No discernable difference: Technology takes borderless education outback

By Lesley Carman-Brown, Public Programs Coordinator, John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library

CAUSE in Australasia 2001 The Power of 3: Bringing together Library, Teaching & Learning and Information Technology, 20-23 May 2001

INTRODUCTION

The John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library (JCPML) has been established by Curtin University of Technology to honour the contribution to Australia by its wartime prime minister and international statesman, John Curtin, whose inspirational leadership and political courage unified Australia during the grim years of World War Two.

The JCPML is a purpose-built archival and educational facility. The research collection comprises personal papers, oral histories, photographs, moving pictures, sound recordings, copies of official records and other archival material relating to John Curtin and his era. The JCPML education program caters mainly to primary and secondary schools, but also encompasses tertiary students. An exciting blend of hands-on interactivity combined with informative documentary evidence from the extensive research collection, aims to bring John Curtin and his life and times alive for students.

As Australia's first prime ministerial library, the JCPML's vision is to be an electronic gateway giving people access to John Curtin-related material from dispersed sources around the world, rather than a physical repository containing substantial records. This was the driving force behind the development of the Electronic Research Archive (ERA) which was launched on the internet in 1999. The JCPML has digitised material in its own collection and other collections world-wide to provide electronic access to more than 40,000 items through ERA.

Researchers around the world now access ERA regularly and it is an important tool for all our Visiting Scholars who undertake research into aspects of John Curtin or his life and times. Recently, ERA was used extensively off-site by our exhibition curators who were involved in researching information to develop our new exhibition. Not only did ERA provide access to the range of materials in the JCPML collection, but the convenience of being able, for example, to search through John Curtin's journalistic writings by keyword for particular topics saved researchers a great deal of time which would otherwise have been spent on a paper trail. And all this was accomplished from the comfort of their own offices - no need to trek to the archives daily!

Since the inception of our schools program, the JCPML has given upper secondary school students an introduction to our online resources and school groups have received this very enthusiastically. Given this technological vision and experience, the next step for the JCPML was to bring virtual reality to its school-based learning environment.

BORDERLESS EDUCATION

Our desire was to provide a seamless education experience for primary and secondary students no matter where they went to school. This meant finding a way to provide an excursion-type experience within students' classrooms. We wanted to use primary source documents to enrich their curriculum and provide them with a valuable learning experience. Distance education is not a new concept to Australians. Our country is ideally placed to take advantage of "borderless" education not only because its population is spread out over huge distances but also because of its history of providing "correspondence courses" since the 19th century and radio broadcasts since the 1930s (Cunningham et al 1998 p.26).

Distance education has always been quick to take advantage of new technology and new delivery systems to offer a world of educational possibilities to those disadvantaged by distance (Boyd et al 1999 p. 105). Hence the increasing acceptance of cable, satellite, CD-ROM, the internet, email and videoconferencing in presenting educational programs, particularly at the tertiary level. Providing virtual learning environments has been a goal for many academics in higher education in recent years, especially given the growing trend towards globalisation of markets, communication and culture (Cunningham et al 1998 p.1). At Australian universities 94,000 Australian students (or nearly 14% of the total student population) opt for distance education (Richardson 2001). This figure has doubled in the past ten years so it's obvious that there is a continuing trend for education to be provided regardless of borders.

Curtin University of Technology has been involved in distance education since its inception in 1967 when it was known as the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT). WAIT has been one of the main providers of tertiary-level external studies programs in the state, being quick to see the potential for international education with its 'WAIT in Asia' program launched in 1977 (Boyd et al 1999 p.111). Curtin University currently provides more than 500 study units to external students. (Boyd et al 1999 p.117).

JCPML'S EDUCATION PROGRAM

On-Site Participation

While the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library (JCPML) does not offer tertiary awards programs, we do participate in the curriculum coursework for a number of units on campus including archives and records-management, information and library studies, museum and cultural studies, and education. As well, the JCPML has a very active primary and secondary education program which encompasses years 5 to 12.

The primary school program offers a comprehensive package of classroom resources dealing with the leadership of Prime Minister John Curtin and the homefront during World War Two. We encourage teachers to begin their investigation of the program by browsing our education web pages where they can find examples of lesson materials, an outline of what takes place during a site-visit, information about how to contact the Education Officer and a booking form that can be downloaded.

