i agree with your points about the assumptions about mobility and technological literacy this implies, but (in my experience at least) it also comes with very little institutional support for the construction and maintenance of collegiality between the different hierarchies of staff involved in delivering these programs… a junior member of staff is managing the delivery of curriculum by (sometimes) more senior colleagues in other countries as well as armies of sessionals they neither select themselves. what kind of working relationships / dynamics can develop in this context?

oh, maybe i should’ve prefaced this with “don’t get me started”…:) sorry…

It can mean these things and more. I’m certainly interested in the second point. And on the first, I was thinking for instance about the number of off-shore campuses our own universities are running, especially with the assistance of junior faculty.

There seems to be a trend that junior academics are being hired with the expectation that they will spend some time teaching overseas, and/or delivering online courses so that these can be run simultaneously for international and domestic students ($$).

Apart from avoiding the obligation of appropriate resourcing, this seems to involve a couple of assumptions: that younger staff will obviously have the digital literacy to carry out these courses (highly problematic, for a number of reasons), and that they will have the mobility to teach elsewhere (so, no family commitments, etc).

Just a couple of the concerns this raises on top of the ‘presence of the teacher’ (see above)!

Yes – absolutely the teacher is still teaching away like blazes. I certainly didn’t mean we had nothing to do! The case is – quite ridiculously, the opposite (and I have a lighter load than many). What I meant I guess was simply that one reason teachers are so busy (and having to do their best in increasingly difficult circumstances) is that in all the workshops etc I go to, teachers are treated as kinds of teaching machines. In rather old-fashioned terms, the teacher as a person is somewhat occluded. At best they are treated as “professionals” although this again has a particular tone. To put this in another way, although much current rhetoric about teaching emphasises students as, at best, having some kind of experience about which they are totally aware, and at worst, consumers, teachers are more or less not mentioned, except as facilitating either “student experience” (normally of the reductivist cognitivist kind) or “student consumption” of programs. So teachers are reduced to a kind of (very put upon and increasingly controlled) circuit or interface between external system and students (the ambiguous position of students within all this is of course another topic). Perhaps the better question might have been – “where did teacher experience go in rhetoric about learning and teaching?”. Of course, it’s not as though this kind of reduction and control of work experience/enjoyment hasn’t happened in all manner of other workplaces, but that doesn’t mean we should put up with it.

Where is the ‘here’ your question is posed from?

To answer Tama: the conference will be free and open to everyone.

Given that the conference is organised by the Early Career Researchers ‘node’ of the CRN, there will be a pool of travel support available particularly for early career researchers to apply for. We will be calling for expressions of interest in due course once we iron out the details–we haven’t been able to predict yet how many people would be interested in coming.

Conference sounds like it’ll get a few tongues going! And great to see you planning in public. A couple of additional topics I’d certainly be interested to hear about:

* AUTC (formlerly Carrick) vs the ARC – If teaching matters so much, why is teaching-based research funded so poorly?

* Higher Ed Developers Vs Higher Ed – Despite the rapid rise in the number of ‘higher education developers’ in Australia unis, why do most academics (or perhaps most research-intensive academics) view these newcomers with suspicion and often derision? (This probably fits into your exiting topics, but a provocative session title never hurt anyone!)

Oh, and a quick practical question: (if these conferences are open to everyone?) what sort of mechanism do you envisage people using to justify funding from their institutions if formal paper presentations aren’t the go? I know that getting funding for an unconference or similar is pretty tough – most unis, incl mine, want to see evidence of an abstract accepted or no $!