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St Mary’s Anglican Girls’ School professional development day.
Perth, 2 May 2011.

Presentation: Keeping up. Educating the mobile learner (pdf, 8.8 MB)

Mobile devices are seemingly ubiquitous in contemporary society. Today’s youth are using these devices, coupled with their access to social media, to share experiences, observations, and discoveries. his presentation argues that students are already mobile and that we need to harness this ‘natural mobility’ in the service of education. The paper covers topics such as current trends in electronic media usage in Australia, the basics of mobile learning, examples of use, pedagogy and challenges, and digital literacy.

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WADHSAA (Western Australian District High School Administrators’ Association) 2010 State Conference.
Thinking Globally – Doing Locally: Classrooms for the future – Digital reality, Perth, 2 – 4 June 2010.

Presentation: Classrooms of the future. (Various media, presentation unavailable.)

This talk was delivered via a Skype connection between Canberra and Perth. Pre-recorded VoiceThreads were inserted into the presentation, allowing for a dynamic discussion of the issues, which included current trends in education and technology, to digital literacy and digital participation, to risk management.

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AHISA (Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia) Pastoral Care Conference.
Pastoral Care: the heart of Australia – Challenges and Solutions, Alice Springs, 29 March – 1 April 2010.

Keynote: Social Networking for Social Participation (pdf, 8.3 MB)

Access to technology is more than about access to PCs. This keynote describes issues related to the ‘digital divide’ and argues that meaningful, ethical participation in online culture is already becoming a key to success — and is already sorting out the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’. Drawing on examples of online mentoring and outreach programs, I show that those involved in pastoral can make a difference to the lives of young people by guaranteeing everyone’s right to contribute to the collective imagination.

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ACT Department of Education and Training, New Educator Support Program, Canberra, 3 and 5 March 2010.

Keynote: New learning: curriculum, literacy and participatory cultures (pdf, 8.2 MB)

The industrial model of schooling is being challenged by the advent of digital technologies. This talk suggests that we need new learning for new times and explores the benefits and challenges that participatory culture presents to current curricula, and education in general. The key to ethical engagement with online culture technologies will be digitally literate students — which inevitably means that we need to be digitally literate, too.

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Upcoming: COACTEA (The Council of ACT Education Associations) Conference, Canberra, date TBC.

Workshop: Creative learning environments: Empowering teachers and learners with the Social Web

In the age of the Social Web (Web 2.0/3.0), virtual learning environments empower teachers and learners to open their classrooms and be part of emerging folksonomies — the social construction of learning. Teachers and learners alike are now using ICT very differently from one another and ever more creatively. This talk will explore

• How schools cope with the potential of collaborative knowledge building
• What is the essence of learner control (empowerment of the learner) for different age groups, disciplines and learning environments
• How new learning solutions (open content, open source software, social networking and social software tools) are introducing innovative experiences and how they facilitate learning as a creative process
• What key competencies are needed to be an active lifelong learner in the 21st century
• What is the emerging role of the school teacher in the new paradigm of School 2.0

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AHISA (Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia) Biennial Conference, 13 – 15 September 2009.

Mini-keynote: Digital literacy: Human flourishing and education in a new knowledge space (PowerPoint pdf, 7.3 MB, speaking version)

Digital literacy: Human flourishing and education in a new knowledge space (Word pdf, 152 KB, prose version)

How is digital literacy important to human flourishing? With so many students today using online tools such as MySpace, blogs, iTunes and instant messaging, what are the implications for school leaders in exploiting these communication and collaboration instruments for their educative value? Using Pierre Lévy’s work on collective intelligence to set the scene, this paper explores the types of digital literacies both staff and students will need to develop if we are to make the most of new technologies as humanity emerges into a new ‘knowledge space’. At a time when many of us fear that the digital age is taking the whole human person out of the teaching and learning nexus, I argue that we have a responsibility to embrace these tools and to use them as confederates in helping us follow what Paulo Freire famously called our ‘ontological vocation’ to become more fully human.

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Moodleposium, University of Canberra, 7-8 September 2009.

Presentation: Managing Risk on the Web (pdf, 8.2 MB)

One way to innovate current courses is through the appropriate use of externally hosted ‘Web 2.0′ online services as part of a course’s teaching and learning activity. These services are generally, free, flexible, customisable, and community-oriented. Even more importantly, however, from an educational standpoint these tools, through their social nature, can easily support educationally proven, soundly constructivist pedagogies. This is an exciting time for education, and the development of Web 2.0 services, tools and applications is beginning to make constructivist educational experiences more of a reality for a mass education market. However, there are concerns that innovation that involves the uninformed and/or inappropriate use of externally hosted services may expose the University, its staff, or students to reputational and other risks, to legal liability, and to other such nasties that we would rather avoid. This presentation explores safe, responsible and sustainable ways for staff to engage with externally hosted service providers with the aim of keeping  everyone as safe as possible online.

Presentation to be added shortly

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The Next G Web. Discernment and meaning-making and the implications for education.

Unpublished paper. (pdf, 228 KB)

The Next Generation of the Web – ‘Web 3.0’as it is generally known these days – will be here in a few years’ time. But what will it mean for education, and especially for education as an intellectual and philosophical endeavour where we seek to critique the world and understand our place in it? This paper I argue that current notions of the Next G Web have the potential to profoundly disrupt the educational enterprise (both as practice and intellectual endeavour) if those notions are sustained, and I suggest that we must start reflecting more closely on what it means to teach and to think, and on how those things relate to each other. I present a brief history and description of the Next G Web, before providing an analysis of the two dominant scenarios in the Next G Web educational literature: the ‘Adminstrative Scenario,’ and the ‘Pedagogical Scenario.’ My main point is that the role of the teacher must remain (or more obviously become) one of discernment – on the part of both teacher and student – for it is discernment that underlies the uniquely human ability to create meaning and thus make sense of the world. Finally, I present an alternative scenario, the ‘Education Scenario,’ before asserting the need for education to take a political stance on the issues raised earlier in the paper.

