ASCILITE NEWS

2018 ASCILITE Awards

Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s ASCILITE awards. The calibre of nominations across all awards this year was exceptionally high and the entire ASCILITE community extends their congratulations to each and every award recipient.

Life Member Award

ASCILITE’s most prestigious award is Life Membership. This award recognises the significant service and/or sustained contribution of an ASCILITE member to the Society. It is the highest recognition of achievement made by ASCILITE and the award is made only when an appropriate candidate meets the criteria.

The winner of this award in 2018, is Prof Dominique Parrish (Macquarie University).

Dominique began her involvement in ASCILITE in March 2007 as ASCILITE Project Manager for a Carrick Exchange Project. In February 2008 she took on the role of ASCILITE Secretariat and in May of that year she introduced an Institutional Membership Scheme. In 2011, she was elected to the ASCILITE Executive as Treasurer for one year and in 2012 she became Vice-President. In 2015, she was elected as ASCILITE President and since then she has initiated a range of new benefits for members and expanded several other services, specifically:

Expanded the number of Special Interest Groups (SIG)
Introduced the Emerging Scholar, Community Fellow and Student Bursary awards
Developed of the ASCILITE Spring into Excellence Research School, a 3 day research school for early career researchers, now in its second year.
On-going development of the Technology Enhanced Learning Accreditation Scheme (TELAS) initiative that will assure the quality of online learning and promote exemplary practices through the certification of peer reviewers, assessment and accreditation.

Innovation Award

The ASCILITE Innovation Award celebrates work undertaken by an individual or team of people in support of the exemplary and research informed use of technologies for teaching and learning in tertiary education. Innovation is defined as a new idea, device or process or something original that “breaks into” teaching and learning in the tertiary sector. The winners of the award this year are:

Dr Maggie Hartnett and Dr Peter Rawlins (Massey University) for “Professional Inquiry – Researcher Training & Development Course.”
Simone Tyrell (Project Lead), Leanne Ngo, Kerrie Bridson, Michael Volkov, Sharon Chua, Ellyse Mitchell (Deakin University) for “Professional Literacy Suite”.
Melissa Fanshawe (University of Southern Queensland) for “Fostering a positive maths mindset for learning through technology-based sense of presence.”

Emerging Scholar Award

The winner of the inaugural Emerging Scholar award is Linda Corrin (The University of Melbourne).

This award recognies outstanding contributions to the exemplary use of, and/or research into, technologies for teaching and learning in tertiary education as an emerging scholar in at least two of the following categories:

Emerging professional mentoring or leadership
Emerging noteworthy or quality research
Sustained innovations

Community Fellow Award

The winner of the inaugural Community Fellow Award is Michael Cowling (CQUniversity).

This award recognises the outstanding contributions to the exemplary use of, and/or research into, technologies for teaching and learning in tertiary education for and with communities in at least two of the following categories:

Professional leadership working within the community
Encourages and supports exemplary use of technologies within the community
Innovations in practice in exemplary use of technologies within the community

Student Bursary Award

The winnners of this year’s Student Bursary Awards are Samantha Newell (University of Adelaide) for “Researching the Value & Validity of Educational Technology” and Sophie Abel (University of Technology Sydney) for “Automated feedback on Student Writing“.

The award recipients receive $1,000 to towards their attendance at the ASCILITE conference. Award submissions comprised of a 3 – 5 minute video that demonstrates how well the applicant made use of educational technologies and communicates effectively through the technology.

AJET Distinguished Reviewer Award

This year’s winner of the AJET Distinguished Reviewer Award is Dr Nauman Saeed, an Academic Developer at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Dr Saeed works on key strategic projects on blended and fully online learning, providing expert advice and practical assistance to academics on projects and professional development that focus on inter-campus curriculum design, flexible and online teaching, assessment, and learning, evaluation and other strategic issues.

His reviews are always detail and constructive, his recommendations are well considered and balanced. He has a critical eye when reviewing and provides an in-depth and coherent review with constructive comments on how the paper can be strengthened.

On behalf of the ASCILITE community we thank all award winners for their outstanding contributions.

2018 Conference Awards

Congratulations to the following winners of this year’s conference awards:

Best Full Paper

Logan Balavijendran and Morag Burnie (The University of Melbourne) for “Ready to Study: an online tool to measure learning and align expectations via reflection and personalisation.”

