Nick Kelly

The AI future for lesson plans is already here

Artificial Intelligence in schools, , , , ,


Another of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference or want to respond to something you’ve heard, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

George Siemens gave the 2022 AARE conference keynote speech yesterday morning and the takeaway was this: artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing education in Australia whether we’re ready for it or not. He went on to suggest that unless we’re mindful we, as researchers and teacher educators, may not have a seat at the table in deciding what the future of education will look like. This blog post is about the future of AI-generated lesson plans and how we might think about this development today and into the future. Think of it as a concrete case study of exactly what George was talking about this morning where the conclusions might apply to other areas of education

What do today’s AI-generated lesson plans look like?

AI-generated lesson plans are already better than many people realise. Here’s an example generated through the GPT-3 deep learning language model:

Prompt: A lesson plan for English for teaching 16 year old students about the idea of “juxtaposition” within Romeo and Juliet.

Output from GPT-3 (verbatim, with formatting provided by the algorithm):

Background

Juxtaposition is the act of placing two things side by side, often for contrast. In literature, authors often use juxtaposition to create a certain mood or atmosphere, or to emphasize certain qualities of a character or situation.

 In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare uses juxtaposition extensively to contrast the two lovers and their families, the Montagues and the Capulets. He also uses juxtaposition to contrast the tragic events of the play with the light-hearted moments.

 Objectives

 By the end of the lesson, students will be able to:

 – Understand the concept of juxtaposition

– Identify examples of juxtaposition in Romeo and Juliet

– Explain how juxtaposition is used to create mood and atmosphere in the play

 Materials

 – A copy of Romeo and Juliet

– A whiteboard and markers

– A teacher-created handout with examples of juxtaposition from the play (optional)

 Procedure

 1. Introduce the concept of juxtaposition to the class. Explain that authors often use this literary device to create contrast and emphasize certain qualities.

 2. Ask the students to think of an example of two things that are often juxtaposed. Write some of their responses on the board.

 3. Tell the students that they are going to be looking for examples of juxtaposition in Romeo and Juliet. Explain that they should pay attention to how the contrast created by the juxtaposition contributes to the mood and atmosphere of the play.

 4. Give the students time to read through the play, or assigned sections of the play if time is limited. As they are reading, they should be looking for examples of juxtaposition.

 5. Once the students have finished reading, ask them to share the examples of juxtaposition that they found. Write these examples on the board.

 6. Finally, ask the students to explain how the juxtaposition affected the mood and atmosphere of the play. What did it emphasize about the characters or the situation?

 Extension Activity

 Have the students find additional examples of juxtaposition in other works of literature, or in everyday life. They can share their examples with the class and explain how the contrast created by the juxtaposition contributes to the overall effect.

Imagine that you’d set a task for a class of second year Bachelor of Education students to create a lesson plan with that same prompt. How do you think the AI response would compare to some of your students?

Anybody can generate their own lesson plans for a year level, subject area, and topic that interests them with a similar prompt: https://beta.openai.com/playground

Some concerns

It is trivially easy to generate useful lesson plans using this technique. One obvious upshot is that setting assessment tasks for any students in initial teacher education that involve them creating lesson plans isn’t a great idea any more—it’s too simple for them to generate one. Yet there are new opportunities that arise:

  • Why not get students to generate a few lesson plans, look at the patterns, and write something about the essential structure of this thing that we call a ‘lesson plan’?
  • Why not get them to take a generated lesson plan and improve it, annotating the reasons why their changes have made it better?

Another legitimate concern that arises is that inservice teachers might start to use the next generation of AI-generated lesson plans (which will undoubtedly be an order of magnitude more powerful) without critique—or worse, that some jurisdictions might actually request that teachers use such an approach in future.

A word that we need to look to is “design”

The issues raised by AI regarding lesson plans and in many places in education too can be addressed by consideration of design. When design in education is done well (whether that’s learning by design, design thinking, co-design, or within the subject area named “design”) it always places an emphasis on two things:

  1. Authentic problems: such that the learner must always construct an interpretation of the problem before they can address it
  2. Process and rationale such that the output that the student produces is impressive only if their process and rationale support what they’ve done.

When assessments follow these two ingredients then educators can give students free rein to use whatever tools they have at their disposal. The adoption of AI stops being a concern. When students are being assessed through their process rather than their output, students can use whatever tools are available. The challenge is integrating use of such tools into solving problems through collaboration, critical thinking, cultural understanding, and creativity.

