http://www.researchprofessional.com/

• Everything in the database has been filtered so that we are eligible to apply for it. Can login as mbower or matt.bower@mq.edu.au and password.
• Team of 12 people searching for funding opportunities across the world and uploading them within 48 hours.
• Enables users to save searches and organise in folders.
• Alerts system.

Some useful grant funding bodies for education:

• Youth in Action – Funding opportunities 2011 | EACEA

• Bilateral Cooperation – EU-ICI-ECP Cooperation Programme | EACEA

• Spencer Foundation

• Ian Potter Foundation

http://heppell.net
Stephen inspires about the ability of learning to astonish, engage, the joyfulness of learning. Simple but deep ideas like children taking socks off to feel more at home, students who are caught being good and add what they’ve done to the praise box.

It’s all about fun and creative spaces and ideas.

At university, creative spaces ,ilecture turning students away. PDF – Pretty Dull Stuff.

21st Century Schools change expectionals, entitlements.
Collegiality mutuality peer support et al need new community spaces
Change is occurring because it works better – retention, completion, engagement, ingenuity, creativity, collaboration…

Measuring creativity. What is the equivalent to a 1500 word assignment.
• Managing an online discussion for a week.
• Editing a 2 minute video
• Scripting and posting a 3 minute podcast
• Authoring an animated diagram in Flash
• Annotating 10 website links
• 750 words with 1 AR object embedded
• 500 word webpage with SMS comments

Exhibitions as a way to generate authentic stages for student production – having an artwork hung at Art Express is better than As in a student’s marks. Community installations also possible.

Hughes pairing – having students mark 3 assignments each get a better ranking than triple marking.

A couple of interesting papers in the most recent release of Computers and Education:

An assessment of the influence of perceived enjoyment and attitude on the intention to use technology among pre-service teachers: A structural equation modelling approach Original Research Article
Computers & Education, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 10 March 2011
Timothy Teo, Jan Noyes

A Framework for Teachers’ Integration of ICT into their Classroom Practice Original Research Article
Computers & Education, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 8 March 2011
Dermot Donnelly, Oliver McGarr, John O’Reilly

Note that the latter paper includes citations to the following references:

• Cheung, G. W., & Rensvold, R. B. (2002). Evaluating goodness-of-fit indexes for
  testing measurement invariance. Structural Equation Modeling, 9, 233-255.
• Kline, R. B. (2005). Principles and practice of structural equation modeling (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
• Hair, J. F. Jr., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., Anderson, R. E., & Tatham, R. L. (2006).
  Multivariate data analysis (6th ed.). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall International.

These looks like great texts in terms of performing attribution analysis from student survey responses. The following was also cited, which looks highly relevant to the Teaching Teachers of the Future project:

• Anderson, S. E. & Maninger, R. M. (2007). Preservice teachers’ abilities, beliefs, and intentions regarding technology integration. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 37(2), 151-172.

This semester the Macquarie University School of Education is trialing Moodle 2.0 for a couple of its units. I’m a great believer in Moodle and its potentials, and am looking forward to the promises of Moodle 2.0. However moving from the refined 1.9 to 2.0 has meant starting again in some respects. Here’s what I mean:

1. There are several annoying bugs. For instance, because of the YUI protocols that are being used, ordered (numbered) lists appear correctly in the WYSIWYG editor but render as unordered (bullet) lists on the final page. See http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=165759 for a discussion on this.
2. There are several annoying design features. For example, the Navigation block on the LHS automatically expands out the users’ courses including all of the course resources. This may occasionally be useful but for those who prefer to use the central course area to navigate through materials it is annoying because it pushes the Settings block down the page. Also, the Navigation block can’t be deleted (at least in some themes).
3. Themes are not fully developed yet. If points 1 & 2 aren’t enough evidence, then consider the fact that in most themes the hidden files in teacher view are not rendered in a different colour to the other files, meaning that when editing mode is switched off there is no way to tell which files a teacher has included in the course.
4. The file system is inaccessible and not at all user friendly. Any uploaded files are placed in their own folders (why?) within folders relating to the blocks in which they appear. It is unclear how to access the file system from the main page. The file system doesn’t remember user preferences for list rather than icon view. The whole design of the file system will be confusing to average users. Mark Drexler provides a discussion on the file system design which may be of some use ( http://www.markdrechsler.com/?p=234 ) because the Moodle documentation on this is lacking (http://docs.moodle.org/en/File_handling_2.0). Personally I think the way files are handled in Moodle 2.0 is a terrible mistake and they will end up rolling back or people will install plugins to workaround.

