2009-2008

News Release

REF NO.: 160

SUBJECT: Faculty of Education professor and PhD student claim national prize

DATE: May 14, 2009

Dr. Elizabeth Murphy, associate professor, and doctoral candidate Maria Rodriguez-Manzanares, from Memorial’s Faculty of Education, recently received the Best Research Paper of 2008 award from the editorial review board of the Journal of Distance Education.

The article was titled Revisiting Transactional Distance Theory in a Context of Web-Based High-school Distance Education.

The award was presented during the Gala Awards Banquet at the conference of the 2009 Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE) in Ottawa on May 12.

“The Journal of Distance Education is an important journal in the field,” said Dr. Murphy, “so having them recognize our paper as the best paper of the year validates the work that we've done. I also believe that the paper itself was important in terms of the contrbution that it makes to theory and to our understanding of the role of real-time, interaactive technologies in distance education at the high-school level.”

The 2009 CNIE conference, titled Learning and Technology: A Capital Idea, took place from May 10-13, with over 400 national and international delegates working in the fields of educational technology, health education, K-12 education, multi-media design and distance learning in attendance.

For Ms. Rodriguez-Manares, this is the third honour in as many weeks. She is also the recipient of the Graduate Students’ Union for Excellence in Teaching (and also received an honourable mention for the GSU award for Excellence in Research). In addition, she has just received a $40,000 SSHRC award.

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