Susan Stoney

Dual protection offered to computer programs – why the move towards patenting?

While copyright law remains a significant area of law providing easily obtained and low cost protection to the copyright owners of e‐commerce‐related computer programs, it is not without its weaknesses. Patent law has in recent times emerged to provide the necessary reinforcements. The emergence of the law of patent, especially in the area of programs that essentially protect business models, is not without its critics. The purpose of this paper is to consider the protection afforded to the owner of an inventive e‐commerce computer program by the laws of copyright and patent. This paper will canvass the strengths and weaknesses of both systems.

The problems of jurisdiction to e‐commerce – some suggested strategies

The long‐term success of business‐to‐consumer e‐commerce depends, in large part, on the existence of satisfactory supporting legal infrastructures coupled with the implementation by virtual organisations of appropriate strategies that will achieve optimum business protection, consumer trust and legal compliance. The concept known as “jurisdiction” is gaining in significance in the world of e‐commerce. The purpose of this paper is to explain why it is that jurisdiction impacts on all the players involved in e‐commerce and to explore strategies that could be implemented by virtual organisations that might eliminate, or at least reduce, the associated risks.

Formative observation of teaching: focusing peer assistance on teachers’ developmental goals

Abstract Peer observation of teaching can provide valuable insights into effective educational practices. By adopting a developmental focus, peer observation can also provide insights into how practices might be enhanced and, importantly, how enhancements in practices might be aligned to teachers’ development goals. However, a review of peer observation of teaching undertaken at Australian universities demonstrates that observation instruments and protocols typically do not explicitly afford alignment of peers’ observations with teachers’ developmental goals. Analysis of observers’ uses of popular peer observation instruments through the deployment of the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme through multiple institutions across Australia has informed the development and trial of a novel observation instrument and protocol design that is aligned with observer use characteristics, and provides a focus on development goals. This study will be of interest to teachers and academic developers researching and implementing goal-oriented curricular and pedagogical development through peer observation.

Assessing distributed leadership for learning and teaching quality: a multi-institutional study

ABSTRACT Distributed leadership has been explored internationally as a leadership model that will promote and advance excellence in learning and teaching in higher education. This paper presents an assessment of how effectively distributed leadership was enabled at five Australian institutions implementing a collaborative teaching quality development scheme called the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme. The Scheme brings together expertise from teams of academics, coordinators, and institutional learning and teaching portfolio holders to the shared goal of enhancing learning and teaching quality. A distributed leadership benchmarking tool was used to assess the Scheme’s effectiveness, and we found that (i) the Scheme is highly consistent with the distributed leadership benchmarks, and that (ii) the benchmarking tool is easily used in assessing the alignment (or otherwise) of teaching and learning quality initiatives with distributed leadership benchmarks. This paper will be of interest to those seeking to assess implementations of distributed leadership to improve teaching quality and leadership capacity.