Publishing and Perishing: The critical importance of educational research design

Tom Reeves, Susan McKenney, Jan Herrington
[Get slides if possible – excellent!]

Tom provides a range of evidence for why traditional controlled experimental approaches won’t work in educational research.

Payne talks about the “clinically depressed” and “demoralised” nature of urban schools.

Educational design research – new book – but does refer to the Banner-Ritland (2003) figure which compares the phases of different research designs to design based research. Tom Reeves has a chapter in that book.

Moving Forward with Moodle

Mark Drexler, Netspot

Metacourses can be used by a Department or a Faculty to create a space for student announcements, discussion, etc.

[Me: Some possibilities I’ve found for helping with the development of Moodle Realtime Quizzes: http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=1036&filter=1
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=4023&filter=1
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=2241&filter=1 ]

Final presentation – World of Warcraft

Martin Oliver

Crack article: 5 creepy ways video games are trying to get you addicted:

• Putting you in a skinner box
• Creating virtual food pellets for you to eat
• Making you press the lever
• Keeping you pressing it forever
• Getting you to call the Skinner box home

Checkout the Digital Games Research Association ( http://www.digra.org/ )

Checkout “Deus Ex” game that teaches (in part) morals, human attraction etc in a morale dilemma framework

“The authenticity of the environment is not the same the authenticity of the task.”

Affordances is a problematic term, ambiguous and doesn’t aptly explain learning or culture.

Lookup review of Higher Education report by Denise Bradley

· The best behaviour management strategy is an excellent lesson

· Join the Second Life Educators mailing list

· Virtual Worlds Ideas:

o A virtual worlds lab (physical) where students can access, learn and design in Second Life. The lab should have a leader who can teach, inspire, guide, facilitate collaboration, etc. Students could then be allowed to develop our learning and teaching spaces, as part of their assessment tasks, or part of their service (participation) contribution!

o Have a design task for students where they design a learning and teaching space for an Education Unit.

o 3D glasses representations of virtual worlds.

· The need for a social networking version of Facebook

How does pre-service teacher preparedness to use ICTs for learning and teaching develop during the first two years of teacher training.

Lincoln Gill, Barney Dalgamo

Uses Steketee (2005) and Taylor (2004) to describe students’ progression between levels.

Mid semester 1: After 9 weeks there had been a development in their skills, but often they were accepting (uncritical) about their use of ICT.

Mid semester 2: Some students still at level 1.

Mid semester 4: Some students still reticent, others moving forward.

Sustainable Online Community Engagement

Denise Wood and Alice Dodd

This project (housed at Uni SA) puts together undergraduates with community organizations that need IT support. It is effectively an online service program. Would be perfect for our Participation unit at Macquarie.

Grant through the Office of Volunteers allows to have an officer staffing the program, act as a liaison officer, maintain relationships with partners, etc. Could apply for an equivalent NSW grant.

Benefits include:

· Improves student self esteem

· Career knowledge

· Increased social responsibility

· Improved academic performance

· Increase in level of student insight

· Ability to apply academic skills

· Understanding of social issues

· Community benefits

Challenges include:

· Conflicting aims and timelines

· Increased academic staff workload

· Increased workload for the community

· Communication issues

· Relationship is not reciprocal

· Milestones not met by client

· Milestones not met by students

· Maintenance of site by client

Changes implemented:

· Working on students’ communication skills for professional interaction

· Host two to three events every semester to bring the students and the community together, showcasing progress and work

· Redeveloped the OSCE program website as a CMS. Students can develop their site as a subsite of the OSCE.

Need to maintain contact and good relationship between student and community organizations – students and community leaders both benefit from the imposition of a contract – so that organization and students both have obligations to contribute, communicate, participate etc.

Nuturing preservice teachers to develop a better understanding of technology-enhanced pedagogy through reflection

Ping Gao et al

Extensive literature review of ICT use by teachers

Uses a model of reflection model of”

1. What?

2. So what?

3. Now what?

Method used a qualitative content analysis:

Four dimensions: Knowledge, Perception, + 2 (lookup).

