ERGA 2008 Conference 24-25 September, Adelaide

The conference theme for 2008 was Motivating and Engaging Students. Our keynote speaker was Professor Kerri-Lee Krause from Griffith University. Prof Krause's research expertise spans across higher education policy areas, with a particular focus on the quality of the student experience in higher education and implications for learning, teaching and policy.

The Conference program is available here.

The Conference Abstracts are available here.

Presentations:

• Anne Arnold: An evaluation of student and staff experience of audio visual recording of lectures. Powerpoint Presentation
• Judi Baron: Cultural values and beliefs from an educational perspective in the arab world. Full paper.
• Janet Bryan, Michelle Tuckey, Bianca Bronzin & Nicholas Ketley: Student Engagement in Psychology Programs. Powerpoint Presentation
• Liz Cooke, Marie Heartfield, Sue Gilbert-Hunt: Interprofessional Learning as a Student Engagement Strategy. Powerpoint Presentation
• Anita De Bellis, Alison Wotherspoon, Professor Jan Paterson, Pauline Guerin, Bonnie Walter, Maggie Cecchin, Sandra Bradley: Interacting With Persons Who Have Dementia-The production of an educational resource to motivate and engage undergraduate students in person-centred care. Powerpoint Presentation
• Helen Johnston, Andrea Duff, Diana Quinn: Cutting the cloth to fit new needs and communication preferences. Website
• Katrina Falkner: Engaging first year classes through active learning. Powerpoint Presentation
• Cate Jerram: Decreasing de-motivation. Full paper. Powerpoint Presentation
• Trent Mattner, Vincent Wheatley: Promotion of open and efficient communication in tutorials. Full paper.
• Dominic Keuskamp: STEPS: Evaluating and enhancing the transition to university of undergraduate science students. Powerpoint Presentation
• Ursula McGowan, Geoffrey Crisp, Kogi Naidoo: Helping academics in engaging students: Evaluation of an academic staff development program. Powerpoint Presentation
• Alexandra Myers: An Online Tutorial that Teaches Legal Reasoning and Literacy skills to EAL Business students. Powerpoint Presentation
• Barbara Nielsen, Amy Hamilton: When knowing your stuff is not enough: engaging and motivating students. (See Abstracts)
• Cheryl Pope: Experiences with Building Intrinsic Motivation Through Self Directed Projects. Full Paper. Powerpoint Presentation
• Anna Shilabeer: Global Education: Myth or Certainty? Powerpoint Presentation
• Catherine Snelling, Sophie Karanicolas: Why Wikis Work: assessing group work in an on-line environment.
• Mandy Treagus, Trish Edmonds, Judy King: Horses for Courses: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Second Life as Pedagogical Tool (See Abstracts)
• David Walker: Identifying and Dealing with Students @ Risk. Powerpoint Presentation

Workshops:

Do Creative Writers Have Anything to Teach You?

Facilitating Creative Process in a Research-Centred University

Dr Jan Harrow, Discipline of English

Teachers of creative writing face a number of challenges in trying to facilitate artistic process and the development of writing craft within a content-centred research environment. This workshop explores pedagogical responses to standardised expectations of student load, research practice, evaluation, and measurements of "industry outcomes" that are often counter-productive to creative process and the production of creative work. In an effort to move beyond the division between "research" writing and "creative" writing, this workshop will present workshop participants who require their students to write in any academic field to experience, first-hand, practical methods to move student writing from concept to draft through the process of pre-writing (conceptualising); free-writing (discovery); focusing (finding meaning); re-writing; peer review; revision; and editing. In addition, peer review and structured workshop guidelines will be discussed and demonstrated with the help of two postgraduate students, Rachel Hennessy and Carol LeFevre.

Workshop 2. 1:30-3:00 Sept 24:

An Education Community of Practice

Katrina Falkner, Edward Palmer

ERGA, as a growing group displays some of the characteristics of a ‘community of practice.' As defined by Wenger, a ‘community of practice' is a ‘joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members' (Wenger, 1998). It functions through ‘mutual engagement that binds members together into a social entity' and it has the capability to produce (and is actually producing) a ‘shared repertoire of communal resources that members [are developing] over time.' Establishing a community of practice has several benefits for participants, including sharing the load of research and problem solving and learning from and with each other (Darling-Hammond, 1994)

Our aim as an emerging education community of practice is to foster collaborative research opportunities: helping identify research potential and supporting early research stages. This workshop is designed to bring together educational researchers from different disciplines and institutions to identify opportunities for research collaboration. We have identified several potential areas that may be of interest: evaluation, assessment, engagement, internationalisation and technology in education.

The workshop was followed up with meetings organized by ERGA to ensure progress is made in developing research proposals.