Professor Matt Bower

Grant runs from 1.07.2012 to 30.6.2014

Kickoff grant to do research that enables people to apply for grants. Changes to proportions in 2012:

• Aims, significance, innovation and outcomes (includes National Benefit) 20%
• Approach and methodology (20%)
• Role of personnel and Training (10%)
• Strategy and schedule for attracting external funding (10%)
• Track record (40%)

Applicant must be here for time of grant (so if JK was on then we would need to complete by October next year when her contract runs out). Can have other CI or PI from other institution, but they will not get any funding.

Guidelines:

• DONT exceed page limits and word limits (otherwise ineligible)
• 12 point font, 10 points for reference
• Save final version as a different name to remove track changes
• Delete all instructions

Panel will be concerned if:

• Panel comes from across the university, so don’t use too much jargon.
• Check grammar and spelling
• Collaboration between ICs is poorly described, details of the roles.

Track record of all applicants relative to career stage and opportunity: max 0.5 pages so provide any evidence.
Publications since 2007 are eligible.
Cannot provide submitted but not accepted articles.

Project title – short descriptive, no more than 150 characters (20 words)
Project summary – plain language, no kargon, summary of aims, significance and expected outcomes, no more than 750 characters (approximate 100 words).

Project description (4.5 pages – 50%)
Background blurb not worth anything but does set scene.
Aims, Significance and Expected outcomes. Make aims integrated and clear.
Approach and Method 20%
Strategy to attract funding 10%

Budget:
Personnel (detailed costing)
Teaching Relief (strongly justified and detailed)
Munor equipment (<$1000
Maintenance
Travel – directly related to project
Visiting researchers (interstate or international during grant period but not for general networking, contributing to project outcomes)

Budget justification: link budget items to specific aims and methodology. Why these items are essential.

Research strategy: relate to long term research strategy. Don’t hesitate to describe research weaknesses.

Research funding: previous grants from 2010 to 2014.

Previously, 76% success rate, almost all money approved. Available budget: $710K

Contacts: Georgina Chinchen

While this is a little off my regular topic, I thought I’d share a fascinating session that I had today at the Sydney Allergy Clinic.

The doctor referred to some seminal literature of relevance:

• New World Health Organisation report: deaths from noncommunicable diseases on the rise, with developing world hit hardest (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2011/ncds_20110427/en/index.html)
• Seborrhoeic dermatitis and dandruff: a fungal disease. Sam Shuster, Royal Society of Medicine Services, 1988
• Health Effects of Omega-3, Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids, By Artemis P. Simopoulos, M.D. June, 2005 (http://pdfrequest.com/seabiotics/HealthEffectsofOmega3.pdf)

Shuster’s article outlines how seborrhoeic dermatitis is actually caused by the fungus (yeast) Malassezia Furfur, also known as Pityrosporum Furfur.

In terms of treating skin generally, the Sydney Allergy Clinic recommended the following five natural elements:

1. Omega 3
2. Vitamin D
3. Zinc
4. Probiotics
5. Prebiotics

Quizzically, the only allergen that returned a positive test result for me was cockroaches!

The Teaching Teachers for the Future project has undoubtedly been a success, and the general mood amongst participants is that it is critical for us to continue the momentum. TTF2 provides us with an opportunity to continue build upon the foundations established by the first TTF project. In particular, we have the opportunity to conduct a coordinate design research program that examines how to most effectively approaches to developing pre-service teachers’ technology-pedagogy-and-content knowledge (TPACK) capabilities.

Under the guise of this research question we could:

1. Perform a mapping using a consistent framework across institutions of the tasks that universities are integrating into their programs in order to develop pre-service teachers’ TPACK capabilities (in TTF1 we did not see how other universities were integrating technology, so could not learn from one another).
2. Conduct the most massive coordinated design research project in history in order to determine the activities and strategies that are most effective in developing pre-service teachers’ TPACK capabilities.

