Law: Conference Contributions

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  • ItemOpen Access
  • ItemOpen Access
    Providing interactive higher education using digital technologies in Australian correctional centres
    (2015) Farley, Helen; Dove S; Seymour S; Lee C; Macdonald J; Abraham C; Hopkins S; Patching L; Cox J; Bedford T
    Prisoners in most Australian jurisdictions are not permitted access to online learning technologies due to procedural restrictions prohibiting prisoner access to the internet. Formal education and training delivery to prisoners is usually provided in non-digital forms, generally in the form of blocks of printed text. Although this method enables access to course materials, it does not foster digital literacies in incarcerated students, and these skills are becoming more essential to pursue formal learning upon release from custody. Currently, there are few programs offered to incarcerated students that adequately prepare them for entry into higher education especially providing them with the opportunity to use modern ICTs. This paper reports on an Australian government-funded project, Making the Connection, which is taking digital technologies, that don’t require internet access, into correctional centres to enable prisoners to enroll in a suite of pre-tertiary and undergraduate programs. A version of the University of Southern Queensland’s learning management system has been installed onto the education server of participating correctional centres. The second stage of the project will see notebook computers preloaded with course materials, allocated to participating prisoners. At the time of writing, the project has been deployed at eight correctional centres in Queensland and Western Australia, with negotiations underway for further rollout across Australia.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Engaging Correctional Leaders and Students in Higher Education: The Making the Connection Project
    (2016) Farley, Helen
    The Making the Connection project is aiming to introduce digital technologies into Australian prisons to allow access to digital higher education for incarcerated students. But correctional leadership and custodial personnel, because of the legitimate need to maintain public safety, are highly risk averse, especially when dealing with digital technologies. This paper describes how the project team worked with three levels of correctional leadership across a number of correctional jurisdictions to successfully deploy the project at 20 sites. It elucidates the engagement strategy employed by the Making the Connection project, a crucial factor in the success of the project. It describes the challenges and opportunities encountered with a view to proposing a framework through which university researchers can productively work with correctional leadership to mutual benefit.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Learning how to use climate information with machinima
    (2014) Farley, Helen; Reardon-Smith K; Cliffe N; Mushtaq S; Stone R; Doyle J
  • ItemOpen Access
    Prisoners of Neo-liberalism: Incarcerated students and the neo-liberal project in the digital age
    (The Australian Sociological Association, 2015) Hopkins, Susan; Farley, Helen; Petray T; Stephens A
  • ItemOpen Access
  • ItemOpen Access
    Issues and Challenges with Assessment in Stand Alone Moodle
    (2014) Farley, Helen; Murphy A; Bedford T; Orth G
  • ItemOpen Access
    Ensuring digital education without connectivity: Making the Connection
    (2015) Farley, Helen
    Brief Synopsis of the Presentation: As universities become increasingly reliant on the online delivery of courses and programs, those without access to reliable internet become increasingly marginalised. This presentation describes a HEPPP-funded project, Making the Connection, which is enabling incarcerated students, particularly Indigenous students, without access to the internet, to participate in university programs through an internet-independent version of USQ’s learning management system and tablet computers. In the future, the technologies, processes and materials developed in this project will be used to provide digital access to university courses for any student without internet access.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Making the Connection: Improving Access to Higher Education for Low Socio-Economic Status Students with ICT Limitations
    (ASCILITE, 2016) Farley, Helen; Dove S; Seymour S; Macdonald J; Abraham C; Eastment T
    The Australian Government Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program-funded project, Making the Connection, is taking digital technologies, that don’t require internet access, into correctional centres to enable prisoners, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners, to enroll in a suite of pre-tertiary and undergraduate programs. A version of the University of Southern Queensland’s learning management system has been installed onto the education server of participating correctional centres. The second stage of the project will see notebook computers pre-loaded with course materials, allocated to participating prisoners. At the time of writing, the project has been deployed at eight correctional centres in Queensland and Western Australia, with negotiations underway for further rollout to Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia late in 2015 or early 2016. It is expected that the technologies and processes developed for this project will enable the delivery of higher education to other cohorts without access to reliable internet access. Beginning in early 2014, Making the Connection project began, building on three previous projects led by USQ which trialled various digital technologies for learning in correctional centres. Most notable of these was the Office for Learning and Teaching-funded project, From Access to Success, which developed a version of USQ’s learning management system, a version of Moodle called USQ StudyDesk, which was installed onto the correctional centre education lab server.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Mobile learning trends among higher education students in Vietnam: A case study