The program committee considered this a clear winner. Of note was the way in which the authors project explored the use of technology to enhance learning. The project was well executed and very well described.

Best Concise Paper

Michael Grimley, Timothy Moss, Emma Donaldson (Torrens University) and Eoghan Hogan (Laureate Education) for “The voices of autism: Using MOOC technologies to meet the needs of vulnerable communities.”.

The program committee liked this paper because it addressed an important question and conceptualised forms of MOOC engagement in a very useful way. A focus on MOOCs that create inclusive educational experiences in a partnership approach is welcome.

Best Poster

Reem Al-Mahmood (La Trobe University), Jenny Corbin (Whitefriars College), Logan Balavijendran (The University of Melbourne) and Caroline Ondracek (La Trobe University) for “Digital identity: Making your mark!’ Developing students’ digital literacies through an adaptive eLearning module”.

This award was selected by popular vote by conference delegates.

2018 Conference Wrap-up

Conference Proceedings: You will find the final version of the conference proceedings here. This document (17Mb) replaces a pre-conference version of the proceedings published late last week.

Conference Evaluation: If you went to ASCILITE 2018, and you haven’t already completed the conference evaluation, you may do so here. It takes only about 4 minutes to complete and your contribution may provide the 2019 conference organizing committee with valuable tips on how to make the next conference even better!

Conference Photos: Photos from the conference, including the conference dinner, welcome reception and other events will be made available on the conference website and via the next member bulletin to be published on 17 December 2018.

Keynotes Recordings: Audio recordings of the conference keynote presentations will be emailed to conference delegates and then made available on the ASCILITE website in the coming weeks.

2019 Conference: ASCILITE 2019 will be held at the Singapore University of Social Sciences in Singapore, 2 – 5 December 2019.

AJET Issue Vol 34 (5) 2018 Now Published

We are pleased to advise a new issue of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology for 2018 has been published. The editorial for the issue and the articles it contains are available from the AJET website.

As always, we thank the wonderful team of associate editors who facilitate the reviews and author revisions. The associate editors are Associate Professor Shirley Agostinho (University of Wollongong, Australia), Dr Thomas Donald Cochrane (CfLAT Centre for Learning And Teaching Auckland University of Technology New Zealand), Dr Linda Corrin (University of Melbourne, Australia), Dr. Eamon Costello (National Institute for Digital Learning Dublin City University, Ireland), Dr Christopher E Dann (University of Southern Queensland, Australia), Dr Helen Farley, Dr Teresa S Foulger (Arizona State University, USA), Associate Professor Paul Gruba (The University of Melbourne, Australia), Professor Judi Harris (William and Mary School of Education, USA), Dr Henk Huijser (Queensland University of Technology, Australia), Associate Professor Matthew Kearney (STEM Education Futures Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney, Australia), Dr Chien-Ching Lee (Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore), A/Prof Jason M Lodge (University of Queensland, Australia), Associate Professor Lina Markauskaite (The University of Sydney, Australia), Associate Professor Stephen Marshall (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Dr Michael Phillips (Monash University, Australia) and Dr Kate Thompson (Griffith University, Australia).

We would also like to acknowledge the authors for their contributions to AJET and for the support we received from them in preparing papers for this issue.

Associate Prof. Michael Henderson, Associate Prof. Eva Heinrich and Associate Prof. Petrea Redmond
Lead Editors, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.

Expressions of Interest invited in ASCILITE’s 2019 Community Mentoring Program

Applications (Expressions of Interest) in the 2019 Community Mentoring Program are now being accepted and are due by 1 February 2019.

The ASCILITE Community Mentoring Program (CMP) aims to provide mentoring opportunities across a number of fields including technical, academic development, learning development, faculty academics, early career researchers, graphic designers and programmers. The program has been operating since 2003 with over 135 members having taken part to date.

You will find full details of the program on the ASCILITE website along with the application forms.

For those with a keen interest in the program, an information session webinar will be conducted in the new year.

New TELall Blog Post: TPACK

In this latest post, Associate Professor Redmond and Professor Lock discuss TPACK as a framework to investigate technology integration of pre-service teachers.

You can view the post here and subscribe to the TELLall blog at the same time.