World Transactions on Engineering and Technology Education

Editorial

The present Issue of the

World Transactions on Engineering and Technology Education

(WTE&TE), marked as

Vol.7, No.2, concludes the WIETE’s publication effort in 2009. This issue of the WTE&TE includes 15 fully peer-

refereed original articles, from authors representing four countries. The entire volume, hence, consists of 32 highly

informative and insightful articles coming from almost all corners of the world.

An interesting trend has been observed over the last year of this publication, with many articles reporting on the

application of modern information technology and the Internet to the teaching-learning processes in engineering and

technology education. In particular, several researchers have presented their research and development achievements in

creating remotely accessible and operated facilities, such as virtual engineering laboratories.

At this point, we should mention the achievements in this new area of Prof. Andrew Nafalski and his group of

academics, based in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of South Australia (UniSA).

These achievements have come out of their international project entitled

Enriching Student Learning Experience

through International Collaboration in Remote Laboratories,

a project fully funded by the Australian Learning and

Teaching Council (ALTC). The project also involves such academic establishments as the University of Technology

Sydney (UTS), Australia, the University of Porto in Portugal and Blekinge Institute of Technology, based in Ronneby,

Sweden.

The WIETE looks forward to the opportunity of becoming actively involved in this area of academic endeavour by

promoting and encouraging this exciting R&D through its media and the international network. Along the same lines, it

is envisaged that the UniSA group will report on the project at the forthcoming

WIETE Annual Conference on

Engineering and Technology Education

, to be held in Pattaya, Thailand, in February 2010, by carrying out a special

workshop entitled

Collaboration in Remote Engineering Laboratories

and presenting numerous research papers on this

subject.

The management of UniSA should be congratulated on this exceptional contribution by its academic staff to the

international body of knowledge in engineering and technology education, and should be thanked for its support and

encouragement.

We are proud to reiterate that the WTE&TE has been included in the list of journals generated by the Australian

Research Council (ARC) under the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative. The paramount objective of

this initiative was to launch a ranking list of journals on a discipline-specific basis to evaluate research excellence and

research impact.

On behalf of all those involved in the production of this issue and, indeed myself, I am delighted to express my sincere

gratitude to the authors of the articles for their achievements and their willingness to publish them in this journal. In

addition, our special thanks should be directed to those involved in refereeing these articles, for their effort and time

they committed to this journal.

I would also like to acknowledge the contribution to the production of this issue of Dr Ian R. Dobson, Ms Elena A.

Danilova and Ms Dianne Q. Nguyen, without whom the release of this publication would not have been possible.

Zenon J. Pudlowski

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