News in Brief: Publishing award, ARC SPIRT grant for UTS, New uni places, Cantopop to Olympic music

Four brief stories on these topics.

Publishing award

The Director of Shopfront and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr Paul Ashton, has co-authored a book, Australian History and Citizenship, that recently won an Australian Award for Excellence in Educational Publishing in the secondary education category.

ARC SPIRT grant for UTS

Three UTS researchers have won an Australian Research Council (ARC) SPIRT grant to explore the effects of technology integration in schools.

Dr Debra Hayes and Professor Lyn Yates from the Faculty of Education are the Chief Investigators working in collaboration with Professor Shirley Alexander from the Institute for Interactive Media and Learning.

The effects project is a new three-year research project that focuses on student learning and experiences in classes where computer-based technology is being integrated. The project is funded by the ARC and the NSW Department of Education and Training and UTS. Total funding exceeds $400,000.

The study will take place in 12 NSW government schools over three years, and will use both structured data-collection and qualitative interviews with students and teachers. The project is significant and innovative because of its holistic approach to studying computer-based learning, including the perspectives of students and teachers in a range of schools.

New uni places

The Federal Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs David Kemp announced recently that UTS has won 60 new fully-funded undergraduate places. More than two-and-a-half thousand places have been created at campuses around Australia.

"I congratulate the universities around Australia which have won places by demonstrating their past excellence and proposing innovative plans for the future," Kemp said.

The new places, allocated on a competitive basis and according to key criteria, are in the areas of Science, Information Technology and Engineering.

Cantopop to Olympic music

The 7th colloquium of the Australia-NZ branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) is being held at UTS in September (see Campus Diary, page 6).

Forty papers are being presented on topics such as Popular Music and Transnational Identity, Music Technologies, Writing about Music, Music and the Mainstream, Music and Creativity, Australian Popular Music Histories, Music and the Olympics and Recent Music in Aotearoa/New Zealand.