Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces in Higher Education: Concepts for the Modern Learning Environment documents real-world experiences of innovators in higher education who have redesigned spaces for learning and teaching. The redefined spaces encompass a broader range of physical, virtual, formal, informal, blended, flexible, and time sensitive factors.

You can order it on Amazon.com.

I write to urge the government to reconsider its decision to axe the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC). While I am a strong supporter of appropriate funding for the reconstruction work in Queensland, Victoria and beyond following the recent natural disasters, I do not believe this decision has been made in the best interests of the nation.

I believe events such as the Victorian bush fires, the Queensland floods, and Cyclone Yasi prove that the Australian government needs to fundamentally alter its thinking on disasters. The government should recognise that we cannot sustain a situation where we must find several billions of taxpayer dollars on an ad hoc basis every time one of these disasters comes along. Of course I will gladly pay the one off levy for the Queensland floods, but I would be even more supportive an ongoing approach that would to pay for a disaster contingency fund for all Australians. With a mining boom, our continued economic growth and projected budget surpluses, this country should be able to compare itself to the Norways instead of the Naurus.

The ALTC is a success story in Australian higher education, and this industry is one of Australia’s largest exports. I have worked in higher education for my entire career since 1990. During this time, I have seen student learning suffer from being vastly undervalued in comparison to research, yet I have seen a great deal of evidence that both are of equal importance. Without excellence in teaching, the top researchers of tomorrow will not be supported to continue in universities. The ALTC was an important way that this imbalance was being addressed in recent years, by rewarding and recognising excellent teachers, and by supporting applied research projects into teaching and learning. Its demise is a giant step backwards for all Australian universities.

I have been lucky enough to be involved in an ALTC funded project on learning spaces. As an early career academic, this is a significant boost to my professional development, but far more importantly it is now having a significant impact on the outcomes for students in my university and beyond, through the establishment of a range of exciting new study environments, including several new collaborative teaching spaces, and the setting up of Faculty learning commons at La Trobe. Our work is being disseminated nationally, and in the coming months my team will publish an edited book internationally. Each of these outcomes — academic development, evidence-based capital investment, student support, and publishing of research — have been made possible only because of the support of the ALTC. This is the sort of thing that will be crushed by the removal of a relatively small amount of government funding necessary to keep the ALTC going.

With changes coming through the Bradley Review and the establishment of TEQSA, as well as important challenges in attracting international students to Australia, it is clearly vital that the government gets the balance right in supporting universities right now. The government will fail in its goal of improving the quality as well as access to higher education in this country if its approach does not include supporting educators through programs such as ALTC. These goals are in tension, and cannot be achieved through regulation alone. Please stand up for the quality of higher education by immediately reviewing the hasty decision to discontinue the good work of the ALTC.

Kind regards,
Matthew Riddle
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Matthew Riddle
Senior Lecturer (Academic Development)
Faculty of Law and Management | La Trobe University | Bundoora, Vic 3086

I’m now getting more and more inquiries about the class, and we’re running a little online poll about the cost of the course. Basically almost everyone’s telling me it should be exactly the same price as the face to face class ($20 for 3 classes), so I’ve now set up automatic enrolment via PayPal. So if you want to enrol, it’s definitely not too late, just go here:
http://www.matthewriddle.com/moodle/

If you’re interested in being involved in the DJ Masterclass, drop me a line and I’ll enrol you!

I’m considering trying to put some of the materials, capture some of the conversations, and even perhaps putting together some new materials so that someone could actually take part in the DJ Masterclass at a distance.  For example I’ve begun talking to some international DJs about recording interviews over Skype, and we could even potentially have an online conference using Skype with some of the DJs who aren’t able to be there (the venue has broadband).

I’d like your feedback on whether you think this idea is worth the effort.  If the Monday night time slot is not suitable for you, you know of people who would like to be involved but can’t, or you just think it would be cool to review this stuff at a later date, could you let me know?

A reminder that the DJ Masterclass is a 3 week course, starting on Monday October the 19th at 7pm.  Since I am putting some resources online in Moodle, you’ll need to enrol beforehand by sending me an email at matthew@matthewriddle.com.

DJ Masterclass Flyer [PDF, 102K]

For example, see this:

Well, there’s actually a fairly decent explanation in the form of the Dunning-Kruger effect. This video explains their reasoning — that those who are incompetent are also unaware of their own limitations — and how they conducted an experiment to prove it.

