ascilite 2006 conference podcasts

Carole Hunter, Lynn Flynn and Janet Bucan are educational designers and learning media coordinators from Charles Sturt University. They joined Allan Carrington a learning designer from the University of Adelaide to become the ASCILITE2006 Podcast Team.

Little did any of them realize what an enriching personal experience the podcasting project would be. At the end of the conference they sat down to do yet another podcast episode but this time it was different. It was a personal sharing of reflections on the experience.

This honest and frank episode looks at such things as:

• Why did four educators volunteer to work 16 hours a day for 5 days straight?
• Why were they willing to leave their comfort zones and become educational journalists … with no prior training?
• What did they learn?
• What did this project mean to each of them?
• Where did all the passion come from?
• How come podcasting helped them put all the puzzle pieces together?
• How do you increase the number of people that will listen to these podcasts?
• How do you use these podcasts to increase the knowledge inheritance from educational conferences?
• How can they do a better job of podcasting future conferences?

Please add your comments here and we invite you to subscribe to these podcasts and experience some of the passion and knowledge construction from this great conference.

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Coralie McCormack and Mary Jane Taylor from Canberra University discuss assessment and feedback in online learning and teaching in a graphics course. In this course they started with the reality that assessment should drive learning. They studied feedback and how difficult it was to adhere to the principles on feedback. They are using oral recording of feedback and delivered as audio files

In this episode they talk about how to find better ways for feedback. They tried using audio feedback between two teachers in a sort of panel and sending as an audio file to the students by email. What they found is explained in the podcast … some of it was a bit of a surprise. How the students considered tone in audio and how audio helped visualisation in the students was extremely interesting and empowering.

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Michael Christie of the Centre for Digital Media and Higher Education at
Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden is a historian and his background is in multicultural studies and he left Australia and became a migrant in Sweden so he has first hand experience on the challenges of cross cultural learning and teaching. Michael shares about his experiences in Sweden about highly qualified people who have to work in different fields because of the difficulties of recognition of prior learning.

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Anne Forster, President of ODLAA (Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia), University of Sydney, reflects on the ASCILITE experience for 2006 from her perspective as President of ODLAA, on what in particular she has gained and what she can share with her colleagues. Listen to this podcast and hear Anne’s reflections on our common concerns on;

• the emerging ways of using technologies,
• where our students are coming from,
• building academics skills and building student literacy’s to cope with the new  environments

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Want to hear all about the benefits of the latest incarnation of audiographic tools? Well you have certainly come to the right podcast! Stephen Rowe discusses his and his co-authors, (Allan Ellis and Tran Quoc Bao) longitudinal case study into the use of audiographics in the Faculty of Business at Southern Cross University.

Stephen talks about the lessons learnt in his sometimes painful journey to where he is today – expounding the advances, uses and potential of the collaborative or Web conferencing software – Elluminate Live! Listen to this podcast and you may well find yourself exploring the Elluminate Live website to find out what this second generation audiographics tool can do for you! Be warned Stephen’s enthusiasm is infectious!

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The Best Research Paper prize winners were announced at the completion of the conference. The paper, “Going with the grain: Mobile devices in practice”, – John Pettit and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme of the Open University in the UK, was nominated by the reviewers as the overall winner.

What makes a great research paper? Have a listen to the podcast and hear John discuss his and his co-researcher Agnes Kukulska-Hulme’s research into their students’ current personal and professional use of mobile devices. Don’t forget to also have a look at the full paper on the CD.

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Passion at ASCILITE??? We found it in a controversial and thought-provoking presentation by Lisa Wise and James Quealy from the University of Melbourne. Their presentation focussed on the institutionalised use of learning management systems . . . and how ineffective this is for today’s learning needs. Anyone who has read Stephen Downes or George Seimen’s will be familiar with the many of the ideas . . . but what is at the limits of social constructivism?

We could have chatted to Lisa and James for hours over the far-reaching ideas they have presented for us all to consider. As is stands, our conversation ranges from personal learning environments to the role of educational design . . . lots of ideas in here to spark some thoughts as the ASCILITE conference nears the end.

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Philippa Gerbic Auckland University, and Gail Wilson and Rosemary Thomson, University Western Sydney reflect on the insights gained from this conference. They also discuss the friendships re-visited and the networks formed and how these networks will keep on benefiting them in the future. Listen to the podcast and also hear a constructive suggestion or two for future ASCILITE conferences.

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In their paper, Ron Oliver and Mark McMahon of the School of Communications and Contemporary Arts at Edith Cowan University, presented their findings in a project on ‘The trial of learning objects: Exploring the design and delivery of VTE courses with learning objects’. There is a lot written and talked about in regard to learning objects, not the least of which is the ongoing preoccupation about defining learning objects, how big are they/should they be, and a lot of research around the design of learning objects? But what of the users, how are teachers using the objects, how are students using the objects? (Do they really care about the preoccupation of learning objects so long as they pass the subject?). Ron and Mark share a few more ideas in this podcast.

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Are academics that teach English subjects the most techno-phobic on earth? In this session Brett Lucas of the Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre Royal Holloway, University of London, explored the possible reasons for this claim and provided an overview of an innovative project currently being undertaken in English departments in the United Kingdom to address this issue.

Brett gave us an insight into the variety of support mechanisms which have evolved during the course of this project using a departmental ‘advocacy’ framework. Brett discussed the role of the departmental e-learning advocate in encouraging effective and sustainable e-learning practice within their teaching community. Catch some of Brett’s contagious enthusiasm for this project here…

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