ASCILITE 2025 at University of Adelaide

Greetings from the closing session of ASCILITE 2024, where University of Adelaide have been announced at the hosts for the conference next year. This will be one of the last events hosted by the university before it formally merges with University of South Australia. The theme is "Continuous Change" with is appropriate for higher education. Given the Australian Government's failure to have a coherent policy, a better theme might be "Bin Fire". 

Mobile Learning Post COVID-19 in the GenAI Era

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 where Vickel Narayan, Massey University, New Zealand, is speaking on "Navigating the Terrain:Emerging Frontiers in Learning Spaces, Pedagogies, and Technologies". I am one of the authors on this short paper, along with others in the ASCILITE Mobile Learning Special Interest Group and got to say a few words about it. The challenge is to take learning out of the hands of the teacher and out of the classroom into the real world, of a facsimile of it. Perhaps we need GenAIGogy.

Heutagogy Has Stood the Test of Time, Unlike Powerpoints in Lecture Theatres

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 at the University of Melbourne. This morning Chris Kenyon is talking about how he co-created heutagogy at Southern Cross University. Originally it was to be autogogy (for "self" directed learning). 

ps: I was a little distracted as the power cable for my laptop is jammed in the table hinge on my chair. The main lecture theatre in Arts West at University of Melbourne has a mains power socket between each seat. About a decade ago I thought this was a good idea. But after a few minutes use of the first installation at ANU it became apparent this is a very bad idea. It is difficult to reach under the chair to plug in the power. 

Art West has the sockets higher up so they are easier to read, but this turns out to be worse. The plug is aligned with the small folding desk on each chair. If you forget to unplug, and fold the table, the cable falls down and jams the hinge. In normal circumstances this is inconvenient, but consider a fire evacuation, with hundreds of people trying to get out in a hurry, entangled in cables. I suggest retaining the sockets for front row seats and removing all others.

Virtual University in Australia?

Torrens Building,
Adelaide, Wikipedia

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 at University of Melbourne, where Michael Sankey is discussing the virtual university. He nominated Torrens University as the closest to this in Australia, which is a reasonable assessment. However, I doubt that this would be a salable product. As far as I know, there is no regulatory requirement for universities to have campuses. But purely online education is perceived as low quality. For this reason universities emphasise their physical campuses. This at times is farcical, such as multiple institutions who offered courses from the Torrens Building in Adelaide. Each instution would photograph the building, showing their banner only.

Turnitin tracking how students turn in assignments to combat AI

Greetings from the ASCILITE 2024 conference at University of Melbourne. I had intended to go to a research talk, but I couldn't find the "Light Green Room", so I stumbled into a presentation from Turnitin on their AI detection tool (this is in a room with check green carpet & mould coloured roundell patterned wallpaper, so I don;t know what it is called). 

Last year Turnitin released an AI writing report with paraphrase detection. This did not appear to work well and ANU decided to switch it off. But perhaps it is time to look at the product again and see if now works acceptable. One aspect I had difficulty understanding is Turnitin is addressing paper based assessment (are universities really returning to paper based assessment.

Turnitin are building a student composition space. The idea is the student writes their assignment within Turnitin. This is an implementation of the "show your work" approach. The tool will have a word processing function. With this approach you can see when the student did what. 

Turnitin are also building an offline digital exam system. This is similar to standalone products already in use. 

A new similarity report is al in the works for Turnitin. One small example is allowing for margin comments. 

AI & Education at ASCILITE 2024

Greeting from the opening of the ASCILITE 2024 conference at University of Melbourne. In the first presentation, Professor Gregor Kennedy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at UoM drew parallels between the challenges of AI in education today and online learning decades ago. In one way this is reassuring, as we have managed to incorporate online learning. In another way this is troubling, as there are many who still struggle with online learning, or deny its value, despite decades of research and experience. Hopefully we will do better with AI in a couple of decades.

Slow Progress in the Third Space

Greetings from the Third Space Symposium at University of Melbourne. Along with workshops elsewhere on campus, this precedes the ASCILITE 2024 Conference, which starts tomorrow. The symposium was preceded by weeks of Third Space Slowposium. I am still trying to work out what the slowposium is and where it is. But at least I have found the symposium. 

The workshops and symposium are being held in the Arts West building at UoM. The building has the look of an Escher sketch brought to life. Building elements are apparently thrown together at odd angles (as if several buildings were fused). One room is carpeted in a bold tartan, which would be okay but the walls are covered with wallpaper using the same pattern.  There is a very functional circular lecture theatre, but the outside wall consists of wooden studs and noggins with polyester acoustic panels between, giving the look of an unfinished building site. This might all be taken as a metaphor for this space, where we are making it up as we going along, with whatever materials are at hand.