For point 1, we could collect information about each TPACK related task in terms of the technology/ies that are focused upon, the pedagogies that are used, and the content area that is addressed. At Macquarie we completed this by creating a 12 item categorisation system for technologies (Web 2.0, desktop software, audio creation, video production, image editing, etc). Pedagogies were categorised in terms of the degree of construction and negotiation required (from transmissive to dialogic, constructive, and co-constructive). Content was not only categorised in terms of subject area (English, History, Maths, Science, etc), but also in terms of the revised Blooms’ type of knowledge (factual, procedural, conceptual, metacogitive) and cognitive processes (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create). This could all then be collected and shared using a national web-portal.

The massive cooperative design research project could then have academics at each university trialing new approaches (or even evaluating existing approaches) using consistent pre and post measures of attitude and ability. For instance, before activities we could ask pre-service teachers approximately 10 easy to answer (common) questions about their perceptions and confidence relating to the technology in question and teaching with it. The task (learning design) itself could then be explained also using a consistent framework, for instance using pedagogical patterns schema. Then post measures and open ended responses could be collected to examine the impact of the approaches and why they were (or were not) successful. In meta-analyses researchers attempt to compare different teaching strategies that were measured using often quite different approaches, however a massive cooperative design initiative would enable us to measure using a common instrument. Once again, all of this information including the resources used in the task could be collected via the web, so we not only have data relating to the impact of the approach and pre-service teacher perceptions of it, but the approach is shared with the rest of the community for reuse (and even re-evaluation for reliability purposes if desired).

Thus this study would then enable the TTF community to (somewhat) reliably compare and understand the way in which different tasks impact on students’ TPACK capabilities, and share our curriculum innovations so that pre-service teachers from all Australian Universities can benefit from the inspiration and hard work of the TTF community.

15th and 16th of March 2012

Mishra & Koeler Keynote Presentation

• In 1999 saw workshop model of teacher professional development not so useful – taught technology but not so much how to use it
• Ran some design experiments – “learning technology by design” – taught themselves the technology skills that they needed – seemed to work [evidence?] – people learning technology without teaching it explicitly – provided teachers with support/scaffolding for technology skill development but not the focus.
• Built on Shulman (1986) who proposed Pedagogical-Content knowledge
• TPACK is conceptual framework that can help describe, infer, analyse, practical (applied).
• TPACK is not prescriptive, or complete (e.g., motivation and attitudes not included)
• Hopefully teachers will reside in the TPC segment.
• TPACK has a handbook, 300 scholarly articles, textbooks, school districts, teacher education programs (eg Michigan state), and of course TTF project, SITE strand.
• An example, using a Kinnect to graph and understand a person’s motion.
• Measuring TPACK – approaches:
• Knowledge – Can ask them about their TPACK knowledge, or self reports of understanding (E.g. 2009 Schmidt survey instrument for statistically measuring self perceptions of change)
• Artifacts – eg discourse analysis of syllabus documents
• Practice – analysing what teachers do in class
• Student Outcomes – Impact on students
• Only a small percentage of TPACK work is measuring TPACK knowledge and abilities – we need more people measuring this.
• Over 66 measures of TPACK out there – can we connect the dots – ie, do the different measures correlate with one another?
• How can we measuring effectiveness of TPACK per se [I believe we can’t]. For instance, is just saying that TPACK was used enough to then count as a TPACK study? [Problem: TPACK is not a method, so cannot say that TPACK is effective]

Interesting other point: People who are brilliant in their area often have interests beyond the area in which they are famous – eg Albert Einstein.

“Explore | Create | Share”

Evaluation Working Group

• Constructed based on the Albion, Jamieson-Proctor & Finger, 2010, Jamieson-Procotor & Finger 2009, Jamieson-Proctor, Watson, Finger, Grimbeek & Burnett, 2007) + emerging TPACK literature. Analysed that instrument with 3000 pre-service teachers. Items were also constructed to relate to TTF PRoject Australian Curriculum areas – Eng, Math, Sci, Hist and consideration of AITSL National PRofessional Standards for Teachers.
• Interestingly there hadn’t been much change in teacher confidence in previous projects
• T1: N=12881, T2: N=5809. Only 75% completed the confidence, usefulness and other rating scales.
• Used traditional factor analysis techniques to find four strong scales:
• Confidence – teacher items
• Usefulness – teacher items
• Confidence – help students to use
• Usefulness – help students to use

Punya Keynote day 2

Note: based on a review of 14 contemporary 21st Century frameworks, there are three overarching themes – Foundational knowledge (content, digital literacy, etc), metaknowledge (knowledge about learning and thinking and information), and humanistic knowledge (knowledge of people, communication, etc).

