Blog
Critical Thinking and Citizenship
I’ve started seeing an uptick in interest in civics and citizenship education. In Australia, this is perhaps not surprising – after all, the most recent NAP-CC data suggests that there has been little improvement from the poor levels of civic literacy reported in previous iterations, and the iterations before them. In fact, civic literacy appears…
Learn2Analyse
I recently completed the Learn2Analyse microcredential offered via an Erasmus grant and a few European university partners. Suffice to say that I thought it was excellent. It was also very lengthy – approximately 100 hours or so, which I think is roughly equivalent to a 4 credit point microcredential. I found the system they used…
Game Review: The Outer Limits
While I don’t have as much time for gaming these days, I have been making a little bit of time for the PlayStation, and taking advantages of some special deals that are currently available. While this means that I sometimes play games that are not exactly current, it does mean that I get the chance…
Getting started with XR (for teachers)
In one of the subjects that I teach, we talk about current and future trends in education, and especially as they relate to learning design. One of the topics that we spend a bit of time exploring is Extended Reality, which is the catch all term that I use to encapsulate Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality…
Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse
Recently, the National Academy of Education released a report, edited by Lee, White and Dong, entitled Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse. Naturally, it falls within my areas of interest, although the phrasing of civic reasoning and discourse, as opposed to something like active citizenship education, is a term that I don’t personally use, for…
Face to face again
So I recently attended the launch of a part of UTS’s RESHUB program, which is all about encouraging research excellence and providing support. It was a great event – the focus of this particular one was all about creativity and how that might find expression in research – and there was a focus on art…
Civic and Media Literacy
I recently came across this article by Gianfranco Polizzi and Marina Cino Pagliarello which beings by describing the current state of media literacy and citizenship education in the United Kingdom, before calling for the inclusion of more media literacy content and material within the compulsory citizenship syllabus. It’s a good article, and, while the UK…
Review of the Australian Curriculum
So, the next version of the Australian Curriculum is currently out for public review. I will be contributing to a variety of submissions in a number of guises, but I also wanted to document my thoughts here, specifically as they related to Civics and Citizenship. I’ll start by beating my usual drum about the place…
Trains, (no) planes & automobiles
I was recently invited by the Teacher Learning Network to give a presentation as part of their professional development program. They are based in Melbourne, so the plan was for me to do it via Zoom. No problem. I feel like I live half my life on Zoom at the moment. Michael, the director there,…