EDUCAUSE in Australasia 2009 Perth

Perth City from Kings Park

I’ve just returned from EDUCAUSE in Australasia 2009 held this year in Perth. Like most conferences it had its ups and downs in terms of papers and presenters. The keynotes were a mixed bag with some sessions being obviously sponsored by vendors. While these may have been a necessary evil for the conference organisers in terms of securing sponsorship, I don’t think they added value to the conference.

 

Day two was probably the highlight for me in terms of papers by delegates. The pick of the keynotes for me was Carie Page from EDUCAUSE who explored using practical examples how web 2.0 has transformed education. Leo Plugge from SURF was a close second, mainly for the engaging way he outlined how the Dutch were using the internet to innovate in education via SURF (the Dutch version of AARNET). It always amazes me how people from Western Europe can launch into English, their second or third language, with barely a hesitation while many of us here in Australia have difficulty mastering our one and only language English.

Of the presentations I attend four were of particular value and resonance to me. Two were on migrating from existing LMS to Moodle, one was an evaluation of the current state of play of library systems and the last was from the National Library of Australia on their use of ICT to support scholarship.

The two papers on the Moodle migration experience were from Derek White (University of Waikato) and Helen Carter (University of Canberra). The reason I found these interesting is that I’m currently managing our curriculum design unit and we’re in the early stages of migrating LMS from Blackboard to Moodle. Waikato were migrating from a home grown LMS and UC were migrating from WebCT. Although there were some differences in their approaches – Waikato had academics manually transferring files while UC automated as much as possible – due to local context there were some similar messages, eg the importance of providing point of need support to academics. Interestingly enough both institutions partnered with private providers to assist with the migration.

Rodney Foley from the University of Tasmania gave a very goodpresentation on the state of play of library systems. Some key points were that the nubmer of vendors is reducing due to consolidation in the industry, most vendors are focussing their efforts on front ends rather than back ends, open source library systems are still a way off although they are being slowly adopted in the US by some big players, and that discovery layers are the way to go.

Finally, Alison Dellit from the National Library of Australia gave an overview of what the NLA is doing to supoprt scholarship.  She particularly focussed on their development of a discovery service which should have beta release soon.

After the conference we headed off to Albany and Augusta in the beautiful SouthWest for a few days … more on that next time.

An update at last …

It has taken me much longer to add another submission than I would have liked. Here’s a few things that have occurred.

ALIA

 I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend, as an observer, the March board meeting in Canberra. There are certainly quite a few very important issues on the ALIA table that will need to be dealt with over the next year or so. A number have been highlighted by Derek and Sue in the annual report, while there are other issues that are quietly bubbling away in the background. If you’re an ALIA member & wish to keep informed I urge you to read Incite & regularly visit the ALIA web site.

The new Board, under the presidency of Jan Richards,will have its first meeting on 19 May, the day after the AGM. the current Board’s last meeting will be on 17 May.  It will certainly be a big three days as we farewell the retiring board members and welcome the two new mebers, Kate Siniclair and Gillian Hallam. Gillian is no stranger to the Board as she is a former national president.

Brewing
The was quite a bit for fermenting activity during February but not much since. I’ve put down three beers since my last entry – a Bar n Brew bitter (a tub developed by the local brew shop), a Vienna larger and one of my favourites, a Belgian Saison. The bitter was basically a quick and dirty brew – add the wort, a bit of boiling water, fill up the fermenter with cold water,  add the yeast & hey presto in about a fortnight you can bottle the beer. Its not a  bad brew its light in colour, well carbonated, light in flavour but not much depth. The Vienna lager is a European amber lager and demonstrates a number of the characteristics listed in the  BJCP style guide for a Vienna lager Its a mid-strength beer of about 4.3%. The Belgian saison is a beer that packs a punch. I accidentally put a bit more malt in than needed and let the yeast really attenuate with the result that its a full strength+ beer coming in around 8.1% ABV. Its certainly a beer for drinking at home!

Golf and Cycling
I’ve been playing more golf than cycling of late as my wife has taken up the sport. So we’ve been having quite a few rounds together after work and on weekends. I’ve drifted out to 8 and have even managed to play to it a few times. I’ve gone through a phase when I’ve been hitting greens in regulation so that makes playing to ones handicap a bit easier. I’m back on the bike and am regularly cycling to work.

Work
Work as ever is busy. I currently have responsibility for the Library, Academic Learning Support Unit (ALSU), English Language Centre (ELC) and Curriculum Design (CDDU). The Library and ALSU are my two key areas of responsibility. It looks like the ELC will be realigned to another area within the univeristy, and I’ll be staying with CDDU until a Director is appointed.

