Join Blackboard at ASCILITE 2017
ASCILITE 2017 is just around the corner. As the premier gathering of Australian and International researchers, managers and educators, this annual conference is always meaningful for us. But this year, it’s even more special as Blackboard is celebrating our 20th anniversary – that’s two decades of partnering with you, our clients, to help solve your toughest challenges. We are committed to being your partner in change and we are excited to be sponsoring ASCILITE again this year. For those who are headed to Toowoomba, we’ve put together a roundup of the most important Blackboard activities taking place during the conference. Don’t forget to follow us for news and announcements during the event on Twitter at @BlackboardAPAC. And to be a part of the larger ASCILITE conversation, follow #Ascilite2017. We’re excited to see you there!
Don’t-miss sessions
Developing a technology enhanced learning framework to gain a snapshot of institutional successes and challenges
Associate Professor Michael Sankey (Western Sydney University), Dr Caroline Steel (Blackboard), Mark Bailye (Blackboard)
Tuesday 5 December, 11.40am – 12pm
Stream 2 | Room R113
Exploratory panel: Privacy, trust, student data, and the university
Barney Dalgarno (chair), Jasmine Thomas (UNSW), Kate Young, Dr Kirsty Kitto (UTS), Allan Christie (Blackboard)
Tuesday 5 December, 1.30pm – 3pm
Room H102 Allison Dickson Lecture Theatre
Meet the Blackboard team
Stop by the Blackboard Booth (#5) for demos, product insights and giveaways. Take part in our ASCILITE Twitter Competition for a chance to win the latest Apple Watch Series 3.0!
Dine Around for ASCILITE 2017
Monday night in Toowoomba is usually the quietest night of the week, but that will not be the case this year as this is the chance for all ASCILITE delegates to hit the town and make merry with friends old and new.
We have compiled a list of some of the iconic establishments in the CBD and around the City Golf Club giving you a range of cuisines, prices and timings with an aim of meeting all tastes. Dine Around options will give you the chance to wine and dine with a group of friends/delegates with a common interest (think about the ASCILITE SIGs, or Mentor/Mentee meetings), for first timers to meet the faces behind your favourite paper, or even put some faces to those Tweets.
On the conference website we have provided details of all the restaurants and will have sign up sheets available at the registration desk. Start thinking now about who you would like to dine with, and where you would like to go. Of course, there is no obligation for you to dine at any of these establishments but we do recommend all of these.
However, we understand if there are some difficult choices ahead, given your options and the fantastic location of the conference dinner. You might like to visit other places on the list during the week. Other options for casual dining - particularly over the weekend -are the newly-completed café and restaurant precinct of Grand Central Shopping Centre, and the cafes and eateries at Waltons Stores.
We are looking forward to a chance to chat, reminisce, and make new memories with friends old and new. Start making your plans today because there are less than twenty sleeps until the conference (a thought either exhilarating or terrifying - depending on whether you are on the organising committee, or an attendee).
Where to go for breakfast in Toowoomba
You will be spoilt for choice if you venture outside your hotel and explore some of the breakfast options Toowoomba has to offer. We've done the hard work of whittling the list down for you. If you find a place for the ultimate breakfast experience, be sure to share it via Twitter - don't keep the best spots for yourself! Each location has a Google Map embedded in the address.
Ortem
15 Railway Street
7:00am – 3:30pm
Ortem is situated in an old ball bearing factory and has a cool, industrial vibe. Delicious food and drinks are served indoors and out, with street-side seating overlooking the heritage-listed railway station. Breakfast items include smashed avo, croissant French toast and the brekky bagel made with a Bagel Boys bagel, bacon, soft scrambled egg, guacamole and béarnaise sauce.
Park House Café
92 Margaret Street
6:00am-9:30pm
Park House Café is a staple on the Toowoomba dining scene and has the enviable location of being directly opposite Queens Park. All produce is sourced fresh from local farms on the Darling Downs and in the Lockyer Valley. Breakfast is available all day and includes sweet coconut bread with honeycomb butter, waffles with maple syrup and ice cream and spinach and feta hotcakes. Or, if you’re feeling especially hungry, the Park House Breakfast is one of the biggest in town.
