Skills – structuring knowledge and information for learning and living of students in Australian universities

Universities in Australia, like their counterparts abroad, are making available several different kinds of electronic information services for their student communities. University students need different types of information for the frequently entwined purposes of learning and living, and such information may be available from a variety of information channels and sources; often the required information may be hidden within the complex structure of various internal and external information systems and services. Organising and processing such a wide variety of information to allow easy access and retrieval is a great challenge. This paper calls for a concerted research effort in this direction, and specifies various tasks of a proposed research project: these range from identifying the learning and living information needs of various categories of students in Australian universities, to organising and processing such information for easy access based on the task, context, and characteristics of the student users.