News

The CIC story has reached the last page. A new story begins... UTS Connected Intelligence Centre launched 1stAugust 2014. Two years ago, we marked CIC’s 10th Birthday, but yesterday this chapter came to a close. This amazing team has had the privilege of 12 years’ funding from the university as a research-active innovation centre within the VP/DVC Academic’s Education Portfolio. Our thanks to Shirley Alexander for conceiving CIC, and Kylie Readman who continued to recognise our work. However...
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We're delighted to welcome Fride Klykken (University of Bergen) as a visiting scholar, exploring AI, ethics and education Fride Klykken joins us till end of Sept. as part of the Norwegian national AI LEARN centre. CIC and TD School are international partners with AI LEARN, with exchange visits around our common interests on ethical AI governance in education. (Recall that CIC alumnus Kirsty Kitto is now Professor of AI in Education at U. Bergen!) Fride is affiliated with the Faculty of Psych...
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CIC is delighted to welcome Rene Kizilcec (Cornell University) as a visiting scholar until January 2027… Rene Kizilcec is an Associate Professor of Information Science, a graduate field member in Communication and Physics, and the founding director of the Future of Learning Lab at Cornell University. Rene's research is on the use and impact of technology in formal and informal learning environments (college classes, online degree programs, mobile learning, professional development, MOOCs, and m...
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There's been a huge amount written about how the emergence of generative AI has disrupted the lives of school teachers and university academics. Not in any way to downplay this, we're rectifying the rather less attention that's been paid to the impact all this is having on students. In 2024, a consortium of Australian universities set out to understand their experience — or rather, experiences — since what has become very clear is that there is no single 'student voice' when it comes to att...
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TEQSA has just published a forward-looking new briefing on "adaptive capabilities", including contributions from CIC's Lisa Lim Distributed Cognition, Hybrid Metacognition, Learner Agency and Self-Regulation. No this isn't an AIED or LearningAnalytics research paper, but the very progressive briefing commissioned by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, setting out the urgent need to cultivate Adaptive Capabilities in our students: "the high-level, integrated capacities that ena...
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Cast your mind back to 1996... the Web's shiny and new, and we're trying to figure out what this means for scholarly publishing in EdTech... The Web is a 3 year old toddler, we've just figured out how to embed multimedia in Mosaic and Netscape browsers (hello Apple QuickTime, MacroMind Shockwave, Java applets...), Paul Ginsparg's 5 years into something he calls arXiv, Stevan Harnad's championing open access journals and piloting “scholarly skywriting”, and the threaded discussions of the wildly...
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Don't blame the AI: you're accountable for your work! VivaBuddy is a form of "AI viva" that helps students check they haven't outsourced too much thinking when they co-author with AI. Mohsen Ebrahimzadeh is a doctoral researcher in the Transdisciplinary School, supervised by Antonette Shibani and CIC's Simon Buckingham Shum, supported by CIC Specialist Software Engineer Andrey Inkin. As we move into an era when undetectable AI is both deepening and undermining thinking and writing, regardles...
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GenAI has wreaked disruption not only with university teaching teams and administrators, but also the students. Here's what they're telling us... The Student Voices on AI in HE project is run by a consortium of UTS, UQ, Deakin and Monash, sponsored by their respective DVCs for Education. The mission to give university students a voice in how they are making sense of the generative AI revolution. CIC’s Simon Buckingham Shum and Lisa Lim have been working with other UTS colleagues (Jan McLean...
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Conversational AI can serve as a “thinking partner” to stretch our reasoning, deepen reflection, and foster the intellectual agility needed to navigate turbulent times CIC's Director Simon Buckingham Shum was honoured recently to contribute to The Hong Kong Polytechnic Educational Design Centre's International Dialogues on Educational Transformation, with a seminar and discussion on his current work considering the role that conversational GenAI may play as we grapple with the global polycrisis...
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CIC is delighted to welcome Prof. Linda Castañeda (University of Murcia) as a visiting scholar June-September... Linda is Professor of Educational Technology, University of Murcia, Spain, who is visiting us to learn how we conceive, design, pilot and scale conversational GenAI for learning at UTS. Linda’s research explores how people learn, teach and make educational decisions in contexts of technological change. Her work spans personal learning, academic development, digital competence, edu...
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