The House of Reps Standing Committee on Economics is interested in attracting entrepreneurs

Brendan Coates (Grattan Institute) has an idea, with just one flaw. “The best way to create a vibrant infrastructure is to go back in time 400 years and create two to three world-class universities based around Boston or California. In the absence of that being an option that is available to us, it is just really difficult.”

In Features this morning

Students are voting with their -devices and moving to on-line learning. Alice Brown and Jill Lawrence (both USQ) set out five ways to enhance engagement. New in Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in teaching and learning.

plus Merlin Crossley (UNSW) awards chatbots in education an A (for average, very average), HERE

In 2015 the previous government made “advanced manufacturing” a research priority. The results are “startling,” just not in a good way

Tim Cahill and Andreea Papuc Krischer (Research Strategies Australia)  report by overall publication count Uni Queensland is well first (3047), followed by RMIT (2097), UNSW (2035), Uni Sydney (1929) and Uni Melbourne (1735).

Four of the top five patent fields that cited Australian scholarly work were in biotech.

Overall they find research accelerated until 2018 but has been slowing since. Given state and commonwealth interest this, they write, “is not what we expected to find.”

Perhaps it was due to a strong period of research prior to the policy, which led to publications in ’15-’18. But as to why it slowed, “we can’t offer up an explanation of this based on our current analysis, though others will no doubt conjecture.”

But they do identify an outcome; offshore institutions such as MIT and Uni Pennsylvania “are translating Australian insight into patent-able technologies.”

“Companies … are also looking at Australian research and seeing commercial opportunities that Australian companies aren’t.”

So what is to be done?

“A coordinated approach to international collaboration in research translation would yield significant impacts,” Cahill and Krischer suggest.

“There is ample evidence to support a substantial opportunity for Australia’s AMT research to have an impact on industry, but on present evidence it would appear that this opportunity is passing us by,” they warn.

 

The third set of Australian Research Council industry fellowships are announced

The ARC’s intent is, “high quality and impactful collaborations between university and industry personnel.”

The new laureate fellowships, for senior researchers, are rare – with just eight awards, for a 7 per cent success rate. This is in-line with the mid-career awards (8 per cent), but way worse than the early career category, nearly 14 per cent (CMM April 26, May 8).

Uni Adelaide is home to three of the laureates, UNSW two and unis Melbourne, Sydney and Wollongong, one each. Awards range from $2.5m to $3.7m

There is no faulting the commitment of researchers. Alexander Hamilton (UNSW) will work with Diraq Pty Ltd, “to solve key issues in the race to scale from small scale prototypes to industrially relevant quantum computers.”

A new AQF could do it

The O’Kane Accord’s discussion paper refers to “harmonising” VET and HE and the “need for a non-hierarchical and flexibly applied qualifications framework that encourages recognition of credit and prior learning,”

Sally Kift points out in her O’Kane submission that there’s a way to do that, set out in the Noonan Review of the Australian Qualifications Framework.

Problem is government does not quite know how to impose it on the present arcane anarchy of accreditation. As Department of Education officials told a Reps inquiry, “although many stakeholders agree with the overall reform intent of the AQF Review, stakeholders have varying perspectives about how some of the more complex review recommendations should be addressed” (CMM March 22).

‘Twas ever thus in codifying qualifications, but as Professor Kift, a member of the Noonan review panel, points out, they set out a three-stage way to reform the AQF – which will provide a process; “a tool for qualification design that allows generic descriptors for qualification types to be developed specifically into learning outcomes that are relevant and appropriate for individual qualifications.”

While the VETocracy may not like it – perhaps as, Noonan proposed, a new governance body” could be established to ensure that what O’Kane recommends for VET and HE in combination happens.

How does assessment drive learning? A focus on students’ development of evaluative judgement from Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

Assessment is clearly an integral part of learning and determining whether learning has occurred, but less thought is often given to how it shapes what students are learning and how. This insightful article from Fischer, Bearman, Boud and Tai at Deakin’s CRADLE (of course) takes an ethnographical approach to exploring how physics students navigate a number of summative assessment tasks. It notes that they make independent evaluative judgements about the way they study as much as their work itself and highlights the value of authentic assessments at a programme level and partnering with students on curriculum design.

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How to customize LLMs like ChatGPT with your own data and documents from TechTalks

Given the towering stack of (virtual) articles in my own reading list, there is a certain appeal in the idea of feeding it to a robot and simply asking my questions. This article outlines the practicalities of this somewhat involved process, but it should be noted that the ‘token’ (words or word fragments) limits on Large Language Models such as GPT4 range from between 2000 to 32000, so it is likely able to ingest more a mound than a mountain of papers. But one day.

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How to cite ChatGPT from APA Style

I am highly aware that some people feel that citing ChatGPT is akin to citing Clippy or Grammarly but this is the world we now live in and as GenAI tools become part of our work processes they need to integrate with other practices. The APA https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt explains here why the use of GenAI differs from ‘personal communications’ and offers a format for in-text and reference citations. It also notes the importance of adding an appendix detailing the prompts and processes used with these tools.

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The Five Pathologies of EdTech Discourse About Generative AI from OnEdTech Blog

Now that everyone with an opinion seems to have self-identified as a GenAI expert, which at least gives the epidemiologists in the room a breather, a lot of the discussion in this space seems to have settled into a number of repeated talking points. This post from Glenda Morgan examines five key themes that emerge whenever a new Ed Tech appears (MOOCs, Learning Analytics, Mixed/Augmented Reality) and considers their validity in this new context. This includes a preoccupation with trendiness, exaggerated results, technology solutionism, overemphasis on application to learning and moral panics.

Colin Simpson has worked in education technology, teaching, learning design and academic development in the tertiary sector since 2003 at CIT, ANU, Swinburne University and Monash University. He is also one of the leaders of the ASCILITE TELedvisors Network. For more from Colin, follow him on Twitter @gamerlearner (or @[email protected] on Mastodon)