Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology
Volume 29(1) Winter / hiver, 2003
Editorial:
Taking CJLT / RCAT Online
Welcome to Volume 29, Issue 1! CJLT / RCAT, in its new format, is now 1 year old and going strong! This issue also marks a banner event in the history of the journal. CJLT / RCAT is now being published online as well as in print! The new URL of the journal is: www.cjlt.ca.
On the journal website, you will find a variety of features, including the abstracts of this, the current issue, the full text articles for all back issues, and instructions for authors wishing to submit manuscripts. You will also find a link to the AMTEC website, where we have provided, in PDF format, about half the issues of the journal as published under its former name, the Canadian Journal of Educational Communication (CJEC). We hope to have the remaining past issues of CJEC up in the near future. We have contracted the design and hosting of the online version of the journal to ICAAP, the International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (http://www.icaap.org/). ICAAP is a research and development organization devoted to the advancement of electronic scholarly communication and is based out of Athabasca University.
After considering the alternatives, and not before some extensive dialogue between the AMTEC Board of Directors and the journal editors, we came to the conclusion that the best course of action at this point in time was to publish the journal in both print and online formats. As academics, your intrepid editors leaned towards open access for the journal. The Board, however, rightly argued that this journal is a major benefit to the AMTEC membership and that unrestricted free access online to the association's journal could lead to a loss of membership and of part of the revenue base for the journal. Consequently, we have taken what we hope is a prudent course of action and have decided to release the full text of the articles for an issue approximately four months after the print version issue has been published (a one issue delay). We will actively monitor this approach over the next two years and then make a decision to: a) continue the dual media approach, b) move to an online-only journal, or c) go back to print only.
Is an Online Journal Scholarly?
Some readers may be asking why we chose to go online at all? First, there is evidence that online journals receive 4_7 times the access of print (Anderson, Sack, Krauss, & O'Keefe, 2001) and it is our view that an Internet presence should strongly increase and improve access to CJLT. Second, we felt that a journal focused on educational technology should, at the very least, make use of current technologies as a means of dissemination (basically to practice what we preach, if you will).
However, in addition to a possible drop in subscriptions, there is another risk in going online. It may be that researchers will begin to change their perception of CJLT as a scholarly journal and take it less seriously as a place to disseminate their work. While we sincerely hope that practitioners will find CJLT of interest, it is a research journal and the vast majority of submissions come from researchers and their students. What is perceived as scholarly, both by researchers themselves and by tenure and promotion committees? Do academics perceive online journals as serious and will they submit to them as first choice or only submit their less serious efforts?
Based on a brief survey of the research literature on academic publishing, there appears to be a mixed reaction to this in the academic world. Peer-reviewed, online journals have become widespread, even in more traditional, "scientific" fields as Medicine, Physics and Biology. They are seen as a way to get more articles out (and get them out more quickly) where many quality manuscripts are otherwise being rejected because of lack of space in the print version (e.g., Roberts, 1999; Lawal, 2001). Further, in-library print journals are often accessed as infrequently (no more than 50 times per year on average) (Lawal, 2001), while online-only articles on the Web appear to be much more widely accessed (Anderson, Sack, Krauss, & O'Keefe, 2001). As well, papers published online are being accepted by tenure and promotion committees (Anderson, Sack, Krauss, & O'Keefe, 2001) and are seen as having impact on their field (Fosmire and Yu, 2000). However, academics themselves are still uncertain about whether or not publishing in such venues will get them sufficient exposure (e.g., Pedersen & Stockdale, 1999; Kiernan, 1999; Anderson, Sack, Krauss, & O'Keefe, 2001).
Overall, then, the jury is still out, but it seems to make sense to take CJLT online and to see how this approach is received. In this regard, we would appreciate your feedback on this issue, so please email me at rick.kenny@ubc.ca with your thoughts and reactions.
Meanwhile, in this issue, we present five very different and interesting articles. Three focus on K-12 education, while the other two take a more general instructional design perspective. The first article, Towards A Cyber-Constructivist Perspective (CCP) of Educational Design, by Rocci Luppicini, argues for a cyber-constructivist perspective (CCP) for increasing awareness of factors that may contribute to effective constructivist educational design (ED) within learning communities. Luppicini discusses the advantages and disadvantages of adopting a CCP in the design of constructivist learning environments.
The second article, Étude du changement découlant de l'intégration des technologies de l'information et de la communication dans une école secondaire de l'Ontario, by Martine Leclerc, reports on a case study that describes the changes experienced by teachers after participating for three months in a project to integrate information and communications technologies (ICT) into an Ontario secondary school.
The third article, the Development of Media Literacy among Grade Five Teachers and Students - A Case Study, by Winston Emery and Rachel McCabe, is the first of two articles about a study of the implementation of a media literacy curriculum project in three inner city school Grade 5's in Montreal. The second article will appear in the next (Spring) issue of CJLT, Volume 29 (2). In this report, the authors describe what the teachers and students learned about two key Media Literacy concepts: the media construct reality and audiences negotiate the meanings of media texts.
The fourth article is Seeking Information for School Purposes on the Internet, by Holly Gunn and Gary Hepburn. This paper reports the findings of a survey study undertaken in four Nova Scotia public schools of twelfth grade students' information seeking strategies when they use the Internet as an information source.
The fifth and final article is Human-Computer Interaction: A Review of the Research on its Affective and Social Aspects, by Colette Deaudelin, Marc Dussault and Monique Brodeur. This paper presents a literature review of 34 qualitative and non-qualitative studies of HCI and highlights a number of important issues that the authors feel research has left unsolved.
Finally, in this issue, you will find a Call for Papers for the Fall, 2003, issue, Volume 29(3). This will be a special issue on Constructivism and Online Learningand will feature our Book Editor, Diane Janes, as Guest Editor. In closing, I want to encourage both our Canadian contributors and our colleagues from elsewhere to let us know how we are doing and to get your articles in to us!
References
Anderson, K., Sack, J., Krauss, L., & O'Keefe, L. (2001, March). Publishing Online-Only Peer-Reviewed Biomedical Literature: Three Years of Citation, Author Perception, and Usage Experience. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 6. Retrieved July 25, 2001, from http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-03/anderson.html.
Bailey, C. W., Jr. (2001). Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. Retrieved January 28, 2003, from http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html.
Fosmire, M., and Yu, S. (2000, Summer). Free Scholarly Electronic Journals: How Good Are They? Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. Retrieved January 28, 2003, from http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/00-summer/refereed.html.
Kiernan, V. (1999, May). Why do some electronic-only journals struggle, while others flourish? Chronicle of Higher Education, 45(37), p. A25.
Lawal, I. (2001, April). Scholarly Communication at the Turn of the Millennium: A Bibliographic Essay. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 32, 136-154.
Pedersen, S. and Stockdale, R. (1999, October). What Do the Readers Think? A Look at How Scientific Journal Users See the Electronic Environment. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 31, 42-52.
Roberts, P (1999). Scholarly Publishing, Peer Review and the Internet. First Monday, 4(4). Retrieved January 28, 2003, from http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_4/proberts/index.html.
Sumner, T. & Shum, S. (1998, April). From Documents to Discourse: Shifting Conceptions of Scholarly Publishing. Proceedings of CHI 98: Human Factors in Computing Systems, Los Angeles, CA. ACM Press: New York, 18-23. Retrieved January 28, 2003, from http://d3e.open.ac.uk/general/d3e-chi98/index.html.
Shum, S. and Sumner, T (2001). JIME: An Interactive Journal for Interactive Media. First Monday, 6(2). Retrieved January 28, 2003, from http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_2/buckingham_shum/index.html
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