The Finch
Shop 2, 469-473 Ruthven St
6:30am-3:00pm
The Finch provides real food on the fly and are known for their Bahn Mi rolls. Breakfast is served all day with the early bird deal of a ham and cheese croissant with regular coffee a favourite for $10 (available until 9:00am daily). Gluten free and vegetarian options are available, such as roasted Goombungee mushrooms with garlic, thyme, feta and a poached egg on sourdough and 100g Angus beef fillet with bacon, hash brown, pork sausage and poached eggs with house tomato and onion relish. For something different, try the shakshuka – a Moroccan spice infused baked egg.
There you have it; your guide to breakfast in Toowoomba. Many of you though will be asking 'what about coffee?', and we'll address that in the very next post, so stay tuned to stay caffeinated.
Early birds and worms
Public Domain image from www.pixabay.com
They do say early bird catches the worms! If you register before 30 October 2017, you can still catch the reduced fees.
Catching the early bird rate will ensure you don't miss out on any of our three fantastic keynotes.
Professor James Arvanitakis will tackle the persistent state of 'getting it wrong' that universities inhabit; and the tension between pedagogy and technology. Can there peaceful co-existence between the two?
Marita Cheng will provide insight to a robotics-driven future. This is not the science fiction of I, Robot, but a looming reality. Responses from higher education will be critical, and Marita explores how to create future-ready graduates.
Amber Case will look at the way the world is made of information that competes for our attention. She'll tackle questions like:
- How does it affect us as individuals?
- Does it help us learn or does it get in the way?
- What are the implications for the way we learn and teach in tertiary education?
- How does technology help us engage with community?
What do you think? Join your flock of peers at ASCILITE 2017, 4 – 6 December 2017 on the University of Southern Queensland's Toowoomba Campus.
Register now! Early bird closes 30 October 2017 so you've only got one week to go!
Spring’s here, and so is ASCILITE 2017 early bird registration
Public Domain image sourced from www.pixabay.com
Spring is here - at least for us down under in Australia! It's a time for renewal and the dreaded 'spring cleaning'. You might have started on your house or yard, but have you done a 'spring clean' of your professional learning closet yet?
Have you hung up the new curtains of learning and knowledge? Have you considered a new dietary requirement for your minds, hearts and/or for actions?
Don’t forget to make ASCILITE 2017 a part of your learning rejuvenation this spring! This year’s conference will be held at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland - the Garden City of Australia.
We have exciting keynote speakers lined up to nourish your mind and whet your appetite each morning, as you move on to the buffet of each stream. Not only do we have interesting and thought provoking papers, you will also get to connect with other like-minded peers and colleagues and network at a number of social events.
In the spirit of change, and renewal, perhaps it is time to consider registration to ASCILITE 2017 and look for fresh perspectives to fold into your practice.
Remember that the early bird registration offer only lasts for just under two weeks (until 23 October)!
Two weeks to go! Submissions closing 5 June
As the extended due date for ASCILITE 2017 submissions draws nearer, I asked one of my colleagues, Henk Huijser, an educational developer at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in the People's Republic of China, why he keeps coming back to ASCILITE each year. Here's what he had to say.
ASCILITE has developed into the main educational technology and blended learning conference in Australasia over the years, and it has also developed into one of the most social of conferences.
These are the two main reasons why I always want to attend ASCILITE whenever I can. Not only are the key figures in blended and technology enhanced learning and teaching usually at this conference, and you can get details on the main trends, but it is also a great conference to present at, as there is a real ‘community of practice’ feel to it. In other words, the content is broad enough to be inclusive of many researchers’ and practitioners’ interests, but not too broad to become too unfocused. This is further helped by the yearly theme of the conference.
The social element is partly due to the timing of the conference, and the organisers usually put a lot of effort into this. The conference is always in early December, when most of the attendees are winding down towards the end of the year. This affects the atmosphere at the conference and everyone tends to be up for a good time and ready to have a bit of fun, which is important and usually makes it a memorable conference.
In short, if there is one conference to choose from the many available, then ASCILITE is an excellent choice, both for professional and social reasons.
The ASCILITE 2017 call for participation closes on Monday 5 June 2017. You've got two weeks to get your submission in! Check out the call for participation for all the details.
Opening up ASCILITE: a call to action
I’m involved in in what I would call a deeply enviable space for learning and teaching.
