December 2016

Dear reader,

With only a few more weeks left till Christmas, we can reflect on all that has happened through a very productive year at the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC).

2016 has been the year when the new team we’ve been building really hit its stride. New collaborations sparked within CIC, with our academic colleagues across UTS, and with national and international institutions. Our Learning Analytics PhD program launched, and our Master of Data Science & Innovation students impressed government and industry with their human-centred data science skills.

Our deepest thanks to you — our extended network — for creating so many opportunities for us to work with you within and beyond UTS, and for all the support and good feedback. We wish you the very best over the holiday season and look forward to all the possibilities that 2017 will bring.

As always, do not hesitate to get in touch if you want to talk.

Regards,
Simon Buckingham Shum
Director & Professor of Learning Informatics

RECENT NEWS

Declara

We are currently piloting an exciting new tool at UTS called Declara, which is a platform for UTS students, staff and researchers to build, annotate, share and discuss content they're interested in, in open or private collections.

We’re now seeking UTS staff and students interested in signing up and using Declara for teaching and learning purposes.

CLARA

CIC are also piloting a learning power assessment tool to support 21st century learners. The tool provides immediate feedback to students by scoring them across 8 key learning dispositions that can provoke reflection on how they approach learning and can be a powerful aid to help them learn more effectively. Read more on the CLARA website to find out how UTS academics can embed this tool in their subjects.

MDSI Students take out ALL Awards

Our Master of Data Science and Innovation (MDSI) students have achieved amazing success this year, taking out a number of awards at various public data challenges ('hackathons'), often defeating teams with more technical experience — but poorer teamwork and communication skills.

Read about how they took at all 3 cash awards at the Unearthed Sydney Hackathon challenge in August.

CIC success at LAK 2017 International Conference

CIC have achieved outstanding success with 3 papers and 3 workshops/tutorials accepted at the 7th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK17), held in Canada in March next year. The papers are from CIC’s close collaborations with academics from multiple faculties across UTS and are based on the analytics innovations we’re piloting with them. The workshops/tutorials are based on our national and international collaborations.

PhD - Learning Analytics

We are delighted to announce that CIC’s doctoral program in Learning Analytics is offering 3 UTS Scholarships for 2017. We invite you to apply for a place if you are committed to working in a transdisciplinary team to invent user-centered analytics tools in close partnership with UTS staff and students.

The Heretics Guide to Management: The Art of Harnessing Ambiguity.

We are very proud of our Senior Lecturer, Kailash Awati who has recently released his second book, “The Heretics Guide to Management: The Art of Harnessing Ambiguity", which looks at how ambiguity affects human behaviour and how managers can harness it in positive ways.

The Australian Financial Review even wrote a story about it!

CIC team edits C21 learning analytics journal

CIC Professors Simon Buckingham Shum and Ruth Deakin Crick have edited a Special Section of the Journal of Learning Analytics. Simon and Ruth (who is joint with the School of Education & Institute for Sustainable Futures) have curated the world's first collection of researcher and practitioner articles on the challenge of Learning Analytics for 21st Century Competencies.

EVENTS

Ryan Baker: Ethical Application of Learning Analytics in a Complex and Changing World

On Thursday 24 November, we welcomed guest speaker Ryan Baker, one of the world’s leading researchers and consultants on Educational Data Mining. He hosted a conversation with our Master of Data Science & Innovation students to explore how the deeply technical meshes with the ethical and how machine and human intelligence can be mixed in a complex social setting.

Virtual Internships: Computer-supported role play simulations

CIC are working with various faculties and academics across UTS to explore an innovative, research-based way of running practice-oriented internship simulations - ‘Virtual Internships’ (VIs). A briefing was held for academics and careers staff on 10th November who expressed interest in these ‘VIs'.

Tom Carey: Innovation Capability, Epistemic Fluency and Literacy

We were delighted to welcome Professor Tom Carey to CIC in October, where he hosted a briefing and conversation with UTS academics specialising in innovation, creativity and transdisciplinary learning.

TEAM NEWS

A/Prof. Theresa Dirndorfer Anderson

Congratulations to our Master of Data Science and Innovation (MDSI) Course Director - Theresa Anderson who was promoted to Associate Professor! Theresa has worked with UTS since 1997, and for the past 2 years has helped grow the MDSI course into a world-leading program of study. We are very proud of Theresa for achieving a well-deserved honour!

CIC PhD Students

We are excited to have appointed 3 PhD students that started in September and have become an integral part of the CIC team, working alongside our staff to make an impact at UTS and tackle data-driven problems. Check out the exciting things they are working on, all of which have a strong transdisciplinary flavour, investigating the interplay between algorithms, ethics, user experience, participatory design & educational theory & practice.

National Researcher Level 1 Award

Congratulations to CIC research fellow, Roberto Martinez-Maldonado who has been awarded a National Researcher Level 1 by the National Council of Science and Technology, Mexico. This includes a prize of $10,000 p/year for 3 years which Roberto plans to use to enhance the collaboration between UTS and Mexican institutions in research and technological development.