Each of the areas have their own tensions caused by different drivers:

 The Library is currently focussnig on supporting the Office of Research with the HERDC and ERA submissions. Our involvement is centred on the utilisation of our repository, ACQUIRE.

The ELC is focussed on recruiting enough students to balance the books – its key activities are ELICOS, IELTS testing and hosting study tours.

ALSU is currently battling the problems of too much demand.  STEPS enrolments have have increased signnificantly on 2008 numbers, and with an increase in domestic numbers demands on the Communications Learning Centre have also increased.

Curriculum Design is heavily involved with the implementation of Moodle. It is caught between supporting normal operations and supporting the implementation of the new LMS.

Over the past month I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to attend ACODE and CAUL meetings. ACODE was in Melbourne and CAUL was in Newcastle. The ACODE focus was primarily Web2.0 and much of CAUL was focussed on research support.

In other news I had a couple of weeks off around attending CAUL in Newcastle. We drove down rather than flew and visited Gunnedah, Nelson Bay, Musselbrook, Sydney, Orange and Tenterfield over a couple of weeks. Today I was diagnosed with a mallet finger & it looks like I’ll have the middle finger on my right hand in a splint for about 6 weeks.  Whats a mallet finger & how did I get it? Well check this link out. The example they provide as a possible cause is exactly what happened to me – last time I make a bed!

Leadership, Creativity & ASCILITE

In October this year I had the privilege of being an ‘industry leader’ at the initial Horizon Leadership Institute run by CAVAL. I always feel a bit embarrassed by being called such things as an industry leader and the like as I certainly don’t feel I am compared to some of my more illustrious colleagues. No matter I attended nevertheless at the first institute held at the Sofitel Mansion and Spa at Werribee, just outside Melbourne or an $80 cab fare from Tullamarine Airport to give you some indication of the distance. As this was the first institute run on behalf of CAVAL by Annie Talve and Monica Redden of ‘Make Stuff Happen’ there were a few teething problems with the content but I think its got the potential to shape up pretty well.

The accommodation was in quite a majestic setting but the rooms were interesting. As a former seminary the rooms were quite small and had interesting bathrooms, eg no where to hang your towel. There were other bathroom stories which many of us shared one evening.

My fellow industry leaders at the two day workshop were John Arfield from UWA and Margaret Allen from the State Library of WA. We’ll be having a follwoup workshop in Sydney in February. Today I joined with Andrew Wells (UNSW) as the other industry leader on a teleconference with Annie and some of the institute participants to discuss leadership in difficult times. Our discussion was stimulated by two presentations on creativity - Tim Brown, CEO IDEO , and Sir Ken Robinson . Both quite  interesting and thought provoking  about  creativity and the need to nurture it . I think this is particularly important when things are tough as w need new ways to do business with fewer resources.

While I was viewing the Ken Brown presentation I stumbled across another one by David S. Rose called 10 things to know before you pitch a VC for money.  I foolishly though he was gonig t talk about pitching to Vice Chancellors (duh) but he was talking about pitching to venture capitalists. The first 5 minutes are particularly interesting when you consider leadership traits in addition to traits you need to make  a convincing presentation.

I’ve got an RSS feed from TED if you want to see or hear more .

In some ways the presentations by Brown & Robinson relate to a presentation by Piet Kommers who was a keynote speaker at the ASCILITE conference I attended recently in Melbourne. He gave an interesting if not rather concentrated presentation on learning. his concluding points were creativity and conceptual thinking were the most difficult things to teach students. According to him, Tim Brown, ken Robinson and no doubt others, we all have it as children but lose it with age and in reaction to the education system.

For me the best of the keynotes was Gary Poole from UBC in Canada. Gary’s presentation was called,  A place to call a learning home. It was essentially about making learning spaces student centric and enabling the student s to feel like they’re at home when they wish to learn on campus, study somewhere like a library or, if you extrapolate that concept, t even to an on-line environment. His presentation provided a theoretical understanding to  the concepts underpinning information commons such as the modest ones we have in our libraries at CQUniversity.

The First Post

This is the first post to my blog. I’ve blogged before but it was specifically realted to my reports to staff as the Director of CQUniversity Library. This is my first freelance blog where I hope to write about afew things I’m interested in – libraries, homebrewing, golf, cycling, and even a bit on leadership.

As you can see I’m fairly eccletic so who knows what will come of it.