Seminar Wednesday February 17th 2010 12.30-13.45

The session will be streamed live

An approach to explore values in education and practice

Professor Caroline Baillie, University Western Australia and SCEPTrE distinguished visitor 

Values guide our action—what we choose and how we choose. Mitchell and Baillie (1998) suggest, “Our values are the lens through which we view the world: they stem from our underlying beliefs and assumptions, which are generally neither articulated nor questioned”.  Either personal or cultural, values are beliefs that influence our thoughts, feelings, actions, and attitudes. Values evolve from human interactions with the external world (Santrock, 2007). However, rarely in undergraduate education is any consideration taken of our values, what they are and where they come from.  Helping professors and students, as well as practitioners begin to examine their values and consider the implications of work based on those underlying values requires some means to expose these.

In this study I present an emerging methodology to create a values mapping approach for engineering, such that students, teachers, engineers and engineering organizations might better understand the decisions they make and the impact these will have on the various communities in which we work. For this study we have adopted contextually modified versions of the ‘Social Values map’ as described in Michael Adam’s ‘Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of converging values’ (Adams, 2003).  Adams developed questionnaires to locate the prevalent social values of different groups of citizens in the US and in Canada. From the data, he created maps, which showed potential differences between these groups, such as between US citizens and Canadians, between men and women etc. Adams further discovered that it was not possible to capture all Canadian values on the US values map and hence created a Canadian social values map from the Canadian data. In our work an attempt has been made to adopt the overall concept and apply it to the profession of engineering but it could work just as well for any other professional discipline.

The intention is that once the methodology has been tested through future studies, individuals or organizations could have their values mapped onto these frameworks and comparisons could be made between different groups and individuals. This would then be an important pedagogical tool, to help students consider whether they are in fact valuing what they thought they were, or whether they have unconsciously ‘swallowed whole’ values from parents, school, society, which they would prefer not to put at the forefront of their professional work.  It is also possible that these maps could be used to help employees and employers think about their roles and impact within society and help organizations move towards more socially responsible actions.

Adams, M. (2003). ‘Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the myth of converging values’, Toronto: Penguin.

Mitchell, C.A. & Baillie, C. (1998), ‘On values, role models, and the importance of being me‘, Proceedings Annual American Society of Engineering Education Conference.\

Santrock, J.W. (2007). A topical approach to life-span development. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

February 8th 08.00-09.30 01/AC01

Developing and evaluating generic capabilities and dispositions through a life-wide curriculum

Norman Jackson, Director Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education, University of Surrey

This is an AGN video conference with Queensland University of Technology in Queensland. It will be streamed live from this page

Seminar Tuesday January 26th 2010 12.30-13.45 University of Surrey

This session will be streamed live from this page

Industry Partnerships, Community Engagement and ‘Real Life’ Learning Through Project Work.

Cathy Farrell, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

As part of Swinburne University of Technology’s commitment to professional learning through project work, the Media Studies program offers a range of ‘real life’ learning opportunities to final year undergraduate students. The projects range from internal artefact creation through to working with leading corporations and local communities. This seminar will present a number of examples of successfully completed project work. Discussion will focus on the ongoing role of industry partners and local communities in providing and supporting student projects, and the supervision and assessment of student project work.

SCEPTrE Visitor

Cathy a lecturer in Media Studies at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, was recently awarded an Australian Learning and Teaching Council citation for outstanding contributions to student learning – “For innovative incorporation of emerging technologies and social media into the classroom, providing relevant and engaging real-world learnig opportunities for students”.

Her 2008 Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award (Higher Education) was presented for:

‘her much valued contribution to educational programs at Swinburne – engaging students in a positive and productive learning experience using weblogs, computer and video games, mobile phones as cultural artefacts under academic investigation; providing diverse selection of assessment tasks to accommodate wide ranges of experience, through completing a number of projects within the Media Studies making it possible for students to apply the knowledge which they are meeting in the classroom to a variety of real world projects, many embedded in the community and industry – 2006 pilot program at Telstra’s Internal Communications Department; blogs development for Southern Women’s Action Network and a local politician; developed and convened one of the first project units to be delivered at FHEL in film making process, providing students with a better understanding of project management and a basic understanding of software like ‘YouTube, Micromovies and Blogs’ the success in meeting her educational objectives is strongly evidenced in the SFT and SFU data reports’

Digital Story Telling Academy

Promotional leaflet and booking form

Helping students reflect deeply and meaningfully on the situations they encounter in order to create deeper and more meaningful understandings is one of the challenges facing higher education as we grapple with the forms of capability that are required in a modern complex world. This professional development Academy is intended to provide a basic introduction to the concept and techniques of digital story telling and to examine some of the ways that this technique could be used to support reflective learning and meaning making in higher education.

Digital Story Telling Academy provides an opportunity for people to learn about how digital stories might be used in higher education. At the end of the process we anticipate that participants will :

• Know what a digital story is and have been exposed to a number of illustrative examples
• Know how they might be used in higher education
• Understand the process of making a digital story and have created their own story
• Use some tools to evaluate the representations or learning and identity contained in example digital stories

Facilitation team

• Jane Leng, Director of Studies- Foundation Degree in Health and Social Care Practice, Leader for Adult Branch Nursing Degree and SCEPTrE Fellow
• Martin Jenkins, Academic Manager, Centre for Active Learning, University of Gloucestershire
• Chris Stannage SCEPTrE Technologist, (year 3 BSc Economics Professional Training)
• Jake Pyne Year 4 student BEng Audio Media Engineering

USEFUL LINKS

Digital Story Synthesis website