    (Springer, 2014) Murphy A; Midgley W; Farley, Helen; Kalz M; Bayyurt Y; Specht M
    Mobile learning has the potential to expand access to education in developing countries. Little is known about the preferences of students in some Asian countries such as Vietnam. Some of these countries have restricted internet access and may be subject to internet censorship. A study was conducted with forty-four Masters students in Vietnam to identify informal mobile learning trends. Results indicate that although rates of ownership of mobile technologies are still low in comparison to many other countries, students do use these devices to support their studies. A third of students had access to a tablet computer, smartphone or MP3 player and many students had access to more than one device. Most students used Wi-Fi and considered internet quality to be moderate or fair. Access to high quality internet and the impact of internet censorship needs to be taken into account when developing mobile learning content for students in Vietnam.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Digital Equity in Australian Higher Education: How Prisoners are Missing Out
    (HERDSA, 2018) Willems J; Farley, Helen; Garner J; Wache D; Houston D
  • ItemOpen Access
    Trusting and trusted: developing and deploying mobile devices to support in-prison learning
    (IATED, 2017) Farley, Helen; Doyle J; Rees S
    A post-secondary qualification earned in prison has been noted as a factor in reducing rates of recidivism and contributing to improved prisoner behaviour. However, delivering higher education into prisons is a challenging process. In Australia, many higher education institutions prioritise online modes of delivery, and most jurisdictions prohibit prisoner access to the Internet. The lack of Internet access means that incarcerated students do not have the opportunity to experience learning in the same way as students who are not in prison. Digital technologies, including mobile devices, offer affordances in terms of providing the incarcerated student with a digital learning experience. From 2012 to 2017, a university research team in Australia has been trialling digital learning initiatives in 28 prisons across the country. The Making the Connection project aims to enhance the student learning experience using an offline learning management system and personal devices. Even so, introducing digital technology into prisons is a challenging process. Prisons have low levels of trust and strict security requirements. Digital technology must comply with jurisdictional constraints and correctional centre policies. Personal devices must be ‘prison-suitable’ yet at the same time ‘user-friendly’ for incarcerated students who traditionally do not have high levels of literacy, including digital literacy. Providing prisoners with mobile devices requires trust in two dimensions: researchers trust the prisoners to use and maintain the devices for learning purposes, and prisoners trust the researchers to provide a pedagogically-appropriate learning tool. This paper reports on the complex process of preparing and deploying mobile technologies in Australian correctional centres.
  • ItemOpen Access
    From ‘hands up’ to ‘hands on’: harnessing the kinaesthetic potential of educational gaming
    (Apple University Consortium, 2011) Farley, Helen; Stagg A
    Traditional approaches to distance learning and the student learning journey have focused on closing the gap between the experience of off-campus students and their on-campus peers. While many initiatives have sought to embed a sense of community, create virtual learning environments and even build collaborative spaces for team-based assessment and presentations, they are limited by technological innovation in terms of the types of learning styles they support and develop. Mainstream gaming development – such as with the Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Wii – have a strong element of kinaesthetic learning from early attempts to simulate impact, recoil, velocity and other environmental factors to the more sophisticated movement-based games which create a sense of almost total immersion and allow untethered (in a technical sense) interaction with the games’ objects, characters and other players. Likewise, gamification of learning has become a critical focus for the engagement of learners and its commercialisation, especially through products such as the Wii Fit. As this technology matures, there are strong opportunities for universities to utilise gaming consoles to embed levels of kinaesthetic learning into the student experience – a learning style which has been largely neglected in the distance education sector. This paper will explore the potential impact of these technologies, to broadly imagine the possibilities for future innovation in higher education.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Using mobile devices to improve postgraduate nurses' access to learning
    (IATED, 2017) Rees S; Farley, Helen; Moloney C