Open education, whilst certainly not a new concept, is starting to gain traction across the Australian and New Zealand higher education sectors (to varying degrees), and the attention it receives makes for interesting and exciting times. There are big issues that challenge practitioners such as institutional and national policy, the business case for open education, promoting and rewarding open educational practice, and even finding ways to recognise that many educators are already teaching openly. The possibilities for collaboration – both nationally and internationally – are extremely promising, and the potential impact on Australian students is positive. Reduced costs that lower barriers to education, better access to resources, more flexible pathways for study and recognition of prior learning, and opportunities to be engaged as co-creators of knowledge are all achievable in an open environment.
However, when we discuss openness, the most common foci are textbooks and learning resources. Why? Perhaps it is because replacing the textbook in a course with an open counterpart can be relatively simple. Repositories exist purely for the purpose of disseminating free and open texts. There is a defined cost associated with publisher texts, and it is easy to demonstrate student savings. Learning resources are already created for courses, and most universities have a repository for Learning Objects. Again, it can be an easy discussion.
The harder side of openness is practice, not resources, and as John F. Kennedy said ‘we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard’. Recent workshops at the University of Southern Queensland led to very interesting debate on the value of resources for learning and teaching for the contemporary university. Are resources why students engage with a university? Do they select a higher education institution for the quality of the resources? Or is it perhaps something else?
The workshop conversation spent a lot of time on the notion that it is interaction and engagement – not resources – that represent the best value proposition for the student. The chance to interact with lecturers and peers, to receive feedback, and to be credentialed; these were perceived as valuable.
It makes me think that conferences are not that much different.
ASCILITE, like other conferences, is dependent on content for the schedule (and we’re still taking submissions), but is that where the true value of a conference lies? Or, as a previous post stated, is it about the connections, the discussion, the open sharing of ideas? Is it about testing or reporting your idea through a session and then engaging in questioning and discussions? Perhaps the value of the conference lies in the quality of the coffee?
In previous years, ASCILITE has openly licenced the conference proceedings and made them freely available to world. We’ll continue that tradition this year. One opportunity though, is for open streams for the conference, and the opportunity for open practitioners to gather, discuss and disseminate open education initiatives from across the sector. Openness – like learning and teaching – benefits from a community, and I’d like to see more papers and presentations this year about open education in our region.
It may be your chance to test an idea, meet new collaborators, and make that idea just a little bit bigger.
Like I said at the beginning – it’s a deeply enviable space.
Why I go to the ASCILITE conference
Each year from October onwards, I start getting excited about the ASCILITE conference happening late November or early December. This is a place where I can get together with my tribe, lament the institutional politics and hang with a group who are grappling with the same challenges that I am. Sometimes it’s a reality check: seeing where other institutions are up to, what other people at my level are doing, and catching up with what’s what in the sector.
I’ve been going for the last seven or eight years and the regulars have now become my friends. I look forward to catching up with those people who are working in a similar field to me. What have you found? What have you done? And wow, that’s so cool; maybe we should collaborate on that! The conference dinner is a way to let of some steam and embrace another identity through fancy dress. I’ve noticed that the dance floor fills early and stays full to the very end. Blue hair (Dunedin), pink feathers (Adelaide), and pointed ears (Wellington): this is how I’m remembered.
Beyond the social aspects, it’s a great way to present my research. The world of educational technology moves so fast that it can be too long a time from conceptualising a project, implementing it and collecting the data, to writing it up in an academic journal. And that’s just to get it to a journal. From there it goes out to peer review, changes made and so on. Presenting at the ASCILITE conference allows me to get my research out there faster. It also gives my colleagues a chance to look at what I’m doing, give me some great suggestions, and stop me from heading down some unproductive rabbit holes. These are also the people who will celebrate my wins!
There’s no doubt that seeing what else is happening in ed tech in the sector is worth the price of admission. This is how you see what’s going on, get new ideas, blah, blah, blah. But for me, the most important aspect of the conference is the networking. I’m now doing a funded project with someone I met at the Dunedin conference. I’m co-editing a special issue of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) with someone I only catch up with in person, once a year. (‘Sure,’ I said over a glass of wine: ‘how hard can that be!’) The person I write with most is someone I met at the conference (well her and about 45 of her closest friends!). The real value lies in who’s there with you.
So, please do think about coming along and please do come and introduce yourself to me. We could become co-authors, collaborators or just someone to chew the fat with once a year! There’s a nice vibe, a friendly atmosphere and always some laughs to be had.
There's no better way to get institutional support for your ASCILITE attendance than getting a paper on the program. Check out the call for participation or make your submission now!
