Design of interactive distance learning equipment.

Distance education focuses on the entitlement of children with limited learning opportunities to schooling experiences that are equivalent to those enjoyed by other students. The means for delivering the curriculum to these learners have been many and varied, but most of these are either unaffordable or deficient in their provision of interactive audio and visual enhancements which are necessary for the pupils' effective understanding of the lesson. The project documented in this report attempts to expand students' access to the curriculum, by providing a cost effective solution to the problems of teaching at a distance. The proposal builds on the cooperative sharing of educational resources within clusters of schools, through which pupils are enabled to study subjects not offered in their own campuses but available in other schools within the cluster. The proposed product employs the concept of a collaborative "electronic blackboard" interface, which allows teachers and remote students to interact with freehand notations on a shared screen. Using audiographics conferencing techniques, remote lessons with live voices and graphic information are transmitted simultaneously to various participating sites. The central focus of the product's design is on the digitiser screen, which accepts handwritten input directly on the display. This provides the user with better eye-hand coordination than was possible in previous systems. The convertibility of the screen from a writing tablet into a computer monitor recognises the students' twin needs for a remote communication device and a computer for other school computing applications. The report covers an extensive analysis of the current status of distance education in Australia, the various technologies used in curriculum delivery, the reactions of users to existing remote learning methods, and the market for distance education and teleconferencing. It documents the various stages of the concept development, and presents the final design in photographs and in line drawings. A study of the commercial viability of the proposal is also included

Handbook of Social Media for Researchers and Supervisors

The goal of this handbook is to assist researchers and their supervisors to adopt and use social media tools in the service of their research, and, in particular, in engaging in the discourse of research. The handbook presents an innovative suite of resources for developing and maintaining a social media strategy for research dialogues