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ANZTLA(Australian and New Zealand Theological Library Association), National Library, Canberra, 10 July 2009.

Presentation: Net Gen Information Behaviour.

Abstract and presentation to be added shortly

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ACT Department of Education and Training, Canberra, 9 February 2009.

Keynote: Net Gen Life, Learning and Literacy. (pdf, 4.4 MB).

Given as part of the Australian Government Quality Teacher Program for the ICT Master Class. This presentation explores some of the expectations and experiences that ‘Net Gen’ learners are bringing with them to school. The talk also covers the areas in which teachers need to be more explicit about how to talk about how ICT should be used for teaching and learning.

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The Canberra College and the Australian Business and Community Network, Canberra, 31 July 2008.

Presentation: Work in the Information Age. (pdf, 2.7 MB).

Produced for the 10 Faces, 10 Stories project, this presentation explores how employees learn and the forces for change in the workplace. I also touch upon the future of work and the literacies required in the Information Age. The needs of the global economy are dicsussed before some tips are provided for students and mentors engaged in a blogging assignment for the project.

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edna and me workshop tour, Canberra, 11 April 2008.

Keynote: Framing your digital footprint. (pdf, 2.7 MB).

This keynote provides an overview of the paths Australian educators are travelling online, and the issues they face in their personal and professional learning journeys. The presentation considers what impact read-write culture is having on educators, and how they are sharing creative content, commenting, reviewing, rating and learning from each other online. What is your digital learning footprint and where are you headed?

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ANU Tutoring@ANU in 2008, The Australian National University, Canberra, 22 February 2008.

Presentation: Incoming! Who will be on campus this year? (pdf, 1.7 MB).

This presentation consolidates some of the recent research reports on beginning students’ online behaviour and expectations, and raises questions about ICT proficiency and literacy. I show that we, as tutors and demonstrators, also need to have good ICT literacy skills if we are to systematically teach ourstudents to use online technologies well in the higher ed environment.

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Creating Balance, ACT Colleges Professional Development Conference, Canberra, 31 January 2008.

Keynote: Balancing the Net Generation. (pdf, 2.3 MB).

In this keynote, I show that the ‘Web 2.0’ technologies that allow for greater communication, collaboration and content creation are changing our students’ experiences of learning whether we like it or not. I explore the dangers involved both in uncritically embracing the new technologies and in ignoring their power to improve the way we engage and teach our students. To this end, I argue that we must never lose sight of our tranformational power as teachers: we have the ability – and the reponsibility – to connect with and raise the critical consciousness of our students.

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Creating Balance. ACT Colleges Professional Development Conference, 31 January 2008.

Workshop: Creating balance through creative use of technology in teaching. (pdf, 1.4 MB)

Podcasts, wikis, blogs: not only recent additions to the English language, but also to our repertoire of teaching methods. This workshop introduces some of the basics of creating podcasts, wikis and blogs with students. The main idea is to help teachers think about how to use freely available technologies to enhance what they are already doing at school.

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NAGCAS (National Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services) Conference, 2-5 December 2007.

Workshop: Employing Technology: Harnessing ‘Web 2.0′ Technologies for Career Development Learning. (pdf, 268 KB)

This presentation introduces graduate careers advisers to some of the basics of creating podcasts, wikis and blogs both with and for their students. In particular, I explore some quick and easy ways of using Web 2.0 technologies to engage with students’ career aspirations more meaningfully – that is, in ways that hook into their everyday experiences and that build on their current
knowledge.

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College of Science Coursework Committee/Teaching Forum, Creative Pedagogies: the opportunities of Web 2.0. The Australian National University, Canberra, 15 October 2007.

Paper: What is Web 2.0 and Who Are the ‘Digital Natives’? (pdf, 3.3 MB)

This presentation consolidates much of the research on Web 2.0 and its potential impact on education. The aim is to characterise the ‘Digital Native’ demographic and to raise awareness of what students might need in terms of future learning on campus.

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HERDSA (Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia) Conference, Adelaide, 8-11 July 2007.

Paper: Powering on with Podcasting. (pdf, 2.5 MB)

In this paper, I argue that it’s time for higher ed to ‘get with the program’ and to start thinking about how Web 2.0 technologies can best be used in our teaching – that is, how this tech can best be deployed in a practical, yet pedagogically sound and theoretically informed, way so that the whole student experience is enhanced.

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Academic Skills and Learning Development Group, Canberra, 11 April 2007.

Paper: Academic Skills Advising and the moral purpose of education.

This paper explores the fundamental tension between the basic purpose of education (that is, to raise the critical consciousness of students so that they become aware of their own subjectivity) and what it is that we do as academic skills advisers (that is, to ‘domesticate’ students into doing things ‘the right way’ so that they can pass their courses).

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First Global Value of Knowledge Conference, Sydney, 2007.

Paper: Human flourishing and education in a market society. (pdf, 193 KB)

In this paper, I argue that the humane and humanising endeavour of education is fast suffocating at the hands of technicist, scientistic understandings of what it means to educate. The paper further argues that such a focus leads to a ‘quasi-deontic’ interpretation of the purpose of education – an interpretation that prepares students to meet the needs of a market society rather than the needs of the total person.