The Year 5-7 education program has been designed to be a self-contained package that gives teachers lesson outlines and comprehensive in-class learning resources, including access to the JCPML web site to find out about Curtin's background, to prepare students for their on-site visit. At the JCPML, students explore the JCPML exhibition and participate in a series of small group activities. Aspects of the program can be used for assessment tasks, making it a very useful classroom tool.

At the secondary school level, the JCPML offers several programs to students of Society and Environment (years 9 and 10) and for year 11 and 12 History and Political and Legal Studies students. The on-site visits use role plays as the basis for learning as well as activities using the exhibition. Students gain an overview of what archives are by using our online resources during their visit.

The 'Borderless' Concept

While all of these programs were initially developed around students visiting the premises, the JCPML has always had as its aim to provide comparable experiences for students and community members who cannot physically visit the John Curtin Centre. There were various reasons for this:

• our vision to be an electronic gateway giving people access to John Curtin-related material and information from dispersed sources around the world;
• limited physical resources (staff availability, space, time, etc) would always mean placing restrictions on the number of students able to participate on site in our programs;
• not all schools have the funds, time, school support, etc to participate in excursions away from the school environment;
• we did not want to limit our programs only to those in the metropolitan area - in consideration of equity issues we wanted to reach a wider audience within the state and eventually around the country and internationally.

The JCPML is therefore developing a number of approaches to assist both students and teachers to have a valuable educational experience with our resources, whether on site or off.

Electronic Tutorial

Since 1999 the JCPML has provided world-wide access to our unique resource of original material through the Electronic Research Archive (ERA). Along with ERA we have developed the ERA tutorial which is a series of user-friendly, interactive guides and quizzes designed to help interested people become more confident about searching for and viewing material from ERA. More than 40,000 items, or digital files, can now be accessed through ERA including:

• Images (photographs, documents)
• Full text (contents of documents)
• Audio (oral histories, sound recordings)
• Finding aids (text containing information about the titles and descriptions of material which has not been digitised)

Each guide focuses on different key aspects of the archive, providing a simple introduction to its structure and illustrating the range of items and variety of formats that can be accessed. Short quizzes reinforce the concepts covered by each guide and provide immediate feedback for participants.

The Tutorial concludes with a Tour that invites people to use the skills they have gained to find, view, or listen to some of the fascinating items available through ERA. Hints and answers are provided throughout to assist and encourage users.

WEB PUBLISHING

The JCPML has developed an electronic publishing schedule for 2000/2001 that aims to place a number of web projects online. Over the past few months, JCPML staff have worked with various authors to publish information from the collection for easy access through the web and these projects have been designed to have wide appeal so that they can be browsed by the general public or used by students and educationists. The latest web projects include:

Visiting John Curtin at Home

Houses and their furnishings can suggest a great deal about the people who inhabit them and eventually John Curtin's house will be open to the public, allowing visitors to interpret its story. However, until then the JCPML provides the only means of exploring this house via the JCPML's website Visiting John Curtin at Home: 24 Jarrad Street Cottesloe. Using photographs, video and sound, the JCPML has brought to life the story of the prime minister's modest home for people around the world to access.

From Revolutionary Firebrand to Journalist in Spirit

Curtin's relationship with journalism was ongoing in one way or another for most of his adult life. Before entering parliament, and for a few years in the early 1930s, John Curtin earned all or part of his livelihood as a journalist. He was the first parliamentarian to employ a press secretary and during his years as wartime prime minister he took journalists into his confidence to a degree that is unheard of in today's politics.

The story of John Curtin's development as a journalist and his special relationship with the media as prime minister is explored in John Curtin: From Revolutionary Firebrand to Journalist in Spirit. The website includes John Curtin's writings from the early 'Socialist' articles at the beginning of last century to his union newspaper editorship through the 1920s and official ALP columns in the 1930s.

A Man of Peace, A Time of War

Our very popular exhibition, John Curtin: A Man of Peace, A Time of War, has now become an online exhibition which can be visited by anyone anywhere in the world. The exhibition follows Curtin's journey from poor country boy to wartime prime minister. He was the revolutionary young socialist turned political pragmatist, the pacifist called upon to lead Australia during its greatest wartime crisis. The online exhibition also features for the first time exciting panoramas which allow visitors to 'walk around' the exhibition viewing the displays in virtual reality. A series of interactive quizzes and activities makes this an ideal educational visit.

