Dramaturgy: A sociological perspective for conceptualising Me. Us. IT in the context of online learning
Experimental session
Dawn Gilmore
Swinburne University of Technology, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design
@dawngilmore9
Catch this session
Monday 4 December, 3.30pm - 4.30pm
Stream 1
Room H102
Abstract
A dramaturgical analysis seeks to understand people’s everyday lives through the aspects of a theatre. I propose that this is a useful analogy for illustrating how students experience learning in an online subject. Based on this analogy, an online student is an actor who crafts performances within the front stage and backstage of a particular university subject.
At the start of this session attendees are introduced to three theatre stages. These stages are defined as the front stage (the LMS), the backstage online (internet websites and social media), and the backstage offline (conversations with family, friends, and colleagues). Following this, attendees will meet student-avatars who play the theatre roles of performer, cameo, extra, and stagehand. The creation of the student-avatars was informed by a fourteen-month study of online university students. During this time data was collected from 224 student observations, 120 questionnaires, 26 interviews, and the content analysis of 1,857 discussion board posts.
Each student-avatar will communicate their learning journey by briefly sharing how they experience learning in the front stage, backstage online, and backstage offline. Through their stories, their preferences and patterns for individual experiences, group experiences, and the tools they most commonly use for university related tasks come to light. With the student-avatars in mind, attendees will design a short learning experience that acknowledges how students enact multiple identities across the three performance stages. The learning experiences will be collated into an online book that will be shared with conference attendees. This book symbolises how we can harness our collective intelligence to support online students.
About the authors
Dawn Gilmore
Dawn Gilmore has over 15 years of practice and research in teaching and learning in higher education. She has worked in institutions in the United States, Australia, Japan, England, China, and most recently South Africa. She has a M.S.Ed. in Intercultural Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S.Ed. in Social Sciences from Temple University. Her Ph.D. research explored where and with whom university students experience learning. During her doctoral candidature she was a Visiting Scholar at in the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Development at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), where she researched the role of communities of practices in a Post Graduate Diploma of Higher Education. Overall, her research seeks to understand how students’ learning is situated across time and spaces. She also has broader interests in learning, community, and technology. Dawn is currently writing a book that is largely based on the content from this presentation.
Future happens: Hack your way to influencing and changing pedagogical and technological strategy and practice
Experimental session
Peter Bryant
London School of Economics and Political Science
@peterbryantHE
Catch this session
Monday 4 December, 3.30pm - 4.30pm
Stream 4
Room L209
Abstract
Using the changehack approach successfully run in the UK for the last two years by Future Happens (http://www.futurehappens.org - a collaboration between two leading UK institutions, the London School of Economics and the University of the Arts, London), this experimental session is designed to collectively engage participants in changing the discourses around the role of technology in shaping institutional/faculty wide pedagogical change. This lightning changehack will generate approaches to scaling and sustaining the lessons and innovations that arise from grassroots practice into approaches that can be included in strategic thinking across disciplines, levels, cohorts and potentially across the whole institution.
This workshop will challenge you to think about the ways you are able to influence your institutions strategic direction and commitments to technology and learning and be a part of the conversation that shapes how they do it. Attendees will participate in a collective hack that draws on the power of the crowd to solve problems. Previous Future Happens hacks in the UK have collectively generated insightful, useful and pragmatic ways to bridge the discourses between the practices of learning technology and how they can be scaled up to be part of the institutional, faculty or School wide strategic approach to innovative pedagogy. Attendees will collectively own the outputs which will be shared globally as part of the Future Happens movement.
About the authors
Peter Bryant
Peter Bryant is the Head of Learning Technology and Innovation at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He leads programmes and initiatives to transform the educational experience at the LSE through the innovative use of technology and digital pedagogies. His team recently was the Overall Gold Award for Innovative Pedagogy at the Wharton-QS Stars Reimagine Education awards. He was previously a Principal Lecturer in Educational Technology and Development at the University of Greenwich. Peter has over twenty years’ experience as a lecturer, Head of Department and curriculum designer, working into two countries (in HE and VET). He is an active researcher in both educational technology and pedagogy. Peter is the co-founder of the Future Happens initiative which uses innovative approaches to problem-solving and change management to engage the wider sector in debates around technology, pedagogy and the future of the University.
Star Gazing
ASCILITE 2017 provides you and your family with the opportunity to be an amateur astronomer for the night!
Internationally-renowned astrobiologist and astronomer Associate Professor Jonti Horner and the Astronomy Outreach Team from the University of Southern Queensland will take you on a cosmic journey of our Solar system and beyond.
Jonti will share his knowledge of the birth of the solar system to modern day astronomical events, a tale of violence and destruction, featuring craters, comets, and even the death of the dinosaurs!