The project I’m working on is about curriculum mapping. The problem is to get a picture of where students are exposed to various generic skills (or ‘graduate capabilities’) like writing, speaking, critical thinking, team work, and so on across a program of study. A heat map allows information in a couple of different categories to be combined in one two dimensional map, through the use of colour/shade as well as size. The columns are subjects, the size of the bubbles represents how much something is taught, and the intensity of the colour represents how confident we are with the evidence. I took a look at what kind of software was out there to create this kind of a diagram, and realised it was reasonably easy to create something with off the shelf packages like Excel, but it was difficult to really customise the look of the graphs or create a workflow to suit the task.

I realised that I really wanted to be able to create a simple table of data, look at the map, and save it online, without dealing with uploading/downloading every time. I wanted to be able to click a menu and compare two graphs from two different programs, overlay them if necessary, and share the data with someone somewhere else. After mucking around with Revolution for a while I realised it was going to be easier to write my own application, and that other people might want to use it as well. What’s more, it would be much easier to share the methodology we developed for our project if there was a tool like this to support it. The Data Entry screen above is where the tables are entered. Clicking on the list of Maps on the right selects a map. The application uses MySQL to store the map data, and draws the maps as you go. It’s working really well now, and I’m adding new features daily. The next version will have the ability to overlay multiple maps for comparisons. And yes, it will be available for Mac and Windows — I will probably also post an online test version here using the revWeb plugin when it becomes a bit more stable. If you’re interested in being a beta tester, please let me know.

When my mum brought home a MacPlus in 1987 I remember becoming captivated by the paper white screen, the Finder icons and MacPaint, but when HyperCard came along later that year I was quickly obsessed by the idea that I could create my own applications.  I am pretty sure I was more interested in messing around with HyperCard than my final year of school, but my gap year turned out to be an opportunity to start working on it more seriously.  To cut a long story short, basically my entire career can be traced back to the opportunities provided by HyperCard to quickly and easily test out new ideas and then make something useful from them.

So when HyperCard was left to wither in the 90s and finally dropped by Apple in 2004 I was naturally very disappointed. HyperCard is not supported by MacOSX. I’ve used most of the commercial products that have tried to keep the dream alive, including in particular SuperCard and Revolution, but there has always been a reason not to invest the time and effort required to use them.

However, the time may well have arrived for the return of HyperCard in the form of a new web-only development tool by the people who make Revolution.  It’s called revMedia, and the best part is that it’s absolutely free. As their press release says:

“revMedia is a fully featured authoring tool that includes an integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.”

I downloaded the alpha without high expectations. I thought this was going to be a very cut down tool with the ability to move a few things around on a screen and basically create Flash style animations.  I’m not sure I would be willing to install a new plugin (and require others to do the same) if that’s all I was getting.  However, this is the real deal. It feels very much like a version of HyperCard that has been updated with all the things you’d like to be able to do now.  Reading stuff in from the web, vector graphics, OS widgets for Mac and Windows, quicktime, and other media formats, etc.  The best part is that language and is just as useful, easy to read and dependable as the old HyperTalk.  I started writing a curriculum mapping tool immediately, and didn’t stop until I had to go to bed at 3am.  I really hope this product is as exciting for new users as it is for old school HyperCard fans like me.

The editors of the book are: Professor Mike Keppell, Charles Sturt University, Associate Professor Kay Souter and Matthew Riddle from La Trobe University.

We are in the process of inviting experts to become part of our editorial board and organizing a call for chapters for the book. The Full Paper Submission Deadline is September 15, 2009

For more information, see the book website:
Physical and Virtual Learning Spaces in Higher Education: Concepts for the Modern Classroom

There were a few disappointments for me however.  The fact that there is still no 32Gb version was a surprise.  I realise that it’s because of the importance they are putting on affordability, but 16Gb is not really a lot when you start using video, photos and music on a regular basis.  The iPhone isn’t just another smart phone, it’s a new category of device.  I’m also disappointed there’s no news on pricing in Australia, but I remain hopeful that it will be in line with the US. The most troubling thing is that there has been no announcement from Apple Australia about purchasing the iPhone outright, which makes me think that the phones will be tied to contracts as they have been elsewhere to date.  But again, I’ll wait and see.  There was also one other thing I expected to see in the iPhone 2.0 firmware that wasn’t mentioned:  support for Macromedia Flash.  This seems overdue.