Diary dates

Ethical Al - Why all the fuss?

Date: Friday 18 October
Time: 3.15pm
Venue: Woodward Conference Centre, Level 10, Melbourne Law School
Register

AI, ethics and the emerging digital revolution have become a hot-button issue in recent times in both mass media and broader society. Leading AI expert Professor Toby Walsh is at the forefront of this discussion and will join us to explore the new issues these technologies present and reflect on the pre-existing ones we still need to consider. Covering topics from driverless cars to Cambridge Analytica, he will examine the findings of the recent ACOLA report on the effective and ethical development of AI within Australia, a report prepared by the learned academies which he co-chaired.

---

---

Celebrating the career of Dr Christine Sinclair

Date: Saturday 19 October
Time: 2pm - 4pm
Venue: 593 Swanston Street, The Queensberry Hotel, Carlton

Staff are invited to celebrate the career of Dr Christine Sinclair, an outstanding educator, theatre maker, writer and researcher. Please RSVP by Wednesday 16 October to kelly.mcconville@unimelb.edu.au.

---

---

Creating Connections

Date: Wednesday 23 October
Time: 8.30am - 7pm
Venue: Kwong Lee Dow Building, Level 2, Theatre Q230
Register

The event aims to showcase the diverse and high calibre research being undertaken within the Graduate School and facilitate opportunities for academic debate and dialogue and to create professional development opportunities and develop a stronger research culture.

The event will involve a combination of a presentations/workshops for staff and Graduate Research students as well as plenty of opportunities for social engagement, and will be a great opportunity to develop MGSE’s already strong research community.

If you would like to assist on the day in any way, please contact the MERI Team at mgse-research@unimelb.edu.au.

The event concludes with drinks and nibbles in the Frank Tate Room at 6pm.

---

---

High stakes testing programs: What is the evidence?

Date: Wednesday 23 October
Time: 4.15pm - 6.15pm
Venue: Kwong Lee Dow Building, Level 2, Theatre Q219
Register

This event will be followed by drinks and refreshments.

Dr Power says in a forthcoming publication

"Since the 1970s, income inequality has been increasing in many countries and with that, the divides in funding, quality and outcomes of schools and tertiary institutions serving different socio-economic groups have widened, but most governments have neither the political will nor the courage to tackle the problem. As a policy option, the introduction of national and international student assessment systems was supposed to set and raise standards for all, leading to higher national economic growth and lifting all. But for the most part, the hoped-for improvements in education and GDP have not been forthcoming: the research reveals that high stakes assessment systems have rarely led to meaningful improvements in the quality of teaching and outcomes of education."

Come and hear him expand on this view.

>

---

---

Demystifying virtual reality in schools

Date: Friday 25 October
Time: 7.30am for 7.45am start
Venue: Digital Learning Hub room W313, Medical Building or via live webinar
Read more

As part of the celebration of World Teacher’s Day, the School of Biomedical Sciences is hosting a panel event, which seeks to demystify the use of virtual reality (VR) in secondary school education.

---

---

---

Enhancing Academic Workload Management

Date: Wednesday 30 October
Time: 9am - 4pm
Location: University of Melbourne
Register

The Enhancing Academic Workload Management Workshop will look at emerging trends in academic workload models and discuss issues around their effectiveness, efficiency and the next step in the evolution of workload models. Participants will come to understand the historic and current practice in relation to this, as well as understanding the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to workload management.

---

---

UMNOS Showcase

Date: Thursday 31 October
Time: 9am - 4pm
Location: Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre
RSVP by Wednesday 23 October. Please note each attendee needs to register individually.

The University of Melbourne Network of Schools (UMNOS) warmly invites academic and professional staff to the 2019 Showcase; the graduation and celebration of our 2017 Network and the launch of our 2020 offerings to schools. The Showcase is an opportunity to learn how schools engage within UMNOS and to hear how they have addressed school improvement priorities via evidence-based interventions and innovations.

MGSE staff will also have an opportunity to learn about upcoming changes to the UMNOS model. Please review the UMNOS website and our flyer for schools.

Registrations open at 8.15am
School presentation will run from 9.30 - 1pm, with refreshment breaks include

Our keynote speaker, Dr Sandra Milligan, will commence after lunch at 2pm, followed by a completion ceremony for our 2017 Network.

---

---

Service Improvement and Innovation in Tertiary Education Conference

Date: Thursday 31 October - Friday 1 November
Register

The 2019 conference aims to encompass all aspects of innovation in tertiary education and capture the collaborative efforts we hope to nurture between industry, government and education providers to create the best outcomes for the tertiary education sector. This year’s conference will examine examples of innovation throughout the tertiary education sector as well as learnings which could be applied from other sectors.

With a highly interactive format, including keynote speakers from within and outside the sector, the conference will provide insights into innovative activities which can be taken up more broadly.

---

---

Book Launch and CVEP Seminar

Date: Friday 1 November
Time: 3.30pm - 5.30pm
Venue: 234 Queensberry Street, Level 2, Theatre Q227
More information

Emeritus Professor Kwong Lee Dow will launch The Oxford Handbook of Higher Education Systems and University Management co-edited by Gordon Reading, Antony Dew and Stephen Crump, to be followed by a CVEP public seminar 'Experiential learning across education levels’ presented by Professor Kitty te Riele (University of Tasmania) and Emeritus Professor Stephen Crump (Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne).