    This paper describes a research project that was conducted in Australia to discover the most beneficial methods for using mobile learning in postgraduate nursing education. Classic grounded theory methods were used to develop a theory titled ‘Economising learning: how nurses learn with limited resources.’ It found that mobile technologies assisted nurses with continuing learning by requiring fewer of their personal resources such as time and money, therefore enabling the nurse to undertake more learning. Interestingly nurses did not view mobile learning as being distinct; rather they used mobile devices namely smartphones and tablets to interact with information they could otherwise have accessed on a computer. In taking a pragmatic approach to how best use mobile devices to facilitate learning in the post-graduate arena, mobile technologies saved the student time and money when used as an alternative to stationary devices. The convenience of mobile devices could, therefore, be leveraged for postgraduate learning. That is not to say that the specific affordances of mobile technologies do not have benefit, but the convenience of mobile technologies was the main benefit to the post-graduate nurse. Nurses continued to learn regardless of whether they accessed formal learning. One way a nurse learned was through accessing information about specific patient needs throughout their work day. Most commonly, nurses accessed information about medications using their mobile device. Accessing medication information in this way saved the nurse time as compared to accessing either paper-based information or a computer away from the bedside, or more concerningly, not accessing information due to time restraints. Mobile devices allowed nurses to access information about procedures or particular conditions that arose throughout the day quickly. The nurses accessed the information mostly to gain reassurance that their existing knowledge was correct rather than to rectify a knowledge deficit. This knowledge checking enabled the nurse to ensure best practice. Email was often used to send information to nurses. Nurses reported that they accessed this information via their mobile device and sifted the information to determine if it was valuable to their clinical area or should be discarded. They determined the value using their personal clinical experience, and according to the respect they held for the person sending the information. The sorted the valuable information according to when they could access it and how they wanted to interact with it. When nurses accessed formal learning, mobile devices allowed the nurse to minimize the impact of learning on their personal lives. Nurses reported downloading their learning before traveling and engaged with that learning while en route to work. They accessed course materials in time that was usually wasted while waiting for children's activities or appointments. Nurses also interacted with learning by listening to podcasts while doing household chores or exercising. The findings of this research should be used to increase the nurse's ability to access and engage with postgraduate learning using mobile devices and other strategies.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Digital Learning without Internet Access in Regional, Rural and Remote Australia
    (2014) Farley, Helen
    The use of the Learning Management System (LMS) in education has permitted educators to move beyond the restrictive physical boundaries of traditional classrooms and provide learning experiences that are personalised and focused on student needs. Unfortunately, the increasing reliance on the LMS and other digital technologies is based on the assumption that students have ready access to the internet and appropriate technologies, which is often not the case. Consequently, there is an increased risk of further excluding disadvantaged students without reliable access to the internet from engaging in learning opportunities. This paper reports on a number of projects at the Australian Digital Futures at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) Institute that have developed a version of USQ’s LMS called Stand Alone Moodle (SAM) which doesn’t require the internet. At the moment, this technology is being trialled in prisons where students don’t have access to the internet. The project team is confident that this technology can also be used in those areas of rural, regional and remote Australia where internet access and data network coverage is problematic. Higher education institutions are increasingly incorporating e-learning and digital technology initiatives in order to remain competitive in modern knowledge-based economies. The use of technology has become essential in the delivery of distance education courses, largely in response to an emerging demand for flexibility in learning. SAM does not require access to the internet yet still enables students to participate in courses electronically. Students enrolled in distance education courses that have previously relied on paper-based course materials will benefit from the resources, activities and support available to students who are able to access the internet, thereby improving the quality of the student learning experience.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Trialling Second Life Machinima to Promote Discussion and Support Learning in the Australian Sugar Industry
    (Apple University Consortium, 2015) Cliffe N; Doyle J; Stone R; Coutts J; Mushtaq S; Reardon-Smith K; Farley, Taylor; Lindesay J; Loch A; Kealley M; Hassett A; Jacobson N; Gifford T
  • ItemOpen Access
    Putting virtual worlds to work to support improved climate risk decision making on real world farms
    (2015) Readon-Smith K; Mushtaq S; Stone R; Cliffe N; Farley, Helen; Ostini J
  • ItemOpen Access
    Where does Mobile Learning Fit into Continuing Nurse Education?
    (2014) Rees S; Murphy A; Farley, Helen; Moloney C