Learnt a lot in terms of ICT skills, Pedagogies, Role of ICT, Perceptions of Technology

Spectrum of student views of ICT:

1. Presentation tool

2. Presentation tool to enhance teaching

3. Presentation + cognitive tools

4. Cognitive tools

Pre-service teachers who focused on student-centred learning gained most from the reflection.

Social Networking: from living technology to learning technology?

Collected data from over 800 students at Uni SA about how students are using social networking technologies, broken down by particular demographics.

Next stage of her research will look at ‘friends’ of hers on Facebook and how they have used Facebook for academic purposes.

Australian Higher Education institutions transforming the future of teaching and learning through virtual worlds

Fantastic compilation of 21 uses of virtual worlds in Australian Universities. Led by Sue Gregory – check youtube for the video coming soon.

3D Immersive virtual worlds in higher education: An Australian and New Zealand study

This is a scoping study to ascertain the state of play in Australia:

1. Literature review

2. Questionnaire

3. One on one interviews will be final stage

See their BJET paper “Model of Learning in 3D Virtual Environments” by Barney Dalgarno and Mark Lee.

Using virtual worlds to elicit differentiated responses to ethical dilemmas

Andrew Cram

Has a framework for how people make decisions in virtual worlds, based on their stance.

People’s decisions in virtual worlds are influenced by:

The virtual character, character’s goal, the player’s goal, the virtual world.

Designing virtual worlds for problem solving requires consideration of:

· Virtual world itself (layout, interactions and data)

· Narrative (character roles, history, appearance, tools)

· Educational objectives

Andrew takes a choreography approach (theoretically founded)

Shirley Alexander

Tim O’Reilly slide share presentation “Working on the stuff that really matters”

Shirley #1: How to design learning to meet the diverse needs of students in contemporary social contexts?

Jan Herrington

Jan Herrington’s Authentic Learning work has won EATC awards (worth looking up).

Note that the Authentic Learning is timeless because it doesn’t really look at the technology, it looks at effective learning principles.

Jan says of Tom: the main factor that influences learning is the task.

Margot:

There is some alignment between learning outcomes, technologies used and types of thinking assessed – the main point for educators is to focus on assessing higher order outcomes (ie using virtual worlds, wikis, blogs etc)

Symposium:

Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds – is it worth the effort?

Useless to test the difference between what would happen in real world and virtual worlds.

Argument: Reduces cognitive dissonance if there is fidelity between virtual world and campuses with which that they are associated. Counterargument – can leverage the potentials of the environment to create designs that would be difficult (or impossible) in the real world.

Pedagogies: Games, role plays, SLOODLE, Business Island (by International Education Services – businesses that students need to run), Law Courts can be purchased in Second Life (USQ has one).

Sue is creating virtual classrooms for teacher training that will be open for use by others.

Merlot know includes Virtual world objects SLURLs

Transforming Assessment in Higher Education

Link: http://web2assessment.blogspot.com

Musing:

I think there will be a big future for networked approaches to research, that enable researchers (and people) from around the world to collaboratively and often publicly perform research analysis.

For instance, if a dataset can be placed on the internet as a series of resources that can be rated, it may be possible to have volunteer researchers (or people) from around the world to score a collection of videos/essays/responses. Raters can be first asked to input their details (country, title, field, years of research experience, etc) so that their responses can be analysed with this in consideration.

Advantages of this approach include:

• clarity – the exact nature of the study is immediately obvious; whereas in a research paper the method may be somewhat ambiguous or difficult to interpret, people can at once log onto the networked research site to observe the approach applied.
• reliability – all methods are easy to see and check so that there is less chance of calculation error or interpretation error
• power – more people can be involved, further promoting reliability
• cost – once online networked research systems become popular, setting one up (based on open source code, say) should be relatively cheap, and as long as it is possible to find people willing to participate in analysis there may be lower personnel costs too.
• demographic analysis of raters – with enough raters it may be possible to analyse the nature and reliability of ratings across different categories of research experience, country of origin etc.

Online Networked Research – another idea for the future.

Two main databases are:

• Scopus
• Web of Science

Also see http://libguides.mq.edu.au/bibliometrics for references. Scopus is better for Education than Web of Science. Can also analyse journals, eg Scopus SJR ratio.