VET Development Centre CEO Denise Stevens opens proceedings for the 2013 Specialist Scholar graduation ceremony.
Today I attended the graduation ceremony for all 2013 VET Development Centre Specialist Scholars. The graduation ceremony was the final event for all recipients of this year’s Specialist Scholarship. The event featured an opening address and presentation of certificates and a gifts to all scholars from VET Development Centre CEO Denise Stevens.
The graduation ceremony also featured an amazing presentation from Terese McAleese, Director of Learning at Swinburne University of Technology. Terese spoke about her journey as an immigrant from 1980s Belfast to Melbourne as well as her journey in vocational education and training (VET), from a student to an administrator and teacher and finally to a professional responsible for designing learning experiences. Terese also spoke about the transformational nature of the VET sector and TAFE, a place where skills could be developed for the direct application in industry as well as a place for second chances or opportunities for education that might have been missed the first time. The chance for a new or better life.
Facilitator Greg Stephens got us all thinking about leading projects and teams in this group activity.
Today I attended the second scheduled event for the VET Development Centre Specialist Scholarship. The event was a professional development session facilitated by Greg Stephens. During the session, Greg presented his unique perspective on the following themes that mapped to the nine units that make up BSB51407 Diploma of Project Management:
The People side of Leading Projects
Leading projects in the contemporary workplace
Project Leadership – What’s important?
Leading through the Project life cycle
High performing project teams
Leading teams at each stage of the project cycle
Leading through Project challenges
Addressing resistance; when things go wrong; managing yourself
Greg also initiated lively discussion, activities and presented examples of:
model project success factors such as:
Pinto and Slevin’s 1998 list of 10 project success factors
Turner’s 1999 project drivers diagram
differences between project management and project leadership
project leader qualities
characteristics of effective leaders
characteristics of an effective team
situational leadership model
work preferences – team management systems
Belbin’s Team role summary descriptions
what drives performance and engagement
coaching the GROW model
Tuckman’s four-stage (Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing) group development model with Edison’s (Informing, Conforming and Deforming) expansion
tips for influencing, persuading and resolving conflict
guidelines for leading change
managing employee resistance to change
responding to indifference or anger
a resilience framework (Vision, Determination, Interaction, Relationships, Problem solving, Organisation and Self confidence)
VET Development Centre Specialist Scholarship: Event 1 – Induction
This year I was fortunate enough to be granted a VET Development Centre Specialist Scholarship. Specialist Scholarships are available to non-teaching staff who wish to develop their skills, capability and professional standing within the VET system. Among the services provided by specialist staff are student support, student administration, human resources, learning design, records management, purchasing, learning resources, information technology, occupational health and safety and financial management. The Specialist Scholarship Program focuses on the professional development of non-teaching staff in the context of high level administrative and specialist tasks required of them by internal and external stakeholders.
How am I using my scholarship?
I’m using my Specialist Scholarship to attend the AR Studio Augmented Reality Camp (ARCamp) at the Inspire Centre, Canberra in May 2013. Attending ARCamp will give me the opportunity to develop my practical skills in designing and building augmented reality learning experiences; access to technology, equipment and expertise to prototype augmented reality concepts and evaluate augmented reality as a technology and then determine how it can be best applied to new and existing learning contexts.
By the completion of my scholarship in late 2013, my goal is to have developed a number of marker-based and location-based augmented reality experiences that can be used and then customised by trainers and learners inside the institute and those outside in the wider vocational education community. My goal is to develop these augmented reality experiences in conjunction with enthusiastic teaching staff and teaching centres to make sure the augmented experience accurately represents real workplace activities. The types of real workplace activities I’m currently exploring for augmented reality experiences include hazard/risk identification in the workplace, apply control measures to a hazard/risk in the workplace and fire drill training.
A risk/hazard identification AR experience previsualised with Duplo.
What have I been doing?
Recently, I’ve been researching tools that I can use to develop my augmented experiences. For the moment, I’ve decided to use Aurasma to create my marker-based experiences and Layar to create my location based experiences. During this time I’ve also been using my iPad and a booklet of AR markers on loan from a colleague to explore a number of different marker-based AR experiences.
Explore Voyager
Shoot baskets.
Drift your way around the course.
Take part in a movie tie-in.
Select a NASA spacecraft.
Explore the Curiosity rover.
Customise your shoe.
My exploration of how we learn and how we design and develop digital stuff that helps us learn.
