ATN/Go8 Excellence in Innovation for Australia Trial - Excellence in Innovation For Australia (EIA)

The Australian Technology Network of Universities (ATN) and the Group of Eight (Go8) are currently undertaking a trial exercise to assess the impact of research produced by Australian universities. The Excellence in Innovation for Australia (EIA) aims to be the impact partner to the quality evaluation administered by the Australian Research Council; the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).


Participating institutions are required to submit case studies under the  four socio-economic objectives (SEO): Defence, Economic Development, Society and Environment. Case studies will form the unit of evaluation for the assessment and will demonstrate uptake of the university's research by end users as well as the breadth and depth of the benefits the research produced. It is comforting to note that the guidelines specify the research has to result in a benefit to the community - there have been examples of high impact research resulting in negative impact to the community (e.g. thalidomide or the atomic bomb).


Australia has produced a large number of high impact research outcomes over the years; many of these coming from universities, research hospitals and the CSIRO. Recent high impact examples include: Fiona Woods' 'spray on skin' for burn victims, Mark von Itzstein's flu medication; Relenza, and the CSIRO's wi-fi.


The results of the EIA will be released in November and once they are made public it will be interesting to compare them to the results of the ERA to see if there is any obvious relationship between research impact and research quality.


http://www.go8.edu.au/university-staff/programs-_and_-fellowships-1/atngo8-excellence-in-innovation-for-australia-trial-excellence-in-innovation-for-australia-eia

A disconnect between staff and student perceptions of learning: an ACELL educational analysis of the first year undergraduate chemistry experiment ‘investigating sugar using a home made polarimeter’

This paper describes an educational analysis of a first year university chemistry practical called ‘Investigating sugar using a home made polarimeter’. The analysis follows the formalism of the Advancing Chemistry by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory (ACELL) project, which includes a statement of education objectives, and an analysis of the student learning experience. The practical requires students to accurately prepare solutions of known concentrations of a common consumer chemical (sucrose), and then investigate the interaction between these solutions and plane-polarised light. The instrument used is a “home built” polarimeter which students assemble, allowing them to recognise that scientific apparatus need not be mysterious in its operation or construction. Student feedback data were conducted using the ACELL Student Learning Experience (ASLE) instrument. Analysis of the data shows that overwhelmingly students rate the experiment as “worthwhile” or better. However, many also rate the experiment as “boring” or “uninteresting”. By contrast, staff and student feedback at an ACELL experiential workshop rated the experiment very highly in terms of the “interest” criterion. In this contribution we discuss this alignment of staff and student perceptions of various elements, including “interest” and explore the correlation with the overall laboratory experience.

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2011/RP/C0RP90015J

Sock it too, them

Richard Branson's blog recently described a story about an entrepreneur who said he wanted to be so successful that he would never have to wear socks ever again. I thought this was a rather intriguing goal and it raises some interesting questions. First, is there a scale of success measurable by the items you no longer have to wear? Would one be deemed even more successful than the sock-less if they didn't have to wear a watch, for example? I am already successful enough that I hardly ever have to wear gloves, certainly not in a professional context anyway. What about shoes? Hats? and is it limited to clothing? What about deodorant? Am I more, or less, successful if not wearing deodorant? It also makes me wonder about those who cannot wear socks; I mean, if one had no feet - one would not wear socks - and therefore be deemed a success. If you set the benchmark for success at being sock-less are you at liberty to wear a single sock when you are half-way to your goal? I can only imagine that it won't be long until we are surrounded by successful people - all  wearing short pants, putting their feet up on the table, casually picking at their toenails - just to ensure that we are all aware of their newly acquired sans-socks-status.

Sock it to them

Encounter Bay Village Shopping Centre - Makris Corporation

The Makris Corporation has sought an extension to the Major Development Assessment status on its proposed shopping centre at Encounter Bay. The $250million Encounter Bay Village is still expected to include a shopping centre with a discount department store, supermarket, specialty shops and food court (17,000 square metres). In late 2009 it was estimated the project would create 650 new jobs.

Here is an article from the Times on the coast (BY ANTHONY CAGGIANO)

http://www.victorharbortimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/makris-seeks-extension/2248185.aspx

ERA 2012 Journal List

With the Australian Research Council (ARC) removing the journal rankings (A*-C) from their ERA journal list there will be an increased focus on citation metrics and specifically the relative citation impact (RCI). In fields of research that did not undergo peer review - ERA ratings were no doubt driven by the RCI values available to the national Research Evaluation Committees (RECs). The RCI is a ratio of the number of citations per paper a particular unit of evaluation has to the expected world citation rate. RCI is most useful because it is discipline and time specific meaning that it takes into account both the fact that different disciplines have different citation trends and that older articles generally have more citations than younger articles. RCIs can be calculated using data available from citation data suppliers such as Elsevier (Scopus) and Thomson Reuters (Web of Science).

ERA 2012

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, the Hon Senator Kim Carr, announced on 25 October 2010 that another round of ERA is scheduled for 2012. As information becomes available, ERA Liaison Officers will be notified and the ARC website updated.

ERA 2010 Journal Ranking List

The Australian Research Council (ARC) have now released their ERA 2010 Ranked Journal list (and ranked conference list too - although this one seemed to appear with much less fanfare than the journal list). The Ranked Journal List contains tens of thousands of peer reviewed journal titles covering all manner of fields of research. The list will be used for the upcoming Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative. The list provides information about the journal titles including the Field of Research (FOR) code that it covers, whether it is indexed by citation and abstracts database Scopus and most "importantly" a quality ratings of A*-C. The quality rating is roughly A* = top 5% of articles by quality; A = next 15%; B = next 30% and C = bottom 50%. While the list makes the practical task of submitting a higher education provider's research output data to the ARC easier, all nicely bundled into FOR codes and with histograms of quality within those FORs, it is definitely not perfect. The main problem is that while the FOR codes and rank might conveniently describe the journal - they do not always accurately describe the individual articles within the journal. This causes problems when the article within a journal inherits the FOR code classifications and ranking of the journal it is published in.

There has been some mention of the idea that with this rating scale "C" ranked journals may disappear as everyone will publish in the A and A* rated journals. My problem with this idea is that it assumes that all those people who currently publish in C rated journals could have those same articles published in A and A* rated journals - this is unlikely. Also, what if none of their colleagues read the A* and A journals - why would they want to publish their work somewhere that no one will see it? I believe that the increasing interest in "open access" journals will have a much bigger impact on publication behavior and research in general than the ranked list will. I doubt that the academic community will be pushed into publishing only in exclusive and expensive A* and A rated journals that no one can afford or want to read - this would defeat the whole point of them doing research and I just can't imagine this list having such a dramatic impact on them.

http://www.arc.gov.au/era/key_docs10.htm