USQ Associate Professor wins international education award

USQ Education Associate Professor Peter Albion has been awarded a 2007 Outstanding Paper Award from the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE).

Associate Professor Albion was awarded the honour for his paper Student Teachers' Confidence and Competence for Finding Information on the Internet, which assessed whether or not Generation Y was more skilled than previous generations with computers.

'With help from USQ's Faculty of Business, we put together a survey that looked at how good incoming students were at using internet tools,' he said.

'For example we asked them to find what time a movie screens and find the transcript of a speech on the internet.

'The perception out there is that they are fluent with computers and while they were efficient with the basic stuff they are not as good as they should be and they did not understand things as much as you would like them to.'

SITE is an international association interested in the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the use information technology in teacher education, with Associate Professor Albion one of thousands of members worldwide.

'I joined the group in 1996 and each year they have a Conference in the United States where they give outstanding paper awards,' he said.

'This year my paper was one of four to win an award, with about 1000 papers submitted to SITE for assessment.'

Although pleasantly surprised to win the award, this was not the first honour that Associate Professor Albion has won after having similar success in 1998 and 1999.

'I won an outstanding paper award in '98 and '99 and have put a paper in every year,' he said.

The outcomes of the paper will now be put into practice at the University, with Associate Professor Albion planning on implementing new strategies to address some of the problems uncovered in the study.

'We plan on modifying the first year course on teaching information technology to address some of the issues that were raised through the survey.'

Associate Professor Albion will attend the 2007 SITE Conference in San Antonio later this month where he will accept his award.

Media Contact: Josh Ada, USQ Media, +61 7 4631 1628