Identity and Community – Addressing the ICT Education Community

Had a great meeting at Swinburne University, (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), today as part of my ALTA Fellowship role. I brought the talk and early outcomes from the ALTA Forum in Queensland into (sunny-ish?) Melbourne and shared it with a new group of participants.

I haven’t had time to write my notes up yet but the overall sentiment was pretty close to what was expressed at the ALTA Forum initially:

1. We don’t have an “ICT is…” identity that we can point to. Dentists do teeth. Doctors heal the sick. Lawyers do law. ICT does… what?
2. We need a common dissemination point for IT, CS, IS, ICT, CS-EE… etc. rather than the piecemeal framework we currently have that is strongly aligned with subdivision of the discipline.
3. We need professionalism in learning and teaching, where people dedicate time to improve their L&T – no more stagnant courses!
4. We need to have enough time to be professional! L&T must be seen as valuable and be allocated enough time to be undertaken properly.
5. It would be great to have a Field of Research Code for Education within the Discipline of ICT – as distinct from general education coding – to make sure that CS Ed/ICT Ed is seen as educational research in the discipline, rather than a non-specific investigation.
6. We need to identify and foster a community of practice to get out of the silos. Let’s all agree that we want to do this properly and ignore school and University boundaries.
7. We need to stop talking about the lack of national community and start addressing the lack of a national community.

So a good validation for the early work at the Forum and I’m really looking forward to my meeting at RMIT tomorrow. Thanks, Graham and Catherine, for being so keen to host the first official ALTA engagement and dissemination event!