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KBANZSL, the Knowledge Bank of Australia and New Zealand School Libraries, is an open access knowledge bank collating key documents, collections and other resources for and about Australian and New Zealand school libraries and teacher librarianship. The resource was created in response to recommendations from the Australian Parliament over a decade ago but still highly relevant in today's educational climate. KBANZSL holds strong potential in supporting advocacy, professional development, and research for school libraries and teacher librarianship in the Oceania region and beyond. This paper shares ways KBANZSL can be used for research and advocacy projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the ways one school library can be positioned to effectively support and extend the general capabilities section of the new Australian Curriculum. In particular, the general capabilities of: Literacy, ICT, Critical and creative thinking, Personal and social capability, Ethical behaviour and Intercultural understanding. These general capabilities are overarching and are intended to feature in all areas of learning across the Australian curriculum. In considering how a school library can work with each of these capabilities, this paper will explore concrete programs, activities and approaches that support and extend the various capabilities. This paper will also recognise aspects of the school library's role in community and culture that, though important, are often overlooked. This role is an important one for school libraries now and into the future as we rework our role in light of changing technologies and documents such as Australia's new curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocational education in schools declined significantly following the demise of the 1970s of technical high schools. By the 1990s, it had undergone a renaissance after formal school vocational education and training (VET) programs became an accepted feature of the latter years of schooling. There is now a diverse range of school VET options available to young people in their senior years of schooling. Over 90% of senior secondary schools offer VET subjects and programs, and nationally over 40% of students participate in VET in Schools programs. Young people participating in the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) can be tracked as they make their transitions from school to work, providing an opportunity to assess the impact of VET in Schools programs on their educational and employment outcomes. This briefing paper uses previous research on the impact of VET in Schools and some primary analysis of the data from LSAY participants who were first interviewed in 1995 or 2003 (Y95 andY03) to assess the effect of these programs on school retention, post-school VET and employment, and young people's school and post-school aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a joint proof of concept project undertaken by researchers from the Flinders University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in partnership with information managers from the Education Network Australia (edna) team at Education Services Australia to address the question of whether artificial intelligence techniques could be employed to help with creation and consistency of learning resource metadata and improve the efficiency of digital collection workflows? The results show some success with automated subject categorisation on a small sample, and the researchers conclude that automated classification based on artificial intelligence is useful as a means of supplementing and assisting human classification, but is not at this stage a replacement for human classification of educational resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the positive impact of international collaboration, utilization of technology and the Independent Learning Centre Program (ILCP) on student confidence and personal achievement. During 2008-2009, Concordia Lutheran College (CLC), an Australian K-12 school and Patrick County High School (PCHS), an American secondary school worked together to deliver the Independent Learning Centre Program (ILCP) as developed by Carmichael (2008). This project utilized the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) as a support system for delivery. The purpose of the online delivery was to make available to Patrick County High School, the teaching and learning strategies enhancing independent learning skills for information literacy and differentiated instruction (Tomlinson, 2003) via the Internet. The program gave students in both schools the opportunity to collaborate internationally and engage in a research topic of personal interest. It was anticipated this program would foster a sense of learner autonomy (Confessore & Confessore, 1994) enhancing students' faith in their ability to accomplish an individual project contributing to cognitive development and furthering their journey in learning for the duration of their formal schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In economic terms, yield is conceived as a rate of return to investment. Due to lack of available information, the operational concept of yield has previously been confined to being approximated by visitor expenditure. While visitor expenditure can indicate relative importance of a particular market, use of it as an indicator of profitability is misleading because profit is only a small proportion of expenditure and it is not uniform across industries. With the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) releasing data on tourism value added and its components, Tourism Research Australia (TRA7 has been able to provide a concept of yield which is closer to its real meaning and at the same time both operational and practical. In this paper, TRA has defined yield as the rate of profit on tourism sales. TRA has proposed a methodology to estimate yield based on this definition and applied it to International Visitor Survey data to estimate yield for selected niche markets. In addition to providing an estimate of yield from a business point of view, TRA has also provided a definition of yield from a national perspective and possible ways to measure it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]