Understanding Society through its Records

Have you ever thought of records as the glue that holds a society together? Understanding Society through its Records is part of the JCPML's ongoing endeavour to contribute to the development and promotion of archives. In this project the JCPML addresses the concept of records and recordkeeping and their importance to society. The website gives users an overview of recordkeeping, reveals how records provide evidence of our lives and document our culture and lets users explore how records, both personal and public, can empower justice and help to ensure a just society.

While these websites have a general appeal, the JCPML intends to make use of these resources as part of our educational programs in the future, particularly for enhancing the learning experience of primary and secondary students in remote and regional country areas of Western Australia.

BECOMING BORDERLESS

All our web projects are currently being adapted for CD-ROM, creating a pool of resources which can be further developed into distance education programs, particularly suited for schools without easy access to the internet.

The stimulus for the JCPML to continue developing its digital educational resources comes from the success we have had this year with our "Treasure Box" concept. In 2000 the JCPML used a grant from the Public Education Endowment Trust to design a "Treasure Box" for upper primary school children to bring them a self-contained education experience. The material in this package is based on our metropolitan primary school program and includes:

• Jigsaw puzzles and jigsaw activity sheets
• A CD Rom - Australia's Wartime Prime Minister
• A Video - Shaping the Nation: John Curtin and Australia
• A sound recording with accompanying Fact File, photographs and documents to interpret the audio exercises
• A range of documentary sources including facsimiles of letters, photographs, leaflets, charts and maps
• John Curtin edition of Snakes and Ladders game
• Parliamentary Numbers Game
• ARP Warden's helmet
• Gas mask and bag
• Lesson plans, teacher's guide and resource and reference booklets for teachers

This smorgasbord of material and activities has been available since first term this year and the response has been overwhelming. A sample of the remote and regional country schools which have booked the Treasure Box shows just how widely dispersed this program is:

Goomalling
Australind
Merredin
Carnarvon
Albany
Karratha
Narrogin
Dampier
Newman

This spread is not surprising given that Western Australia covers 2.5 million square kilometres. Amongst the most isolated region is the Pilbara which is defined as stretching from the Northern Territory border to the Indian Ocean and covers 510,000 square kilometres. It contains 14 towns inhabited by 48,000 people which gives the region a population density of 0.09 persons per square kilometre. Such remote areas suffer not only from the "tyranny of distance" but also from their isolation from information technology. These features make for peculiar difficulties in the delivery of education and telecommunications (Else 1998 p. 2). Most of the effort that has been made to bring education to these areas has been concentrated on vocational education and training through Tertiary and Further Education colleges (TAFE).

What we have Learnt

Even in the short time our Treasure Boxes have been in use we have learnt a great deal. For instance, even when courier companies say that service is "overnight", we have discovered that overnight can stretch into "overweek" for travelling to remote rather than regional sites. Currently there are four boxes, with three actively on loan and one "backup". In first term we managed to give a maximum of 12 schools access to the materials, but in future 9-12 schools is probably a more reasonable figure given the time constraints of travelling. Since there are 350 primary schools within WA that fall outside the Perth metropolitan area we are only likely to be able to service a small portion of them every year. Given the cost of producing materials for the Treasure Box we do not see increasing the number of boxes as a feasible option to help us service more schools.

The strain on staff resources to manage the booking, sending and receiving of the Treasure Boxes has also been much higher than expected with all the components of the Treasure Box having to be checked upon return and, often, properly reorganised and repackaged before the boxes can be sent out again.

What we are investigating, therefore, are other technological avenues of providing this material to the schools. However, some of the remote towns in WA's northwest face difficulties that we in the city fail to realize fully, such as relying on generator-derived electricity (which is prone to break downs or power surges), lack of phone lines and optical fibre cable (OFC) connections (which carry data and voice) or poor quality reception or the inadequacy of the lines for data exchange. The current OFC network is limited to data exchange at 24 Kbps. Many people are still reliant on Digital Radio Concentrator Service systems for data transmission via computer and this is limited to 4.8 Kbps (Else 1998 p.18). Even mail services can be unreliable due to disruptions caused by severe weather conditions.