Lookup Bertram Bruce, who espouses that we shouldn’t adopt a technologically deterministic model of education. Technology is deeply embedded in educational practice.

Brainstorming session with Mauricio Marrone

1. Insert a FB Social Plugin discussion

• Facebook Social plugin for discussions is not assigned to any particular FB account. Cannot add a FB discussion plugin that is from a FB group
• FB social plugin can be inserted into any web page, and the post that people make can also appears on their FB wall (and is announced to their friend) depending on whether they select that option
• Must nominate a URL if you are going to start a FB Social plugin discussion.
• Good for initiating a sense of community
• To embed just go to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ and follow the instructions to insert a FB Comment.
• Note: cannot use the FB subscription tool as it relates to subscribing to people within FB

2. Insert a Twitter feed

• For instance, a convenor might want to capture every twitter comment relating to EDUC261.
• This can be done either by
  • A) grabbing the search widget from the My website section of http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets and inserting it into a section of a unit website, or
  • B) using the Twitter block that comes built in with your LMS (say Moodle)

3. Insert a Disqus feed

• See http://disqus.com for a plugin that enables people to create a comment platform / community on your website. Allows for full integration with Facebook, Twitter and more.
• Interesting question – what are the different advantages and disadvantages between a Facebook Social Plugin discussion and a Disqus discussion?

Aims:

Important that the embedded functionalities are purposeful and useful to students.

From cloud to Moodle

1. Capture all tweets and have them appear in a sidebar of Moodle (done in 2 above)
2. Capture FB comments and activity (in EDUC261 FB group, say) relating to EDUC261 and have them appear in Moodle (?)

From Moodle to cloud

1. People receiving Moodle announcements, discussion activity etc in their FB (for example 1. Insert a FB Social Plugin discussion, investigate Moodle plugin)
2. People receiving Moodle announcements, discussion activity etc in their Twitter (retweet? Twitterfeed?)

Other ideas/questions:

• What is the bet way to conceptualise what we are trying to do using FB, Twitter, and other SN (eg is it just about capturing FB and Twitter within LMS, as well as pushing out LMS activity to FB & Twitter, or are there are other ways to think about what we are trying to achieve?
• How to make the most of the Photo/Video/Docs/AskQuestion features of the EDUC261 FBgroup

There is currently a great deal of change taking place at NTDET. In the immediate term there is no scope for partnership, but once their new social networking policy is put in place (next two weeks).

Operationally NTDET needs to:

• Move from individual to shared Facebook account.
• Circles in Google – overheads due to everyone has to manage their own circle.

NT DET moving from outcomes based learning to A-E learning which means less emphasis on differentiated learning. Shifting to uncomplicating the environment.

Alison Lockley is working in the social networking area – could possibly work with her.

Meeting with Warren Bailey, 30^th January 2012

• Not offering ARC Linkage grants in the first part of the year.
• 12 month projects to establish research partnership with a reasonable prospect of an ongoing project. Reasonable prospect is assessed based on the project being synergistic with the goals of the organisation.
• Application forms on the web, matching dollar for dollar.
• Warren is the gatekeeper for the scheme – 15 awarded last year.
• Reasonable chances of success if meeting the criteria.
• Assessed upon receipt.
• Warren can help with the application.
• Not only Linkage funding because they are becoming harder to obtain and offered less often.
• Talk to Macquarie Institute of Advancement (headed by Mark Williams) look at potential for Foundation money.
• Talk to Mark Wiggins to see if there is a Business Development Manager for Human Sciences who might be able to help source funds.

I’m excited to be working with staff from Beenleigh High School on the Technology Enabled Assessment for Learning program. I’m anticipating that teachers will be interested in learning about ways to use Web 2.0 Technologies  along with student responses systems to differentiate the curriculum for their students.

