The 27th annual ascilite conference was held at the Novotel Sydney Brighton Beach on 5-8 December 2010. The conference theme and sub-themes provided the opportunity to consider challenges in the context of the curriculum, technology and transformation for an unknown future. The conference was jointly hosted by The University of Technology Sydney, The University of Queensland and Charles Sturt University.
Keynote and invited speakers included:
Prof. Shirley Alexander, Deputy Vice-Chancellor & Vice-President (Teaching, Learning and Equity), University of Technology, Sydney
Prof. Jan Herrington, School of Education, Murdoch University, WA.
Prof. Ron Oliver, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning), Edith Cowan University,
WA.
Dr Martin Oliver, Reader in ICT in Education, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, UK
Dr Lev Gonick, VP for Information Technology Services & Chief Information Officer, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio
Prof. Tom Reeves, Professor Emeritus of Learning, Design, and Technology, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Proceedings are available online.
Virtual worlds
Several sessions (11 papers and symposiums) were devoted to exploring, demonstrating and/or discussing virtual worlds technologies – Second Life, OpenSim, etc. At the Virtual Worlds symposium titled “Teaching and learning in virtual worlds: is it worth the effort?” speakers presented at the conference (Helen Farley, USQ, Sue Gregory, UNE and Geoff Crisp, UofA) and were joined inworld by Allan Ellis (SCU) and Matthew Campbell (ACU).
Worthy of note:
Allan Ellis, in response to the question, “Is it worth it?” suggested that the value of virtual worlds for learning and teaching will be more obvious once students get out into the workplace and demonstrate their skills. In response to the access and equity question, one speaker made the point – “Don’t hold students back who can access the technology”.
To the question, “Why try and recreate what already exist (ie the real world)?” the response was that for some simulations, it is important to re-create exactly as is (e.g., taking blood pressure) but is not often important. This is the difference between building a replica of and a representation of the context.
Pearson suite of products
As I had been asked to Chair the session presented by Pearson, I did take a few notes. This company is more than a publisher of books. It is purported to be the leading educational solutions and services provider in Australia providing educational materials, technologies, assessments and related services to educators and students. They apparently own Penguin, Financial Times, LMSs e.g., eCollege, and have recently acquired The Learning Edge International (Equella) which is a digital repository for storing content in one location (USQ Library uses this product for storing reading materials for courseware.
James Dalziel demonstrated what’s new in LAMS (Learning Activity Management System):
- this product is marketed as a means of designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities
- demonstrated LMS integration – single sign on; the ability to drag and drop Moodle tools straight into LAMS; use of quiz scores to determine pathways.
- provided a hard copy booklet on Practical eTeaching Strategies
- directed the audience to www.lamscommuniy.org
- mentioned the templates of good teaching practice (Activity Planner) – which you have to pay for but is given to existing LAMS users.
- mentioned the hosted version hosted version LessonLAMS.com – free download for up to 30 students; paid version next year $30 month for over 30 students
See http://tpack.org for model -types and sources of knowledge for teaching and design.
Lev Gonick – keynote speaker
Spoke about imagining the future. He discussed the Case Connection zone – Cleveland Ohio – where 140 homes in the inner city have extra fast internet connection, etc. with a focus on:
- Energy conservation
- Health issues – obesity. Health and wellness program – links straight back to health provider
- Build numbers of science professionals
- Community Partnership Program
- Revitalization reimaging reinvention of university – standards based, open, neutral
onecommunity : university + Cleveland and on to state of Ohio – HealthNet
1500 sites across Ohio; free public wireless connectivity
Tom Reeves, key speaker
Books worth a look:
The narcissism epidemic: Living in the age of entitlement – Jean Twenge & Keith Campbell
The book of learning and forgetting – Frank Smith
What the best college teachers do? – Ken Bain
Gerry Lefoe and Dom Parrish (University of Wollongong)
Spoke about strategic leadership and a conceptual framework of distributed leadership
The Leadership Capacity Development Framework focuses on 5 key domains:
- Growing
- Reflecting – peer interaction, mentoring, coaching
- Enabling
- Engaging
- Networking
Iain Doherty, Learning Technology Unit, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland discussed systemic change through embedded continuing professional development for teachers and directed us to http://www.fmhshub.auckland.ac.nz/23.html – a rubric of teaching performance.
The Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences’ Teaching and Learning Hub is worth a look!
Julie Willems (UNE)’s paper on student disadvantage is worth a look.
as is Richard Wenchao He’s paper titled “Enterprise architecture roadmap for the development of distance online learning programs in tertiary education”. This paper discusses how the Zachman Framework is adapted to propose a concise roadmap for universities to convert their normal face-to-face courses into e-learning programs in a large scale (see Table 2 in this paper).
Robyn Nash, Sandra Sacre, Jennifer Lock and Pauline Calleja’s paper (from UNE) on developing the leadership capabilities of clinical supervisors was also a good paper. I have suggested that our own Dr Helen Farley contact the team regarding the project we are planning with nursing using virtual world technologies.
Through a presentation by Tom Reeves, Susan McKenney, Jan Herrington on the importance of Educational Design Research (also known as Design-Based Research), our attention was drawn to:
- So Much Reform So Little Change – by Charles M. Payne
- The Flat World and Education by Linda Darling-Hammond
- Mark Taylor’s Crisis on Campus
- Educational Design Research (contains a chapter by Tom Reeves) and
- the work of Madhabi Chatterji from Teachers College, Columbia
Ron Oliver
Some of Ron’s recent work has been in the VET sector as part of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. See the Learning Design tool at http://ldt.eworks.edu.au
Geoff Crisp spoke about assessing students in Second Life. See
http://www.transformingassessment.com
http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=QrulhMVgYI
This prompts me to commit to using Second Life to do more creative things and look further at sloodle. As Geoff says, recreating many elements inside the environment is such a waste of time – just link out to other related sites.
Shannon Kennedy-Clark presented an interesting concept in her “MUVEing Slowly:
Applying slow pedagogy to a scenario-based virtual environment” paper written with Miriam Tanti. This concept of slow pedagogy is well worth a look, particularly in this crazy/quick/fast world in which we live. The concept is derived from the Slow Food movement – rejection of the fast food movement – and came out of Turino, Italy (see the slow food festival held here – must happen about mid November)
They claim that this approach:
- Questions if quicker, faster, etc resulting in better learning?????
- Is the opposite of making everything fast – fast access, etc.
- Is learner centered
- Is not just about the speed but time to explore, make mistakes, solve problems
- Look at study in India where a woman has applied slow pedagogy to a rural school
Swee Kin Loke, Phil Blyth, Judith Swan discussed the Otago Virtual Hospital and Helen Farley – teaching first-year studies in religion UQ religion bazaar.
Anthony McKnight and Garry Hoban (Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong) gave a great paper on animated storytelling to support non-Aboriginal pre-service teachers in understanding indigenous perspectives. The presentation “Animated storytelling about “My Special Place” to represent non-Aboriginal preservice teachers’ awareness of “relatedness to country”” was very interesting.
“Slowmation” (abbreviated from “Slow Animation”) is a simplified way for university or school students to make a stop-motion animation to explain a concept or tell a story. It is an engaging way to learn because students conduct research and make the animation as a representation of their learning by taking digital still photos of manually moved models and playing them at 2 photos/second to produce a slow moving image. The explanation or story may be enhanced by students adding narration, text or music. See www.slowmation.com
Also have a look at My People’s Dreaming – by Uncle Max Harrison
ALL IN ALL, A GREAT CONFERENCE!
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | 2010, ascilite, conference, slow pedagogy, slowmation, virtual worlds
