The December edition of AJET, the Australian Journal of Educational Technology, has now gone online, after the usual 3 month delay.

The editorial is a detailed, statistical look at AJET itself, and comparisons with similar journals;   a tad introspective but not without interest if you stray occasionally into the academic literature.

Of the seven articles, four I avoided, as being too narrow of focus, or just plain irrelevant to ODL QC. They were:

• Using ICQ to enhance teacher-student relationships,
• Instructional gaming and collaborative learning at a Western Australian School
• Strategic development of IT services in a provincial HE institute (in N Thailand), and
• An evaluation of web enhanced instruction in college level biology courses

Of the remaining three:

• Contrasting syntactic and semantic units the analysis of online discussions was a little too dry even for my tastes;   no doubt useful if you wanted to attempt that level of detailed analysis of online discussions, but of no relevance to the hard-pressed practitioner.
  
  
• The pedagogical and multimedia designs of learning objects for schools was a review of the field generally, and of passing interest if you have any ambitions to move towards learning objects and away from traditional courses.
  
  
• Likewise, Determining the factors affecting student perceptions of a popular science video offered a few useful insights into how the use of video might complement more traditional teaching methods.    But the video in question is a short, professionally-made cartoon and, as such, beyond the budget of any but the very largest provider.    So the insights, too, are probably not transferable to our world.
  
  

Source:    http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet.html