University Students Promoting Science in the Community

Project SEARCH (Science Education and Research for Children) has brought these undergraduate students here today. It is an outreach program designed to bring the science resources of a large research university to classrooms and community centers. For the past 9 years, SEARCH students have spent 4 hours each week doing hands-on-science experiments, dissecting frogs, demonstrating microscopes, lecturing about the planets, playing computer games, exploring the World Wide Web, and creating Web pages.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Leaving Home: Europe and 'Utopia'

In the lead-up to the Brexit referendum politicians and journalists invoked the concept of utopia to disparage positions diametrically opposed. On the one hand, the adjective 'utopian' was deployed to describe appeals to the possibility of a rediscovered national self-determination and 'control'. On the other, it was utilized to characterise the conception of a European federation that might subsume or trump the autonomy of separate nation states. I argue here that the deployment of the adjective on both sides of the debate is not a mere accident of language. Rather, it betrays a deeper correspondence between the idea of Europe and the conception of utopia - not just any utopia, but, specifically, that of Thomas More. In More's text we can read a prolepsis of the profound tensions that underlie the U.K.'s relation to Europe today: Utopia anticipates both a retreat into an illusory, isolationist conviction of the possibility of national integrity, and, at the same time, the dream of a Europe not (yet) achieved, whose most ambitious and thus far unrealised objectives - peace, collaboration, respect for human dignity and succour for the dispossessed - flicker into being in the utopian imaginary of a text written over half a millennia before our own fragile and highly contested historical moment

Comparison of Gaussian process modeling software

Gaussian process fitting, or kriging, is often used to create a model from a set of data. Many available software packages do this, but we show that very different results can be obtained from different packages even when using the same data and model. We describe the parameterization, features, and optimization used by eight different fitting packages that run on four different platforms. We then compare these eight packages using various data functions and data sets, revealing that there are stark differences between the packages. In addition to comparing the prediction accuracy, the predictive variance--which is important for evaluating precision of predictions and is often used in stopping criteria--is also evaluated

Performance-based research assessment is narrowing and impoverishing the university in New Zealand, UK and Denmark.

Susan Wright, Bruce Curtis, Lisa Lucas and Susan Robertson provide a basic outline of their working paper on how performance-based research assessment frameworks in different countries operate and govern academic life. They find that assessment methods steer academic effort away from wider purposes of the university, enhance the powers of leaders, propagate unsubstantiated myths of meritocracy, and demand conformity. But the latest quest for ‘impact’ may actually in effect unmask these operations and diversify ‘what counts’ across contexts

Reimagining the role of IL: Sustaining information literacy futures

In this keynote panel conversation we embrace the conference theme as a foundational principle; that is, that information literacy (IL) is essential to combatting mis/dis information in today’s Global Information Society. For us, information literacy, irrespective of the stance or paradigms we adopt, is intrinsically associated with critical thinking and the ability to discern wisely in the information universe. There will be many examples of this in action as this conference progresses over the next two days. Accepting these premises leads us to the important question of how we maximise the impact of the information literacy endeavour. Since its inception, and labelling by Paul Zurkowski in 1974, this has been achieved through contextualising IL to make it meaningful to the widest possible range of stakeholders. Today we will: a) Provide a recent example of contextualisation in the form of ‘Informed Research’. Bringing IL to the research community seems an easy and obvious intention, yet has remained challenging to realise. The potential for IL impact in this space has, been strengthened through the development of the Informed Research Framework, which we discuss as an example of innovation in contextualising IL originating from the work of our team. b) Explore the recent re-emergence of the concept of Information Literacy as a discipline, which has been made possible as a consequence of the ongoing contextualisation of IL over the last almost 50 years. This need for contextualisation has driven ongoing research, scholarship, policy formation and training since the inception of the idea; and has also driven the ongoing reimagining of a response to the question – how do we communicate the relevance and import of IL? These matters have been the subject of recent conversations initiated by a new group focussed on ILIAD (IL Is A Discipline). We conclude that it remains essential for IL Professionals to be at the vanguard of combatting mis/dis information through conveying trusted conventions around information sharing and knowledge construction. We see informed research as pivotal to the process of conveying IL as a discipline to the broader community, establishing disciplinarian is itself a research process. As a discipline embodying transdisciplinarity, information literacy is realised through contextualisation across diverse walks of life and is critical in addressing the contemporary global issues that affect us all. The IL Stakeholder community will no doubt continue these conversations throughout the conference. We look forward to many illuminating debates around contextualization, disciplinarity and the role of IL in securing, discerning, and wisely using information into our global futures