---

---

Maths and Science Education Research Seminar
Exploring a trajectory of learning for digital technologies within integrated STEM

Presented by: Dr Duncan Symons

Date: Tuesday 19 November
Time: 12pm - 1pm
Venue: 234 Queensberry Street, Kwong Lee Dow Building, Level 2, Theatre Q227
Register

As we move forward into what has become known as the fourth industrial revolution, no longer are traditional approaches to teaching that privilege rote learning of procedures and routines relevant to school age students. The development of a series of skills and understandings that I will describe as STEM Literacies are becoming increasingly fundamental. These STEM literacies include:

• Scientific Literacy
• Statistical Thinking
• Algorithmic Thinking
• Critical and
• Creative Thinking
• Collaboration
• Problem Solving.

In this talk I will focus on the role of Algorithmic Thinking and a practical demonstration of how it can be developed across the Foundation to year 8 curriculum will be provided. The role of algorithmic thinking within integrated STEM and as a component of both the Digital Technologies and Mathematics curricula will be examined.

---

---

Mental health sessions: 'How can we have better dialogues?'

Date: Tuesday 19 November
Time: 11am - 12.30pm
Venue: 207-221 Bouverie Street
Register

The Mental Health PhD Program proudly presents its third mental health dialogue session: 'How can we have better multidisciplinary dialogues within mental health?'. Our multidisciplinary Q&A panel of experts will interrogate the ways in which we can have better dialogues within the domain of mental health. They will do so from a (clinical) psychology, population and global health, psychiatry, psychiatric nursing and lived experience perspective.

Members of the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions and the panel will respond and debate.

---

---

7th IOE-BNU International Conference
Innovation in Education and Pedagogy

Date: Friday 22 - Saturday 23 November
Time: 9am - 4pm
Venue: Beijing Normal University

IOE and BNU are excited to announce that the 7th IOE-BNU International Conference will be held in Beijing on November 22-23, 2019. The theme for this year's conference is "Innovation in Education and Pedagogy". IOE and BNU welcome submissions from all over the globe, and certainly is pleased to welcome works from INEI member institutions.

Visit the conference page for details about conference registration.

---

---

PhD Completion Seminar
Pedagogic possibilities of diasporic texts in a Contemporary Literature Classroom: A postcolonial analysis

Date: Tuesday 26 November
Time: 12pm
Venue: Kwong Lee Dow Building, Level 3, Room 372

Presented by: Mary Purcell 

Supervisor: Professor Fazal Rizvi and Dr  Dianne Mulcahy
Chair: Professor Nikos Papastergiadis

This project is situated within the broader context of the emerging policy discourses of “Asia Literacy” and “Intercultural Understanding” expressed in the Australian Curriculum, and the changing demography of Australian classrooms resulting from expanding cultural diversities, mobilities and transnational connectivities. It seeks to examine the ways in which a text produced by an Australian-Asian diaspora writer has the potential to contribute to the development in students of what Spivak (1992) refers to as “Transnational Literacy” – helping contemporary students to negotiate their identities and understand their “worldliness” (Said, 2003) in relational, critical and reflexive ways. Using a range of critical tools from recent postcolonial theory, this project involves the researcher teaching a postcolonial text to Year 11 students, observing student responses to the text, and interviewing them, producing data that is analysed through a constant movement between theory and data, privileging neither. This data suggests that, within the transnationalised and hybridised space of contemporary Australian society, some students find difficulty negotiating the dominant norms of Australian-ness and that they identify nation-centric narratives as key sources of feelings of confusion and exclusion. This implies a need for a pedagogy that responds to contemporary social changes. By the end of the course of study, some students reported changes in their epistemic constructions of themselves and of others after contesting these norms. Based on this insight, this thesis proposes a new form of literary pedagogy that considers each student’s orientation to the space, the way that social labels stick to students’ bodies and make them feel out of place in particular settings. It shows that the teaching of diaspora literature is a useful tool in steering students towards transnational literacy as it enables affectivity to be brought into the centre of literary analysis. It highlights the ambiguities, ambivalences, and the hybridities that they experience and it gives useful insights into how 'reading otherwise' is essential for the development of transnational literacy.

---

---

Save the date - Narrm Oration 2019

Date: Thursday 28 November
Time: 6pm
Venue: Kathleen FItzpatrick Theatre
Register

When a language is at the juncture of extinction, using it as the language of formal education would appear to be a mission impossible. Thirty-six years after a handful of people in Hawaiʻi decided to face this dire situation head on and use Hawaiian as the medium of pre-school education – with no money, no site, no curriculum and no 'qualified' teachers – Hawaiʻi is now experiencing a reawakening of new generations of highly fluent second and first language Hawaiian speakers.

In the 2019 Narrm Oration, Dr Larry L Kimura will impart a progression of the 36 years (1983–2019) of overcoming obstacles to advance the life of the Hawaiian language and cultural wellbeing.

---

---

Student Voice and Partnerships International Conference

Date: 9-11 December
Venue:Arts West Building, the University of Melbourne
Register

Join Social Education Victoria for a gathering that will bring together researchers, school students, teachers and school leaders, policy workers, and support organisations to consider current and future directions in Student Voice, Agency and Partnerships.