Australian Professional Standards Forum

Greetings from the Professional Standards Forum of the Professional Standards Councils. Today's forum is on AI, with Dr Ryan Payne, University of Canberra. 

The councils set professional standards, including computing. In return members of participating organisations have their liability capped. AI creates many challenges for organisations wanting to ensure their members act legally and ethically. 

Dr Payne claimed that NFTs are making a comeback, which I hadn't noticed. He also mentioned a number of other technologies which have been coming real soon for a long time, but which AI will make mainstream. 

Dr Payne claimed that AI had changed the words MPs use in Parliament and drafted in laws. He then touched on doomsday scenarios of AI optimizing human out of existence, or just subtly nudging human behavior. Of course, given governments, individuals and corporations have engaged in crimes against humanity, so could AI be worse? 

Today Meta started suspending the accounts of children, ahead of the Australian ban. It occurs to me that it should be possible to use AI to make a safer social media for children. I worry that in the next few weeks we will have millions of children suffering real pain and at risk of their lives, due to the ban. 

Then we got to play with Lego! Dr Payne used Lego to explain how a Large Learning Model (LLM) works. This was cleaver, as it got us out of the mode of just looking at Powerpoint slides.

Lego Serious Play at ANU

A Lego Serious Play workshop will be held at the Australian National University in Canberra. This is part of the TELFest a showcase of innovative use of technology for learning, 5 November 2018.  . I have previously been a participant in one of these workshops run by Dr Stephen Dann and observed another. The first had six teachers reflecting on learning, the second with three hundred software engineers. The insights which come from paying with a few bricks are hard to believe, unless you have participated in one of these sessions. The event is free, but registration is required.

ps: I will be speaking at TELFest, on "Ten Years Teaching Graduate Students Online: Some Hard Lessons".

TELFest: showcase of innovative use of technology for learning at ANU

The Australian National University (ANU) is holding TELFest a showcase of innovative use of technology for learning, in Canberra, 5 November 2018. The event is free, but registration is required.

Some topics:

• How can you engage students in class? This session focuses on interactive teaching tools and techniques.
• Are you thinking of reinvigorating your course and curriculum? Learn more about course and curriculum (re)design.
• Workshop: Designing for Interactive Learning: A Case at the Lab.
• Workshop: Building on the Bricks of the Lego Serious Play for the Classrooms Experience.

I am speaking at 11am, on "Ten Years Teaching Graduate Students Online: Some Hard Lessons".

What is ResearchOps?

Greetings from the #ResearchOps workshop on Research Ops Hosted by Ruth Ellison at the Digital Transformation Agency in Canberra (there are other locations around the world). This is about refining the design of user interfaces for web based applications, based on user input. This overlaps with existing user interface, systems analysis and industrial designs disciplines.

One of the issues discussed was how to get a multidisciplinary team working. I mentioned a #Lego Lego Serious Play session run by Dr Stephen Dann for the ANU TechLauhcher program. In this the new student team members used Lego to help draw out issues about what they saw as their role and what their project was about. This could be useful for ResearchOps teams.

ANU Project Bootcamp with Lego and User Centered Process

On Saturday I participated in the TechLauncher "Bootcamp" at the Australian National University in Canberra. There were about three hundred students who had been formed into about fifty teams of six students each, after Thursday night's team formation exercise. Each team has a tutor and a client, plus there as some mentors to help teams in areas such as social enterprises.

The students went through a series of group exercises:

Dr Stephen Dann took the students Lego Serious Play in the morning and Dr Craig Davis on User Centered Process in the afternoon. The idea is to get the students thinking as a team (not individuals) and thinking about what will be useful for the client and their users (not what the team wants to build).

This all took place in the same large flat floor classroom as the previous exercise. One limitation of the room is that the small single person tables are arranged in straight rows. An enterprising team of students at the back rearranged their tables in to circle for better group-work. To rearrange all the tables for group work would take considerable effort, as they don't have wheels.

I have previously been a student in one of Dr Dann's Lego exercises (and recommended it for TechLauncher). It takes a little while (and some faith) to accept that this is a serious educational activity, not just playing with bricks. The students were asked to build something to represent the project and their role in it, after each build describing it and answering questions from other students.

Dr Davis took the students through exercises to verify the product to be produced would be valued by the customer. This is a small part of what is usually a much longer workshop series (which I have been a student of). There is a version of this for researchers being run from March. The exercise where team members have to get up and interview members of other teams was a little hampered by the limited space between desks. 

Apart from the limitation of non-groups desks, the flat floor large room worked well. I moved my teaching on-line in 2009. With flexible facilities becoming available for flipped/blended learning, it may be time to go back to the classroom.

Lego Play for Higher Education Academy Recognition

My teaching philosophy,
expressed in Lego.

Today I took part in a Lego Serious Play session run for staff at the Australian National University in Canberra. This was conducted by Dr Stephen Dann, who customized the session to help those working on their Higher Education Academy Professional Recognition.

We were each provided with a pack of Lego bricks and taken through a sequence of quick exercises, where we each built something and then discussed what we had built. This was a very carefully structured process, starting with concrete exercises to get us used to working with the bricks, through increasingly abstract discussing of our teaching and supervision practices.



This may sound like a frivolous exercise of adults playing with children's blocks. However, it was a way for us to reflect and discuss what we do with teaching and research. It turned out to be a very intense and at times emotional process. In a few hours of "play" I discovered aspects of how I think about teaching which I had not realized in my previous three and a half years of formal graduate education. I am tempted to submit a Lego stop-motion movie as my HEA application, in place of the usual text document. ;-)


There is a 22 page "Introduction to LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ®". No fee needs to be paid to Lego to use the "Method", but obviously they would like you to buy their Starter Kits of Blocks. In addition there are are books on the method and scholarly papers. 

Lego Serious Play Method

One of the more fun looking educational techniques for teaching creativity in a corporation is "Lego Serious Play Method".  There is a 22 page "Introduction to LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ®". No fee needs to be paid to Lego to use the "Method", but obviously they would like you to buy their Starter Kits of Blocks. In addition there are are books on the method and scholarly papers.