Design as a response to “what should be taught”

George Siemens concluded his presentation by suggesting a list (controversially) of what should be taught in the context of an AI future. A summary/interpretation of his key points of what we should be teaching is:

  • Beingness: what it means to be human in the world, the interconnectedness of all things
  • Systems thinking: how systems change and what complexity is about
  • Technology and how to use it: machine learning and data literacy, computational thinking, collaborating with non-human intelligences

Increasingly, design has become a part of education: design for learning, learning by design, thinking, and so on. The epistemic fluency to design using computational tools in a way that enriches material life and human culture is at the root of all three of these areas. 

For any subject area, teaching using a design approach shifts the focus from knowing content to knowing process. It becomes less about how to get from A to B in a straight line and more about knowing how to frame problems, use tools, and communicate outcomes. More design in education provides one way of responding to this increase presence of AI in education, whether we’re ready for it or not.

It might even provide a response to George’s provocation about McKinsey, Deloitte, or Microsoft trying to get in on a slice of the education sector. Education conceived as design—process rather than output—prioritises the humans involved in the enterprise and makes it harder to sideline educators.

Dr Nick Kelly is a Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design at the Queensland University of Technology, in the School of Design. He is a genuinely cross-disciplinary researcher spanning the fields of Design and Education. He conducts research into design cognition (how designers think), metacognition in learning (how teachers and learners develop their metacognitive abilities), and places where these two things come together (design pedagogy, design for learning, learning by design, design of learning technologies). His specialisation is in the design, facilitation, and analysis of online communities.

Dr Kelli McGraw is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education Social Justice at QUT. Currently teaching units in Secondary English curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, her prior experience includes teaching high school English and debating in Southwest Sydney, NSW. Kelli researches the fields of English curriculum studies, secondary school assessment, teacher identity, digital literacy, popular culture and new media texts.

Image by Adobe Stock

Let’s talk about job satisfaction for teachers, not just about who leaves and when

teacher attrition, , , , , , ,

In Australia we have been talking about rates of attrition in the teaching profession for a long time. Yet when we focus on attrition we miss the bigger picture. The key issue is not just who is leaving and when, but how we can improve job satisfaction for teachers so that they can flourish within their role, not just survive.

There are decades of research on this theme and it’s certainly not a new idea—or a simple one to address.

What is new here though is that my team has analysed data from over two thousand Australian early career teachers. We’ve tried to untangle the ways in which satisfaction and attrition are linked to each other, and to preservice education and working conditions.

Yes, the findings do show a strong but unsurprising link between satisfaction and attrition. Far more important though are the findings that suggest ways in which teacher satisfaction might be improved.

To introduce some terms I will briefly describe what is often referred to in a faintly dehumanising way as the ‘teacher pipeline’ but which I will refer to as the ‘teachers’ journey’.

The teachers’ journey

Many things need to fall into place for a system to produce and keep high quality motivated teachers. People need to make a choice that they want teaching to be their vocation, and then those people need to finish their initial teacher education. These recently graduated teachers then need to get a job in a school, get registered, and make it through the first five years of teaching. At this point they will be in the sun-drenched, happy-ever-after territory of being considered an established teacher.

Anywhere along this journey we can find factors that will influence teacher satisfaction and attrition.

If teachers aren’t well prepared for the job, then it may be that we are setting them up to fail—their preservice education (their initial teacher education) might be influencing their future satisfaction.

If teachers get their first job in an environment where they are well supported, then this might help to shield them from the slings and arrows of the first few years of teaching. This early career support,in an ideal world, might look like having a helpful mentor, a quality orientation program, a reduced load in the first year(s) of teaching, and structured time to reflect on the job with peers.

Finally, there are factors that are relevant to the teacher’s current job—their overall job satisfaction and the factors that describe their perception of on the job conditions. These relate to the school as well as external factors and range from things like the quality of pay and the status of the profession (external factors), through to what is going on in the classroom, and relationships with students (inside classroom factors), through to relationships with parents, school leadership, and other teachers, and workload (outside classroom factors)—these are just some of the 17 variables we used in our study.

