Seminar on ANU Grand Challenge: Peace through superior education

I will be presenting a seminar on the ANU Grand Challenge: Peace through superior education, 22 August 2017 at the Australian National University in Canberra. All welcome, free but please book.

The ANU Grand Challenges Scheme aims to "...bring people together from all across the University to bring new perspectives to a major challenge confronting society". Nine of the proposes relate to education through the use of technology. This seminar discusses one such proposal, for delivery of education on-line in the indo-pacific region from ANU.

Designing Professional e-Learning

The Australian Computer Society Canberra Conference needed an extra speaker next Tuesday. So I am filling a 2:20pm slot with "Designing Professional e-Learning". It is an opportune time of this as ANU has just announced a "major expansion of engineering and computer science".

Designing Professional e-Learning

Speaker: Tom Worthington, MEd, FACS CP, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University

Award winning e-learning designer Tom Worthington will discuss how to equip professionals for the technology challenges of the 21st Century. He will detail how to provide formal postgraduate education to students in their workplaces via mobile devices. Tom will discuss his own experience as an international student using an e-portfolio to provide evidence of skills.

Speaker

Tom Worthington is an independent consulting Certified Computer Professional and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Research School of Computer Science at the ANU. He writes on education issues as "The Higher Education Whisperer" and more generally as "The Net Traveler". Tom is leading an ANU Grand Challenge team to provide m-learning to 200,000 students across the indo-pacific region.

 

Mapping Skills Between Frameworks

Loise Smith from ACS is talking about Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) at the Australian Computer Society Canberra Branch Conference. She mentioned in passing that SFIA Level 3 corresponds to the skills level expected of a university graduate in the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF). A Bachelor Degree is at AQF Level 7. This was good to hear, as I assumed this for Designing an Undergraduate Course on ICT Sustainability. Also I had assumed that SFIA Level 5, corresponds to a Masters Degree (AQF Level 9). Obviously these are approximate alignments.

More Participation to Improve Learning and Events

This week I spent two days at the  ACS Canberra Conference, and two at . While good, both events could do with more opportunities for input from delegates. They both had experts speaking for 30 to 45 minutes, followed by a few minutes of questions from delegates. There were some panels, but these also tended to consist of the experts speaking for an extended period, followed by a few minutes for questions. I find this a very dull format and also research shows it is not a good way to learn.

For the last few years I have been attending "Bar Camps" and "Hacker" events. At these, the ordinary delegates are encouraged to participate. Some of this could be incorporated into more conventional events to make them more lively and educational. As an example, a traditional formal for an academic conference is to have posters outside the conference room. There is usually a prize at the end of the conference for the best poster. Instead, I suggest judging the posters on the first day of the conference and then inviting the winner and the two runners up to present in a main conference session.

Similarly, groups of delegates at a conference could be asked to discuss a topic and then a representative report back. This can be facilitated by use of online technology.

Conference organisers will be be justifiably worried over what unpredictable effects having more delegate input may have. But that would make the event more interesting and attract more delegates.