ASCILITE NEWS
ASCILITE 2018 Conference Program Released!
The 2018 Conference Organizing Committee is pleased to announce a draft of the conference program is now available for viewing. You will find the program here.
As of mid-October, 207 submissions had been reviewed by a dedicated team of conference reviewers who accepted 121 submissions in total – including 30 full-papers and 47 concise papers.
Prior to the Welcome Reception on Sunday evening there are five optional half-day workshops. The conference program commences Monday morning, 26 November and continues until Wednesday afternoon. Monday morning’s Keynote speaker is Prof Paul Le Blanc (Southern New Hampshire University) followed by a full-day of exciting presentations.
We hope you can join us! It’s not too late to register which you can do here.
Reminder: ASCILITE Executive Committee Poll
If you have not already voted for your preferred nominees to serve on the ASCILITE Executive Committee, please do so before the poll closes on 31 October. ASCILITE members who were current at the time were emailed a private link to the poll on 11 October so please refer to that email if you would like to cast your vote.
ASCILITE Executive Committee members perform critical volunteer roles that ensure the society remains a sustainable, vibrant and relevant tertiary education community. As an ASCILITE community member, we hope that you will cast your vote in order to ensure the continuing success of the peak professional body for digital learning and teaching in Australasia.
As per the constitution, the Call for Nominations this year is for the Treasurer and 3 non-office bearer committee members. The current Treasurer, Allan Christie has announced that he will be retiring in that role as of the Annual General Meeting. Since only one nomination was received for the Treasurer’s position, that being from Mark Schier, Mark will be elected unopposed. Mark has served on the Executive Committee as a co-opted member since 2016.
Five nominations were received for 3 available non-office bearer positions on the committee. The five nominees include two current committee members (Chris Campbell and Julie Willems) and 3 new nominees (Sandra Barker, Thomas Cochrane and David Porter). A third current committee member, Mark Northover, who was eligible for re-election this year has also announced he will be retiring as of the Annual General Meeting.
Unfortunately, we cannot issue additional voting links at this stage so you must refer to the email you received on 11 October in order to vote. The polling system also prevents duplicate votes so you may only vote once and you cannot return to the poll a second time to edit your vote so please choose carefully. In addition.
The results of the ballot will be announced at the ASCILITE AGM on Monday, 26 November held during the 2018 ASCILITE Conference at Deakin University. We encourage all members who will be at the conference to attend the AGM.
ASCILITE Live! Webinar: Trans/interdisciplinary approaches to serious computer game development
Thorny issues and opportunities for inclusive practice
Date and Time: 29 October, 2pm AEDT. To find your local time zone for the session please go here.
Abstract: This is an interactive session focusing on frameworks and processes for serious game development. The session will present frameworks for understanding trans/interdisciplinary knowledge production for serious games and inclusive design, and will hold a critical lens to the concepts that are often used in higher education such as ‘innovation’, ‘disruption’ and ‘agility’. Drawing on her experiences in developing three serious games designed to improve the literacy of students of all ages, Erica will provide a serious of talking points on practical, philosophical and disciplinary issues in trying to innovate through serious games. Bring your own experiences or observations of playing or developing games for learning so that these can be part of the discussion.
Presenter: Associate Professor Erica Southgate (University of Newcastle) is a leader in equity and education, and is recognised for ‘surfing the next wave’ of technology enhanced learning for social justice. In 2016, Erica was appointed national Equity Fellow. A key component of the Fellowship was her Immersed in the Future report on how technologies such as virtual and augmented reality could be deployed for school career education. Erica is leading the Virtual Reality (VR) School project. This was the first study to explore learning through the use of highly immersive virtual reality in high school STEM classrooms. Erica is a serious computer game developer whose role entails content development, game mechanics and evaluation for learning. With Dr Shamus Smith and Dr Maree Gruppetta, she is currently developing an immersive virtual open world to improve the literacy of Indigenous and non-indigenous students. Her free literacy game apps are available on the App and Google Play stores – these are Apostrophe Power and Sentence Hero. To date, the apps have received over 55,000 downloads from around the globe and her academic literacy YouTube channel has over 117,000 views. One of Erica’s favourite things is flying high in virtual reality.
You can register for this session here. Pre-registration allows us to send you a quick reminder prior the event and to email you a link to the webinar recording of the session.
Transforming Assessment (e-Assesment SIG) News: Next webinar
The next Transforming Assessment webinar “Mindful assessment design” which will be hold on Wednesday 7 November 2018, will be presented by Dr Samuel Elkington (Teesside University, UK).
This session will explore the concept of mindful learning as it applies to assessment design. We will cover the current thinking and evidence for promoting self-regulatory practices to reframe student-centred assessment as a primary vehicle for authentically personalised learning. This includes student sensitivity to context and new perspectives, intentionality of attention, managing personal responses to feedback, and resilience. The session concludes with some practical examples of mindful assessment design in higher education.
To additional information and to register for the session, please go here.
TELedvisors SIG News: 2019 planning, projects and progress webinar
The next TELedvisors SIG session will be conducted on Thursday 1 November 12 noon (AEDT). The TELedvisors SIG is intended to be an inclusive and active community, dedicated to supporting the practices and enhancing the status of all our edvisor members. Come and let us know how you think the group is going, what we should be doing and find out how you can be a part of it. Projects being discussed will include:
- The TELedvisors blog – The Edvisor
- Research projects
- A sector wide database of ed tech being used in our institutions and organisations
- Options for credentialling edvisors
- Anything you’d care to add to the agenda.
- Activities for the ASCILITE 2018 conference
You can login to the session here.
Open Educational Practice SIG News
The Australian Open Educational Practice SIG is a practitioner-facilitated community designed to bring open educators, primarily those in higher education, together to explore issues of common interest, collaborate on shared projects, undertake research, and to advocate for the place of OEP in national L&T discussions, strategy, and policy. It is really a ‘grass roots’ community, and engagement with OEP varies greatly across the membership so don’t feel as though you need to be an ‘expert’ to join! In fact, most of us are quite the opposite.
We are committing to action during Open Access Week (22 – 26 October) and you can join in here.
Our next meeting is 8 November, from 2pm – 3pm (AEST) and connection details are available via the ‘Meetings’ section of the website.
OTHER NEWS
FLANZ webinar: Near Future Teaching from the University of Edinburgh
Date & Time: Wednesday 24 October – 8pm NZT
FLANZ (Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand) is a national association committed to fostering growth, development, research and good practice in distance education, open learning and flexible delivery systems for education.
In this webinar conversation, Sian Bayne will discuss the University of Edinburgh Near Future Teaching project, which was the focus of her keynote at the 2018 FLANZ conference. You can join the session here and find out more here.
