Tomorrow it’s Christmas Eve, and CIC will fall silent as midday strikes! It’s a good moment to reflect on a dynamic year. . .
If you’re seeing this via our newsletter, then welcome to the first of the new updates in which we aggregate from the CIC website the month’s activities for you to stay in touch with everything that the CIC team is up to. To kick things off, we have a bumper issue pulling in the last two months’ news, plus this end of year retrospective.
An innovation lab is only as good as its people: they define the personal and intellectual culture. So it’s been tremendously exciting to appoint the team over the year, all of whom have can-do, user-centred, transdisciplinary mindsets, and see them start to meld their minds.
CIC envisages analytics tools designed around the ways that people need to learn and work, and we aim to train and mentor data scientists and researchers who can think with all 3 of the “CI” qualities: Connected, Creative & Collective Intelligence.
Our students in the Master of Data Science & Innovation are one indicator for how well we are managing this. Launched only in February, we are forging a growing number relationships with government, industry, startups and NGOs, who value the contributions that our students make to their businesses. Our victory in the data challenge run by TransportNSW and the NSW government Data Analytics Centre was a recent highlight.
Another indicator is our collaboration with UTS academics as we understand how to embed and tune learning analytics tools into their contexts. This year we have worked closely with Science, the Business School and Law Faculty, with expertise from IML’s Academic Learning & Language team.
CIC sits squarely at the intersection of learning and research: it’s the quality of our research that drives the innovation we can bring to bear on UTS teaching and learning. We will therefore be very active at the International Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK) Conference, co-chairing the Doctoral Consortium, a panel with leaders of university analytics centres, three workshops on analytics for writing, physical/digital spaces and temporal aspects of learning, and presenting research papers.
We love to welcome thought leaders to CIC to engage with us, and the many others who join from across UTS. This year has seen a stellar lineup come through our doors. Review and replay our events at your leisure.
CIC is of course just one of many nodes in the UTS network of expertise around data science. Learn how we act as broker across departments and business units, to bring to bear multiple analytics lenses on university datasets.
CIC is definitely in startup mode, not just because we’re a new kid on the block, but because continual dialogue around tools in perpetual beta is the only way to operate now. We are indebted to the many people across UTS who have expressed their interest in and support for CIC’s work over 2015. To list you would inevitably mean we missed someone — you know who you are 🙂
UTS heads into 2016 as the joint Times Higher and QS Stars top ranked young university in Australia. It’s a turbulent world, and we need citizens and organisations equipped to handle such complexity. CIC’s mission to develop human-centred analytics for societal learning is uniquely tuned to that challenge.
We wish you Peace as we approach Christmas, and a New Year full of possibility.