Examining the education policy context in Australia by looking closely at the Melbourne Declaration

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This post is a part of a series being written for my EDUC6352 online masters students.

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One of the themes of policy in Australia (over the past 40 years or so) is the increasing influence of neoliberalism. This is particularly apparent in education, which has become increasingly marketised. Teachers’ work is increasingly subject to economic principles – made visible through the focus on accountability and standardisation; and performance pay which is perennially proffered as the a means of increasing teacher quality.

Nearly ten years after its signing, the 2008 Melbourne Declaration remains a useful case study which illustrates some of the ways that neoliberalism is manifest in Australian schooling. Continue reading →

Digital Footprints research: A brief summary

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This post was originally posted on 1 Dec, 2016 on the AARE EduResearch Matters blog under the title: Digital Footprints of children: latest research and the implications.

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Australian children are among the youngest and most prolific users of the internet in the world. They are, on average, a little under eight years old when they begin using the internet and most go online daily. So it is not long before they develop an extensive digital footprint. But not much is known about young people’s digital footprint awareness and how to best educate them to manage their growing online presence.

Continue reading →

Lazy blogging ~ reposting a previous effort

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child on loungeWired and tired: why parents should take technology out of their kid’s bedroom

Australian children are among the youngest users of the internet in the world, starting as young as eight years old.

Whether they’re using mobile phones, iPads or the TV, most children and teenagers will use their devices daily to chat to their friends or to access entertainment and education.

But when children use these devices in the evening, they can struggle to sleep, leaving them wired and tired. Continue reading →

A belated update and some links of interest

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So I arrived back at my home institution in early July, to the pleasant discovery that I’m featured in our faculty’s research showcase publication. Not that I’ve had much time for research since finishing sabbatical. As I’m coordinating a rather large foundational course this semester, my time has been spent organising the teaching for that. We have over 1100 students enrolled in the course (all of our first and second year early childhood, primary and secondary teaching students) and it is being delivered in a blend of face-to-face and online modes. Which means I’m coordinating a large teaching team to deliver tutorials (seminars to use the UK parlance) to 41 classes per week for the semester, organising the lectures and building the online content. And there’s been marking.

Being a blended course, I’m combining lectures; (yes, an old fashioned notion, I know, but it’s not without its defenders), with classroom discussions slated for the tutorials; and chunked resources that provide background information, and neat definitions, concept explainers, and contemporary perspectives (new stories, blog posts and the like) that link to the academic readings for the online components. This course is certainly stretching my teaching and admin skills and I’ve even starting using Adobe spark to make little videos (yep, even got my own youtube channel, something I never thought that I would have the guts to do) and memes for the LMS. Continue reading →

Check out this (fabulous) research-informed comic

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Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 7.12.15 PM

My colleague and friend, Associate Professor Katy Vigurs (who hosted my study leave visit to Staffordshire University) has recently published her research in a very innovative and exciting manner; her “research-informed comic” is featured on the website of the Society for Research into Higher Education. Katy employed 4 final year students on the BA Hons Cartoon and Comic Arts programme at Staffordshire University and worked with them to develop a brief that would see a traditional academic research report (published in Feb 2016) turned into a set of graphic representations. Continue reading →

Men, maybe your teaching isn’t as awesome as your students say it is

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Today I had the pleasure of attending an information session for academics on the topic of digital  footprint management. While digital footprints is something I’m passionate about it isn’t the subject of this post.

Anyway I was looking forward to this and was there early. A male academic walked in and upon meeting the woman running the session he joked that she was going to get bad feedback on the session because she “was a girl”. Continue reading →

Social Equity and Digital Footprints

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University students with devices 1On Tuesday 31st May I was invited to give a seminar at the University of Leicester’s Leicester Learning Institute. I talked about research that I had done with colleagues at the University of Newcastle on the Digital Footprint awareness of university students being an emerging equity issue for higher education. The overview of this research led to a very interesting discussion with those there about equity, digital technologies and cyber ethics. Continue reading →

Back to blogging

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While this is my first post here, I am not new to blogging. While completing my Ph.D (2001-2010) I spent a lot of time in the Australian feminist blogosphere. My old blog can be found here. Dr Frances Shaw’s research on the Oz feminist blogosphere can be found here. I was interviewed by Frances as part of her doctoral research which shows that even my ‘tool of procrastination’ blog was actually (once-upon-a-time last decade) a part of something bigger. Continue reading →