Edusource: Canada's Learning Object Repository Network

An alliance of Canadian Universities and government agencies pooled their resources to establish a network to share and combine Learning Objects from a variety of sources and further develop this technology. In the process, they resolved many learning, logistical, and legal problems and moved this technology forward by an order of magnitude. Principal goals include: nationwide interoperability, network of repositories, linked servers, repository software programs, national and international standards, digital rights management, business and management models, evaluation and feedback, dissemination of results, and bilingual access to all Canadians, particularly learners with disabilities. The defined tasks were sub-divided into nine work packages, each with a lead institution as package manager

Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF): Building the ICT in education capacity of the next generation of teachers in Australia

The Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project is a unique nationally significant project funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations (DEEWR, Au$8.8 million) and the Information and Communication Technology Innovation Fund (ICTIF). This 2011-2012 project has ambitiously attempted to build the ICT education (ICTE) capacity of the next generation of Australian teachers through its focus on pre-service teachers, teacher educators and the new Australian Curriculum. This paper will provide an overview of the project including a description of its genesis in a changing educational and political landscape, its structure and operations, its grounding in contemporary theory, the research opportunities it has engendered and its tangible outcomes

Using computers at home and at school : children's views and perspectives

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Playing and learning with digital technologies : at home and at school

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Perceptions of how ICT has the potential to influence children beyond the curriculum : home/school/community links

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Children's use of computers in their homes

This project explores the interactions of young children with computers in their homes. It focuses on: resources available and what affordances these enable; socio-cultural contexts, discourses and family practices; nature of the use and affordances children perceive; and how school experiences differ from those at home and the impact of teachers' discourses about computing. Findings were: common activities comprised game playing, editing and decorating texts and using information texts; gender and socio-economic differences interacted with varying rules, resources, discourses, affordances, and family use and expertise; parental discourses and resources combined to generate key affordances of the computer as toy and tool; parental discourses revealed different conceptions of childhood and computers; children’s patterns of learning and use are relatively consistent across age, gender and family background – they learn by exploring and the dominant affordance is the computer as playable; teachers’ discourses and conceptions lead to the marginalisation of computer use within the curriculum; at school, children have less access, control and time to use computers in ways that allow them to draw on the expertise and approaches they have developed at home. Theories are developed to show how children come to perceive the computer as playable, and how parents’ and teachers’ discourses position computing as marginal to the curriculum. The other issues relate to conceptions of learning, types of learning that computers afford, and the possibility that children’s approaches to learning are changing as a result of their interactions with computer