Limitations

Several limitations became apparent during the research and this, most notably, affected the use of ICTs with senior students. Assessment tasks for senior students in Queensland have to be submitted to a district panel in order to conform to the requirements of Queensland Education and electronic forms of those submissions are unacceptable, i.e. if students create a wiki to demonstrate the collaborative nature of their work the wiki will not be accepted as a viable text for assessment. If students present an oral presentation, the text submitted is videotaped or recorded for DVD and fundamentally alters the nature of the dynamism that is inherent in a text that relies implicitly on audience involvement. Similarly, in the Higher School Certificate in New South Wales, the final examinations takes a pen and paper form. The implication is that it is acceptable for teachers to integrate ICTs in their teaching and learning of course curricula but ultimately the major external assessments pedal back to a time where straight silent rows of students writing by hand is still a measure of their educational worth and a measure of their learning and our teaching.