While there is certainly potential to make more use of technology in providing educational experiences to primary and secondary country school students, it is also necessary to take logistical and pedagogic constraints into account, so what the JCPML prefers to implement is a range of technological tools to suit students' and teachers' needs. The aim for our program is that it be content-driven, not carriage-driven. It's also important to keep in mind that, unlike tertiary students who need to actively develop their independent learning, primary and secondary students still need their teacher's guidance and input. Our feeling is that technology works best when it's integrated with traditional materials to give students an optimum learning experience

FUTURE MOVES

The JCPML is currently considering the option of replacing the physical items now supplied in the Treasure Box, such as the facsimile documents and photographs, the video and sound recordings, with digital copies on CD ROM. This would occur initially as material becomes damaged or lost through use. Technically there is no reason why, given the storage capacity of the CDs, we couldn't store the entire contents of the Treasure Box, including the games and jigsaws, but excluding the artefacts, on CD ROM or make them accessible via the internet. There are cost and time saving advantages to this including:

• it would be far cheaper to burn a new CD from a master than re-copying all the documentary sources we provide;
• we could use mail services instead of couriers;
• it would save staff time in rechecking and repackaging material to fulfil the next booking;
• there would be an increase in the number of schools we could service.

However, the major disadvantage would be the loss of tactile stimulus for the children.

So far the feedback we have received from students and teachers who have participated in the Treasure Box program has been overwhelmingly positive. One of the activities the students in particular seem to have enjoyed is using the CD ROM on computer.

In regard to the other digital education projects which have been developed, we anticipate building them into our off-site education program on a gradual basis. For instance, the online exhibition, John Curtin: A Man of Peace, A Time of War, provides panoramas which enable users to 'walk through' the exhibition and click on 'hotspots' to get a closer view of items. A range of interactive quizzes and activities has been adapted for the online version from exercises that students participated in during their on site visits over the past two years. As visiting the exhibition is a major component of our on-site school visits, adding this opportunity online will really enhance the experiential feeling for our remote and regional students who are unable to visit the premises. We can also make this opportunity available through CD for those with unreliable internet connections.

|Our Understanding Society through its Records web project, which goes online in May, is our most ambitious educational project given the depth of material provided and the coverage of the subject area. It provides a comprehensive look at records and recordkeeping processes and has been designed for use with students ranging from secondary to tertiary level. The JCPML hopes it will eventually be used as part of the coursework for appropriate subjects.

Another project in the pipeline is an online version of our current exhibition, Shaping the Nation: John Curtin and Australia, featuring additional indepth information about John Curtin's contribution to Australia which we were unable to incorporate in the physical exhibition. Again, we will be providing interactive activities and quizzes and these will be an educational feature on our future digital projects.

WHAT'S INVOLVED

Providing material to students online does involve considerable time and effort to translate a physical experience into a comparable digital one while maintaining the integrity of the learning experience. A number of issues need to be tackled in this process including:

• Technical - what hardware and software is available to the school?
• Practical - what is the economic feasibility of providing this material and the cost of accessing it; what skills do students and teachers have, or need to develop, to make effective use of the technology and feel comfortable with it?
• Pedagogic - how well will students learn using this method?

Decreasing public funding for education could make technology-based courses more desirable. Yet costs for connectivity of computers and the prevailing attitude of user pays are difficulties that need to be addressed in borderless education. While technology does open up access across distances, it doesn't necessarily address the equity issues - having the right hardware and software can still be costly even when they are available. As well, both students and teachers need to have, or to develop, sufficient technical skill to be comfortable using the technology. Currently, we need to face the reality that in some cases virtuality may not be a possible replacement for physical access.

While there are probably no technological barriers to preventing the future existence of virtual schools complete with chat rooms for lunch breaks, libraries to browse, and interaction between "classmates", perhaps the best approach is to consider that the internet will more fittingly become one teaching strategy among many. From the JCPML's viewpoint, technology is an aid for those groups which cannot otherwise participate via physical access. Our feeling is that technology works best when it's integrated with traditional materials at primary and secondary levels because these students still need their teacher's guidance and input. We will continue to monitor feedback from remote and regional schools to update our programs so we can provide an innovative educational service.

REFERENCES

Boyd, Anna, Fox, Robert and Herrmann, Allan 1999 Flexible, Open and Distance Teaching and Learning: A Guide Curtin University of Technology, Perth

Cunningham, Stuart, Tapsall, Suellen, Ryan, Yoni, Stedman, Lawrence, Bagdon, Kerry and Flew, Terry 1998 New Media and Borderless Education: A Review of the Convergence between Global Media Networks and Higher Education Provision Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra

Else, Ruth 1998 Message Received: Use of on-line technology for the delivery of vocational training to remote North West Australia: a feasibility study Hedland College Social Research Centre, South Hedland

Richardson, Jane 2001 'Handy but no easy option' in The Australian, Education Supplement 21 March 2001 pp 48-49.