Snurb's blog

I'm glad there's finally an official statement about this: along with a number of other Australian universities, and with commercial and government partners, QUT is a participant in a high-profile new Cooperative Research Centre which will get started from mid-year. The Smart Services CRC follows on from the successful Smart Internet CRC which was based at Swinburne University (and which had already run a Smart Services forum recently). Along with a number of my colleagues from Creative Industries, I'll be involved in this in some capacity...

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The last presentation here at ICE 3 is a group act by Bruce Ingraham, Gráinne Conole, Chris Jones, and George Roberts, who have also set up a group blog in preparation for this talk, which some of us have already contributed to. Their focus is especially on scholarly communication through new media environments - and they begin by noting that unfortunately few ICErs did respond to their original blog-based challenge, which in itself provides some insight on the extent to which scholarly discourses have changed so far. Why is this so - are the topics available too dull; is there too little time available to participate in such environments; or are emerging new media not suited to scholarly discourse (which could also mean that scholarly discourse is unsuited to the modern world, however). If we are not professing our disciplines to one another using such new media environments, however, how can we enocurage our students to do so? If we do not do so, then who will - the people formerly known as students?

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The next speakers here at ICE 3 are Leah Macfadyen and Anne Hewling, presenting on their experiences with a University of British Columbia online course in global citizenship, which they developed from scratch. Aims of the course were for students to develop an understanding of the concept of global citizenship, as well as ultimately to consider the impact they might have as global citizens within local, national, and international communities. Students within this (elective) course come from a very brad range of disciplinary backgrounds (and in fact also from the universities of Hong Kong and Melbourne, who were remote partners in the project).

Ross Priory, Scotland.
It's a clear but frosty morning here in Scotland - for the first time in some 14 years, I've had to scrape ice off the windshield of my car today... We've reached the last day of ICE 3, and I'll be the first speaker, presenting on the implications, for the field of education, of the move from production to produsage (full paper here). I'll try to record the talk as well, and if all works out I'll post it up here some time soon the recording is below as well as here. For now, here is my Powerpoint... I must also apologise to Debra Ferreday and Vivien Hodgson for not blogging their talk - my laptop was in use to run the presentation.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Maggi Savin-Baden and Christine Sinclair (as well as their Second Life avatars Christine Sanders and Second Wind) are the last presenters at ICE 3 for today (full paper here). Both are students in the MSc in e-learning at the University of Edinburgh, which in part focusses on the use of digital game-based learning environments. They begin by describing their journeys into this degree, which were motivated for them as academic professionals in part by an interest in learning about what it means to be a student in the present university environment, and an interest in exploring possibilities for e-learning which were not covered by WebCT and other standard solutions.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
As we approach the end of the second day at ICE 3, Karim Remtulla is the next speaker (full paper here). He is particularly interested in how e-learning connects with the realities of the workplace (both in terms of the experiences of recent graduates in transitioning to the workplace, and those of employees coming back to university for further education). Karim notes that the projections for e-learning are promising - it is now a US$300 billion market globally, while the World Bank's education portfolio stands at US$8.5 billion, and covers 86 countries. The dominant point of view on e-learning is that it is simply a process of learning from information which is delivered electronically, leaving us as learners to identify relevant information and convert it into meaningful and applicable knowledge - but this may be a highly questionable definition.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The next presenters at ICE 3 are Michael Begg, Rachel Ellaway, David Dewhurst, and Hamish MacLeod. They describe themselves as educational informaticians, and note that the idea of learning design has been somewhat diluted by the ubiquity of online teaching spaces. Instead, this group focus on proximal development - experimentation with spaces which are in a constant state of development and often sit at something of a distance from the institutions around them.

The problem here is Web2.0: the variety of definitions which exist; and the lack of clarity about its standards. Why do institutions say they like it, yet do so little about it? Who is implementing it in an educational context, and who owns it? What is the origin of the claims that it is going to make things better? What makes us "us" and the institution "them" - and is Web2.0 for us or for them (or for the students)?

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Up next here at ICE 3 are Debbie Holley and Martin Oliver. They begin by highlighting the notion of the digital divide, which appears to be based on a notion that media access is inherently a good thing: if the digital divide problem is solved by providing access for all, then society will be better off. This question of access is positioned as the basic issue, but is ultimately only a superficial one - behond this, there are also divides in relation to people's skills and literacies, to their levels of motivation to exercise their skills (they may have skills, but choose not to use tem), and further, there is a divide between what are seen as 'normal' high technology uses on the one hand, and disruptive effects of complex technologies on the other.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The last ICE 3 speaker before lunch is Andrew Ravenscroft. He begins by discussing some of the traditional conceptualisations of cyberspace, such as the descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer, which saw cyberspace as a distinct space which one would enter; The Matrix is perhaps the most prominent visualisation of this idea (and Andrew shows a very funny Muppet version of the Matrix trailer which can be found on YouTube).

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Cate Thomas is the next presenter here at ICE 3. She begins by describing the online world as an uncanny space where there is a ghost in the machine; the academy as it moves further online then also becomes a haunted university where radical uncertainty persists. How are academic staff constituted in this digital university, then?

Cate suggests that academics are already in crisis today; their traditional authority has been undermined, much as the crisis of the author in the postmodern environment has also undermined authorship. Additionally, there is a tendency towards disembodiment of the academic subject, which means that their electronic self increasingly begins to constitute the day-to-day presence of the contemporary academic. Their real-life presence, in turn, comes to be reconstituted by the electronic persona; the online world rewrites real life in that sense.