The program will involve an initial two-hour interactive session where teachers learn about the potentials of Web 2.0 technologies (such as blogs, wikis and social bookmarking). This will be followed by a session outlining a Framework for Web 2.0 Learning Design. Some teachers will also participate in further sessions. These include 1) a creative design session where teachers are supported to design a learning episode that uses student response systems and Web 2.0 technologies to develop differentiated learning pathways for students 2) a development session where teachers are supported to construct a differentiated lesson, and 3) a reflective practice session where teachers share their ideas about differentiating the curriculum and providing feedback about the program.

By the end of the program it is intended that teachers will be more confident users of technology, as well as more capable in catering to different ability levels. One of the aims of the program is to investigate potentials and challenges when attempting to differentiate the curriculum, including issues arising and effective strategies for implementation. Studying this will provide valuable information for the educational community.

Really looking forward to this program!

Spiros: LOAT (Learning Outcomes Authoring Tool) enables teachers to choose a framework (Revised Bloom’s, Solo Taxonomy, etc) and then helps them to construct well composed Learning Outcomes. Integrated into LAMS servers.

Gregor: Has done quite a bit of work on Undesigned Learning, eg using Facebook. What students were doing was similar to what could be done within the LMS, but it was their space and the toolset plugged into their life.

Gregor: Ways of thinking about design:

• Our tasks vs Their activities
• Whole Task vs Trigger Activities
• Formal vs Informal
• Mandated s Voluntary
• Our Tools vs Their tools
• Designed vs Undesigned
• Us vs Them
• Learning vs Living

Apparently Sasha Barab talks about the four elements (C’s) of engagement: include Challenge, spark Curiousity, provide Context, offer Control

Emil Badliescu-Buga LAMS conference paper for some excellent conceptualisation about adoption of innovation: Aligning context, community and professional development for large scale adoption of Learning Design innovation. Great and deep literature review.

Lookup:

• http://www.nquire.org.uk/
• http://www.ld-grid.org/
• http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/publications/camel

• Learning Design as the broad technical and pedagogical field of designing learning experiences.
• Peter Goodyear: Important distinction between what we can design and the learning that occurs – can’t design learning. Design needs to take into consideration that what we prescribe may not occur -> so that the task needs to account for the fact that activity may not actually unfold the way that we desire (for instance, in students with low motivation or behavioural disorders).
• Gregor: The trick is to take the tools, the task and the context, and an alchemists’ touch to cultivate that learning outcomes that you want.
• James: What we may want to change what we give to an expert teacher (who may bring a great deal of rich understanding to the learning experience) versus what we give to a novice teacher (who may appreciate much more direction about how they can teach).
• Peter Goodyear: We often undervalue academics who don’t have articulate knowledge of pedagogical theory but do have a great understanding of learning and teaching principals.
• Carlos: GLUE!-PS interconnecting learning design systems. Practical interoperability between systems. Excellent, worth looking up and tracking.
• James: The curse of learning design – the vision of learning design as a solution to all teaching woes is that compelling that we don’t quite acknowledge the limitations of the approach.

Attendees:

1. Mr Carlos Alario, University of Valladolid, Spain
2. Prof Kumiko Aoki, Open University of Japan
3. Mr Emil Badilescu-Buga, Macquarie University, Australia
4. A/Prof Sue Bennett, University of Wollongong, Australia
5. Dr Matt Bower, Macquarie University, Australia
6. Ms Leanne Cameron, Australian Catholic University
7. Dr Chris Campbell, University of Queensland, Australia
8. Dr Kay Carroll, Australian Catholic University
9. Prof Grainne Conole, University of Leicester, UK
10. Prof James Dalziel, Macquarie University, Australia
11. Dr Eva Dobozy, Edith Cowan University, Australia
12. Ms Deborah Evans, Macquarie ICT Innovation Centre, NSW DEC
13. Mr Paul Gagnon, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, a joint collaboration between Imperial College, London and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
14. Prof Peter Goodyear, University of Sydney
15. Prof John Hedberg, Macquarie University, Australia
16. A/Prof Gregor Kennedy, University of Melbourne
17. Dr Elizabeth Masterman, Oxford University, UK
18. Dr Matthew Kearney, University of Technology, Sydney
19. Prof Ron Oliver, Edith Cowan University, Australia (virtual)
20. Dr Spyros Papadakis, Hellenic Open University, Greece
21. Dr Simon Walker, University of Greenwich, UK

Lookup: WebCollage, Compendium,