How this all fits together: our findings

For our study we used a regression analysis of data from 2,144 Australian early career teachers, adjusted for school sector, type, geolocation, socioeconomic status, and job security. Our study was a disaggregation of existing data from the 2010 Staff In Australia’s School Survey . For those wanting details of our methods and findings please find the link at the end of this post.

We made significant findings from our analysis.

1. Teachers who feel they are not satisfied with their job are more than six times as likely to plan on leaving the profession.

While this association (between satisfaction with work and wanting to stay in that job) is unsurprising, having a statistic to back it up is meaningful. It is worth mentioning that, in previous studies, an intention to leave the profession has been shown to be a useful guide to actual attrition.

2.  No variable in preservice education was strongly associated with teacher satisfaction.

This suggests that trying to address teacher satisfaction through changes to their preservice education is unlikely to have success. However, when teachers felt that they had been prepared for “working with other teachers”, and for “using a variety of instructional methods for diverse student needs”, they were far less likely to want to leave the profession—but they were not more satisfied with their jobs.

3. Three kinds of early career support were associated with satisfaction in the job

  • a helpful mentor,
  • a helpful orientation program, and
  • a reduced face-to-face workload.

Again, these are not surprising findings (they echo existing research from the past two decades) but the size of the sample gives us increased confidence that this holds true for Australian teachers. Of these, it is only having a helpful mentor that was also a strong factor in teachers being less likely to plan on leaving the profession.

4. Factors relating to job conditions most associated with wanting to leave the profession.

From strongest to least (only considering those variables with a strong effect size, out of 17 variables in total) were:

  • The amount of clerical/administrative work required
  • What teachers are currently accomplishing with students
  • Opportunities for career advancement
  • The value that society places on teachers’ work
  • Relationships with parents/guardians.
  • The amount of teaching expected
  • Freedom to decide how to do the job
  • Salary

Where to from here?

Ideas from positive psychology suggest that intrinsic motivation in a job requires having opportunities for autonomy, competence, and relationships with other humans. The paper that my team published makes a few key points that, along with our findings outlined above, can be understood in this context.

1. It seems that reshaping preservice teacher education (yet again) would not be the most effective place to put our future efforts.

2. For all the studies that have been carried out about mentorship programs and their effectiveness, three out of ten early career teachers in Australia in our analysis either had an unhelpful mentor or had no mentor. Yes some states have since established a policy about mandatory mentorship programs, but for some beginning teachers (anecdotally) these can be just box-ticking exercises.

3. The fact that clerical/administrative burdens was one of the strongest factors considered in linking on-the-job conditions to intention to leave the profession suggests that this may be a place to look for improving teacher satisfaction. The literature suggests that administrative burdens have increased for teachers in the last decade. It is difficult for any study to conclusively show that reducing this administrative burden would improve teacher satisfaction; but it is a proposal that certainly passes the common sense test. Again, this is a point made by many scholars before me; but having solid data to back it up adds to the case.

Research using quantitative datasets, such as ours, can play a role in guiding policy; particularly when it backs up what decades of theoretical and qualitative research have already proposed.

Yet when looking at any dataset the paradigm within which one views it matters. My great hope, personally, is that policymakers across the country can adopt the paradigm of positive psychology, and ask questions about how teachers can be supported to flourish in their jobs—rather than the old paradigm, of asking how we can keep them in the profession. Maybe then we could start to truly transform the conditions within which teachers go about their vital work.

With thanks to my co-authors on the original article: Dr Marcela Cespedes, Dr Marc Clarà and Professor Patrick Danaher.

Dr Nick Kelly is a Lecturer in Interaction Design at the Queensland University of Technology, in the School of Design. His research focuses on the cognition of creativity, the support needs of preservice and early career teachers, and the design of online communities of teachers.

Download our full paper Early career teachers’ intentions to leave the profession: The complex relationships among preservice education, early career support, and job satisfaction

Economic thinking is corrupting education in Australia

Education policy, , ,

There is a growing trend in education of proposing and enacting policy ideas that are based primarily upon economic thinking. I believe there are hidden impacts of applying economic thinking (typified by price signals, market mechanisms and market-oriented ideas) to education. In this post I want to unpack some of that thinking and look at what is happening to education because of it.

