Best Paper Award
Congratulations to Dr Janet Toland and Professor Pak Yoong, who have been awarded the John Dickinson Memorial Award for best article in the Australasian Journal of Regional Studies
A paper by Dr Janet Toland and Professor Pak Yoong focused on the potential contribution that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can make to the development of learning regions has won an award for best article in the Australasian Journal of Regional Studies.
The John Dickinson Memorial Award was presented by Professor Paul Dalziel on Wednesday 20 February at a celebration hosted by the School of Information Management. Professor Dalziel is President of the Australia and New Zealand Regional Science Association International (ANZRSAI) and Deputy Director of the Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit (AERU) at Lincoln University.
The article, entitled ‘The Development of Learning Regions in New Zealand: The "6-I" Framework’, was based on Dr Toland’s 2010 PhD thesis supervised by Professor Yoong. They both lecture at the School of Information Management.
The "6-I" framework was developed to evaluate regional development using the concept of a “learning region”, which is a region that is regarded as being innovative and economically successful, with six key factors identified that could be used to measure its development.
Governments are increasingly making major investments in ICTs such as ultra-fast broadband in the belief that they will facilitate regional development, but little work has been done to assess the contribution of ICTs within a regional setting.
This article used the "6-I" framework to assess regional development in Southland and Wellington over the 20-year period from 1985 to 2005, looking at the potential contribution that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can make to the development of learning regions.