The USQ Astronomy Team will then help you to find some of the famous constellations in the night sky using both naked eye observation and telescopes, and answer any questions you might have about astronomy and our place in the Universe.
The agenda for the evening will be:
- 6.00 – 7.00: Talk in R113
- 7.00 – 7.30pm: Refreshment break and walk to Gumbi Gumbi gardens
- 7.30 – 8.30: Star viewing
This event is open to all ASCILITE delegates and their families.
Registration is free but places are limited! Register now!
Date: Monday 4 December 2017
Time: 6pm – 8.30pm
Venue: R Block Room 113 (and the Gumbi Gubmi Gardens)
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Schools Night
As part of ASCILITE 2017, USQ is hosting a Schools Night so that primary and secondary educators and administrators can participate in the edtech showcase featuring some of Australia’s leading edtech designers and companies.
The night will feature ASCILITE 2017 keynote speaker Marita Cheng.
The Gender Divide
Marita Cheng, 2012 Young Australian of the Year, will share the leadership skills, creativity and steadfastness that it took for her to start Robogals and grow it to chapters in Australia, the UK, USA and Japan, all while studying full-time at University. Robogals teaches young girls robotics as a way to encourage participation in engineering and technology careers, and has taught 60,000 girls in 10 countries.
Educators and administrators interested in using educational technologies to impact the digital literacies of their students and provide a coherent transition from secondary school to university.
Primary and secondary teachers and administrations, we’d love to see you there!
Registration is free but places are limited!
About Marita Cheng
Marita Cheng was the 2012 Young Australian of the Year and is a technology entrepreneur and women in technology advocate. Marita Cheng is the founder and CEO of aubot (formerly 2Mar Robotics), which makes a telepresence robot, Teleport, for kids with cancer in hospital to attend school, people with a disability to attend work and to monitor and socialise with elderly people. As well as telepresence robots, Aubot does research and development in robotic arms, virtual reality and autonomous mapping and navigation.
Aubot has been recognised on a global scale through the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2016, and through being called “the coolest girl at CES 2014” by VentureBeat magazine. Marita has presented about Teleport at the M.A.P. International CEO Conference in the Philippines in 2016, MIT Technology Review EmTech Singapore in 2015, and the 2014 World Entrepreneurship Forum in Lyon France.
While studying at Singularity University’s flagship 10-week program, the Graduate Studies Program, located at NASA Ames and on a full scholarship funded by Google, Marita cofounded Aipoly with Alberto Rizzoli. Profiled in TechCrunch within a week of the first prototype being made, Aipoly allows blind people to recognise objects using computer vision and has been downloaded 250,000 times in 7 languages since its launch at CES 2016.
Marita was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year for demonstrating vision and leadership well beyond her years as the Founder and Executive Director of Robogals Global. Noticing the low number of girls in her engineering classes at the University of Melbourne, Marita rounded up her fellow engineering peers and they went to schools to teach girls robotics, as a way to encourage girls into engineering. While on academic exchange at Imperial College London, Marita expanded the group to London and through innovation and sheer will, Marita then expanded Robogals throughout Australia, the UK, the USA and Japan. The group runs robotics workshops, career talks and various other community activities to introduce young women to engineering.
Robogals has now taught 70,000 girls from 11 countries robotics workshops across 32 chapters. Robogals has been internationally recognised though the Global Engineering Deans Council Diversity in Engineering Award (2014), Grace Hopper Celebration’s Anita Borg Change Agent Award (2011), and the International Youth Foundation’s YouthActionNet Fellowship (2011).
Marita regularly travels around Australia presenting her work including appearing on Q&A on ABC beside two Nobel Laureates and the Chief Scientist of Australia (TV audience 600,000), and alongside Ashton Kutcher at Lenovo’s #TechMyWay (online audience 35,000). As well, she has presented overseas at Foxconn’s H.Spectrum by Yonglin Healthcare Startup Conference in Taiwan (2016), the 37th Kumon Japan Instructors Conference in Japan (2016), the World Engineering Education Forum in Dubai (2014), and the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts’ World Conference in Hong Kong (2014).
Marita was born in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. She grew up in housing commission with her brother and single-parent mother, who worked as a hotel room cleaner. She graduated from high school in 2006 in the top 0.2% of the nation, and that year was awarded Cairns Young Citizen of the Year for her volunteering and extra-curricula efforts, which included winning awards for mathematics, Japanese and piano. Marita speaks English, Cantonese and Japanese.
Marita has a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechatronics) / Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Melbourne. She serves on the boards of Robogals Global, the Foundation for Young Australians, and RMIT’s New Enterprise Investment Fund, where she helps decide on startup investments, the Victorian State Innovation Expert Panel, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s Tech Advisory Board. In her spare time, Marita enjoys reading, travelling and daydreaming.
Date: Monday 4 December 2017
Time: 6pm – 7.30pm
Venue: R Block Refectory
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