 Corruption of the concept of education

The philosopher Michael Sandel proposes that there are two main arguments against policy based on economic thinking. These arguments are made on the basis of fairness and corruption, and both are significant for education researchers and policy makers. While it is typical in policy formation for much attention to be given to the concept of fairness – with steps taken to ensure that policy is as fair as possible – the concept of corruption is rarely given consideration. In the case of education policy, this relates to questions about how policy can change (or corrupt) society’s conception of the role and purpose of education, and about how the moral value of education can be crowded out by economic values.

If you want to read more about this notion of economic thinking in education you should read Hidden Privatisation in Public Education and (released in July this year) Commercialisation in Australian Public Schooling. This latter study provides data confirming that teachers in Australia are indeed concerned about the influence of commercialism in schools, characterised by “top-down, test-based accountability, the introduction of market competition between schools, the use of private sector managerial practices, and an increasingly standardised curriculum that focuses on literacy and numeracy” .

In this climate of economic thinking there is a great need to attend to the moral value of education – its role and its purpose in society.

What does economic thinking in education look like?

 Some examples from Australia and around the world demonstrate what economic thinking in education looks like:

1) Various schools within the USA have experimented with paying students to learn. In Dallas, a school district paid students to read books ($2 per book) to motivate higher literacy. In New York and Chicago students were given rewards based on their performance in assessments.

2) Still in the USA, there was an experiment in some charter schools with the inverse of this: giving students financial penalties for bad behaviour. This was dubbed as a move “from corporal punishment to capital punishment”.

3) In Australia, in the Northern Territory, a similar concept was enacted on a broader scale when schools had part of their funding determined by student attendance levels. Some commentators referred to this as “inverse needs-based funding”.

4) Politicians and think tanks have at various times come up with the idea of linking school funding or teacher pay to performance in standardised tests such as NAPLAN.

5) In Australia, recent increases to higher education student fees and repayments have been justified by claims about the higher earnings gained by those who have attended university. Minister Birmingham uses this rationale to suggest that the extra cost for students is a “fairer deal for taxpayers”. In the United Kingdom, the former Secretary of State for Education recently stated this same argument more bluntly, saying “it’s wrong if people who don’t go to university find that they have to pay more in taxation to support those who do.”

6) Australia has invested $5.1million to pilot ‘P-TECH’ (Pathways in Technology) high schools, and there are currently 14 pilot sites across the country. These schools are jointly funded by industry and government. They provide traditional high school study in parallel with industry-supported STEM education geared towards employment, or further education, in a particular sector. The economic thinking and employment-oriented focus of this program is evident in Wyong High School’s rationale for adopting the P-TECH model:

“In the P-TECH model, local employers partner with schools, TAFEs/RTOs and universities to strengthen students’ prospects of a successful transition to work by ensuring they develop the technical and personal skills employers are looking for. To achieve this goal, the school is working collaboratively with other education and training providers and a number of major locally-based employer partners including Mars Food Australia (Masterfoods), Sanitarium Health & Wellbeing Australia, the University of Newcastle and the Central Coast NSW Business Chamber. Commencing in January 2017, Wyong High School has begun to introduce an innovative P-TECH styled skills-based program that will provide an industry-supported pathway for students to achieve a post-school qualification in areas of growing local employment demand.”

When economic thinking takes over

These varied examples highlight different aspects of economic thinking. For example, when students are being paid to learn or are fined for bad behaviour, when schools are being paid for improving attendance, and when teachers are being paid for having higher achieving students, a financial incentive is being introduced where, previously, the motivation had been intrinsically oriented.

The economic justification for these ideas is that by “incentivising” a particular behaviour, you get more of it. However, this is not always the case as introducing a price mechanism, certain intrinsic or pro-social motivations can be lost – or “crowded out” as Sandel describes it.

This crowding out effect can be observed in a classic study of a childcare centre in Israel. Parents were often late to pick up their children, so the childcare centre experimented with the idea of introducing a financial penalty for being late. Traditional economic thinking dictates that this should result in fewer parents being late to pick up their children as they now have an added disincentive to be late.

However, the inverse occurred: more parents were late to pick up their child than previously, when there was no financial penalty. One interpretation of this is that the pro-social motivations for being on-time for picking up children (e.g. not infringing upon the teachers) were crowded-out by the introduction of a financial mechanism, and the parents felt that this justified them in being late.

