Our keynote speakers are:
Prof Sue Clegg, Leeds Metropolitan University
Sue Clegg is Professor of Higher Educational Research and Heads the Centre for Research into Higher Education, and is Director of Research Students at Leeds Metropolitan University. The research centre is a pan-university centre that supports the work of colleagues in the disciplines and professions and acts as a focus for higher educational research. Her personal research includes close-to-practice research, often in collaboration with practitioners, as well as theoretical work including work on the social and pedagogical significance of the gendering of information technology, analyses of information technologies in learning and teaching, and a critique of the debate about the nature of ‘evidence-based’ practice. She has written about the importance of critical distance and work which scrutinises higher education as well as serving it. In her recent work she has taken seemingly mundane pedagogical practices, such as those involved in personal development planning, and explored how these are understood by staff and students and the ways in which they are reframed in policy discourse. She has taken a critical look at institutional practices designed to improve teaching, analysing the rhetorical repertoire of learning and teaching strategies and exploring how these strategies are mediated in practice. She has written on academic identity as a gendered sense of self and drawn on her work on academic identities to deconstruct the dualism between teaching and research. She is Editor of Teaching in Higher Education and serves on the Boards of Studies in Higher Education and Higher Education Quarterly and she Chairs the Publications Committee of Society for Research into Higher Education.
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Dr Christopher R Jones, The Open University
Dr Christopher R. Jones is a Reader in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. He teaches on the Masters programme in Online and Distance Education and coordinates the Online and Distance Education strand of the Doctorate in Education programme (EdD). His research focuses on the utilization of the metaphor of networks to the understanding of learning in tertiary education. Chris has a longstanding interest in the application of collaborative and cooperative methods to teaching and learning and in the use of the ideas of Communities and Networks of Practice.
Chris is the principal investigator for a UK Funding Council funded project “The Net Generation encountering e-learning at university until December 2009. He was previously a co-leader of the European Union funded Kaleidoscope Research Team “Conditions for productive networked learning environments”. Until 2006 Chris was co-director of Networked Management Learning a research project being undertaken for the UK leadership college for further education (CEL). He was also the co-director of a joint team, with Manchester Metropolitan University, evaluating the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Information Environment. He was part of the Lancaster University team evaluating the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council’s (SHEFC) Quality Enhancement Framework and the programme wide evaluation of the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN).
Chris has published over 50 refereed journal articles, book chapters and refereed conference papers connected to his research. He is the joint editor of a book in the area of advanced learning technology - Networked Learning: Perspectives and Issues published by Springer in 2002 and of a second edited collection related to his work in Kaleidoscope with Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Berner Lindström (forthcoming 2009) Analysing Networked Learning Practices in Higher Education and Continuing Professional Development. Sense Publishers, BV.
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Dr Tai Peseta, La Trobe University
Before taking her position at La Trobe, Tai worked for 10 years at the Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Sydney in academic development, and at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests are broadly framed around the scholarship, identity and politics of the academic development project, doctoral education and supervision development and the relations between disciplinarity, pedagogy and research and writing in the academy. She is currently working with Dr Peter Kandlbinder at the University of Technology Sydney on a research project which investigates the key thinkers in higher education teaching and learning.
In 2004, Tai co-founded the Challenging Academic Development (CAD) Collective - an international research group of academic developers interested in theorising the scholarship and politics of academic development. Their theoretical essays are featured in a 2007 Special Issue of The International Journal for Academic Development (IJAD). She is part of IJAD's editorial team and sits on the Editorial Board of Teaching in Higher Education.
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