware development projects (ARROW, DART and ARCHER) funded under the DEST Research Information Infrastructure Initiative (RII).

Treloar A, & Groenewegen, D. (2007). ARROW, DART and ARCHER: A Quiver Full of Research Repository and Related Projects, Ariadne, 51. URL

Paterson, M., Lindsay, D., Monotti, A., Chin, A. (2007). DART: a new missile in Australia’s e-research strategy, Online Information Review, 31 (2), 16-134. DOI 10.1108/14684520710747185. URL

Are they relevant to social research?

This entry is about other aspects of the same, mentioned in the earlier blog, Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework. This time is about:

Research culture

Recently (May 2007) the Australian Government accepted An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework. This document outlines a general vision and strategic plan for the enhancement of e-research capacities in Australia over forthcoming five-year period. I think this document deserves some interest of academic research community too, particularly of those who work in education. This is my first thought about it.

Education for e-research

What is e-research?

Generally speaking "e-research" is research practices enabled by the combination of:
• shared computational power;
• distributed access to large databases; and
• virtual environments for collaborative research work.
Here, you can find the Australian DEST definition of e-research.