A similar phenomenon can occur with the introduction of price mechanisms in education. For example, to return to the cases listed above, a student may feel justified in not doing their homework if they have resolved to accept the corresponding infringement. The intrinsic motivation in this case (i.e. that doing homework will help the student learn) is therefore at risk of being lost, and the student may begin to make decisions about their education that are based primarily on perceived economic benefits. Whilst there are many possible reasons to critique such ideas of performance pay for schools, teacher, and students, the focus here is upon the way that the introduction of an incentive changes how people relate to the activity; the very concept of what that activity is about can shift.

What is lost when education is framed in economic terms?

In the case of the recent changes to HECS-HELP fees and repayments, the public discussion centred almost entirely around whether it was fair. Debate went something like this: On the one hand, there is evidence that those going to university earn more money than those who do not. On the other hand, education is a public good and should be supported by the government. What percentage of student fees should be paid by students and what percentage by government? What kind of repayment system would enable equality of access to higher education without the burden of repayments becoming prohibitive?

My point does not address the final mix that was present in the policy but rather that the terms of the debate were entirely around fairness. Was it fair for students? For different degree types? For women? For students from lower socio-economic areas? For those who drop out of a degree? These are all important questions that do deserve to take primacy in debate around this policy. However, there is a separate argument to be made about the resulting degradation of the concept of education from the repetition of such policy ideas and their rationale. What is altered or lost by framing university education as a purely personal and economic good?

A similar question applies to the case of P-TECH schools in Australia. An economic way to frame the argument is that having industry invest in high school students is a “win” for everyone who is involved: schools get more money for education, students get a head-start in skills in technology that employers want, and industry gets graduates that have the skills they need to take up entry-level positions following graduation.

However, we can ask once more: What is altered or lost when we frame the debate in these terms? Or perhaps: What are the moral values surrounding society’s conception of education that are being degraded or corrupted by promoting models of high school education solely on the basis of their economic merit and their ability to help students get jobs? To be clear, having an education system that supports a strong economy is not problematic in and of itself; but what happens when such aims crowd out other goals for education?

Why economic thinking degrades education

The aim of this short post is to draw attention to the way that economic thinking degrades the very concept of education. Often those critiquing economic rationale do so on the basis that it is unfair to certain sectors of society. Another critique that is often missed is that such rationale cheapens the very meaning of education: why we engage in it, how it benefits society.

A response to this excess of economic thinking in education is increased public discourse around why education ought to be valued as a social good.

Many teachers complain that students only wish to learn the things on which they will be examined– the classic question “will this be in the test?” Students are chastised for even asking the question because it indicates that they are blind to the broader merits of learning.

Is there not a large contradiction here? We expect our students to be aware of the intrinsic value of learning, yet they are taught within a system that increasingly values only economic thinking.

 

Dr Nick Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education and the Science and Engineering Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. He is also an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Digital Life Laboratory at the University of Southern Queensland. His research focuses on motivation within the teaching profession, the online support needs of beginning teachers and the cognition of creativity. Further details can be found on Nick’s website 

Online communities for teachers: what research says about their limits and potential

online communities for teachers, supporting other teachers online, teacher mentors, Teacher professional development, teachers mentoring teachers, ,

The ability to be connected “anywhere, anytime” is recent enough that most professions are still figuring out how make best use of this connectivity, and teaching is no exception. Online communities offer great potential for teachers, in helping them to create and sustain networks of mutual support. However I believe current online networks are still a long way from reaching their potential to help the profession.

Teacher educators emphasise the importance of having a network of colleagues to draw upon in the challenging early years of the profession, yet many beginning teachers find themselves without adequate access to such support. When asked to name their most useful form of support, many simply say that they have none. Preliminary results from further research show teachers in rural locations, on short-term contracts, and supply teachers, are more likely than other teachers to lack support.

A strong online community of teachers is no panacea for the problem of early career teacher support. But improvements in online communities have the potential to make a significant difference, particularly for those teachers currently missing out on support.

The potential for improving online communities of teachers

There are already a wide range of online communities that aim to help teachers to support one another. These range from groups within large corporate providers (e.g. Facebook, EdModo) and government sites (e.g. Scootle) to institutional (e.g. individual university-provided sites) and researcher-led platforms. Yet there are still significant areas for improvement.

What teachers can do to support other teachers online

Following existing research, six roles can be identified that experienced teachers take on to support other teachers online:

  1. Advocates the practical. Teachers help one another with day-to-day pragmatic aspects of the profession, such as finding resources for a lesson or navigating the bureaucracy.
  2. Conveners of relations. Teachers instigate relationships with other teachers, and can make introductions to other useful contacts.
  3. Agents of socialisation. Teaching as a profession has cultural norms. Experienced teachers induct other teachers into these norms, such as in the way that they share stories and the ‘memes’ that they promulgate.
  4. Modelers of practice. Teachers give a rich description of what they are doing in the classroom, providing a model of teaching practice.
  5. Supporters of reflection. Collaborative reflection is often considered the most important kind of knowledge for beginning teachers, to make sense of confusing situations and learn from their experiences.
  6. Providers of feedback. Teachers provide a constructive source of feedback, such as pedagogical and curriculum advice or in reconstructing an event that has occurred.

In a review of existing online communities, it appears that certain conditions are needed for teachers to be willing to engage in the most important of these roles: modelling practice, supporting reflection and providing feedback. Such a connection appears to have preconditions of a trusted environment with stable relationships and a sense of privacy.

What a good online community might look like

There is a design challenge that is yet to be overcome for online communities of teachers. Teachers have a need for the privacy and trust of smaller communities. Yet at the same time there is much value in having massive communities involving many thousands of members.

The reason for this is that, in general, the amount of experience held within an online community grows with its size. The more teachers there are in an online community, the more likely it is that someone in that community can help with whatever support it is that you are looking for. Massive communities can have enormous utility in professions where all members of that profession know that there is a single community in which re-usable knowledge is shared.

For example, currently teaching resources are stored in many different sites on the web and it can be confusing for a teacher trying to find a quality resource. Over time it is likely that, as with other professions, there will be some form of convergence on a single massive community where resources are curated and can be re-used.

Teaching knowledge can be talked about as being both situational (knowledge from experience) and declarative (separable from experience). The design challenge is that private, trusted communities are needed for developing situational knowledge (such as through collaborative reflection). Yet massive, open communities are more appropriate for developing large stores of re-usable declarative knowledge. How can this tension be resolved?

Learning by doing

In Queensland a large collaboration is underway, attempting to create an online community that addresses this design challenge. All universities within the state, around 50 academics involved in teacher education and the accreditation body (the Queensland College of Teachers) have all come together to create TeachConnect, with the support of the Office of Learning and Teaching through the Step Up project.

TeachConnect is an altruistic online network to support teachers in the transition from pre-service into early career teaching. Currently the platform is only available for secondary mathematics and science teachers, but it will eventually be available for all teachers. This is the third year of an ongoing design-based research study.

TeachConnect is an attempt to integrate the need for private, trusted spaces for reflection into massive open spaces for re-using knowledge. In the network, the two halves are implemented as: a group mentorship program, where pre-service teachers in private groups of around 30 are mentored by two experienced teacher mentors; and an open area for question and answer and re-usable community knowledge. The network is still being developed, but offers a space in which to explore ways that these two halves can be better integrated to create something authentically useful for teachers. Currently, TeachConnect has 500 users, and as it grows the research team is further developing the platform in response to the design needs of the users.

The future for online teacher communities

As a profession, we are a long way from realising the potential of online communities.

There are certainly limits to the potential for online communities to support teachers. For example, the affective and cognitive engagement that we as humans obtain from face-to-face contact cannot be fully replaced by online connectivity. Having quality mentors and induction programs within schools is as important as ever – online communities in no way replace this.

Yet given the potential value of online communities to augment this current support (and given the capacity for online communities to scale well) it seems valuable that researchers explore ways to achieve the potential of these communities.

Every profession is different, and developing online networks for teachers requires teacher-specific solutions. Design-based research, with a grounding in the theory of teacher support needs and expanded through real-world exploration, offers one way that we can move towards online networks that are more useful for teachers.

 

nick-kelly-portrait copyDr Nick Kelly is a Research Fellow at the Australian Digital Futures Institute at the University of Southern Queensland, Springfield. He is a Research Fellow on the Step Up project at the Queensland University of Technology and one of two leaders of the TeachConnect project in this role. His research focuses on the development of online communities, the support needs of beginning teachers and the cognition of creativity. Further details on some of the research in progress that is touched upon here can be found on the website www.nickkellyresearch.com.

Nick is presenting his paper The Potential and Limits of Online Communities for Rural Teachers at the #AARE2015 conference in Fremantle, Western Australia, this week.