A Balanced Energy Plan for the Interior West

Describes a Balanced Energy Plan for the Interior West region of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Part of the Hewlett Foundation Energy Series

Collaborative Research Culture Framework V5

A framework is available for use in workshops, seminars and other publications to support discussion and professional development of researchers in relation to Collaboration. The framework supports mapping and evaluation of current network, planning for future networks and exploration of collaborative practices

Collaborative Research Culture Framework V2

The framework was developed collaboratively as the two authors were preparing to make separate presentations on the topic of collaboration. Researchers and related stakeholders are invited to use the cultural framework to inform reflection, enabling the creation of healthy (productive and sustainable) collaborations. Highlights of the framework are trust and respect (the roots of collaboration) collaborative communities (the fields of collaboration) and the generation of outputs (the fruits of collaboration)

Supporting higher degree research collaboration: a reflection

This paper demonstrates the application of a collaborative research framework (Gasson & Bruce, 2017) to the Higher Degree Research (HDR) journey. We propose that by positioning this as a collaborative research culture framework it will enable discussion about developing (building, sustaining and maintaining) healthy and productive collaborative research cultures. Both authors were invited to discuss research collaboration in different spaces. We established a way forward by discussing the critical elements of such collaboration. Out of this we built a framework (Gasson & Bruce, 2017). In the course of sharing this framework with colleagues it became clear that the productive discussion and issues lay around building and managing a sustainable collaborative research culture. We realized that evaluating the collaboration is easier (based on performance metrics), evaluating the culture is more difficult but also important. Further we noted that evaluation work to date has focussed on measurable outcomes associated with visible research activity and their outputs. This framework suggests that focus on the culture would be informing, enabling productive cultures to be established. This paper will provide a background as to why this is important and relevant to the current climate (Australian Government, 2015; Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, 2017; Department of Education and Training, 2017; McGagh et al, 2016); Productivity Commission, 2017; Watt, 2015) and describe the proposed culture framework. We then move on to a narrative reflection on the application of the initial collaborative research framework in two contexts and the ensuing discussions and issues that arose. This has led to our view that there is a need for a deliberate focus on the development of a collaborative research culture as an enabler of research productivity; this leads to consideration of the application of the collaborative research culture framework in the HDR context. We conclude the paper by raising key questions such as: What are the characteristics of a productive collaborative research culture? What puts a productive collaborative research culture in place? What puts a productive collaborative research culture at risk? How is a productive collaborative research culture measured and maintained? What is the role of research leaders in building, maintaining and sustaining productive collaborative research cultures? In moving the discussion into the HDR context our intention is to consider how to support students and their supervisory teams to respond optimally to the call for increased collaboration/end-user engagement. The proposed application of the culture framework moves discussion from evaluation, measurement and reporting on the impact of these engagements to the underpinning culture required to enable development of research collaborations. Development work involves a three stage approach starting with building, moving to maintaining and then sustaining based on a justification of the research collaboration’s productive measureable outcomes. Our view is that this development work sits with research leaders. To date these leaders have relied on intuition and modelling from past experience to inform their activity. However, with the increasing focus on collaborative research and its measurement a more systematic approach may be needed. This approach provides leaders with a cultural focused perspective. An example of the application of the framework is provided to demonstrate this

Supporting higher degree research collaboration

This theoretical paper demonstrates the value of a collaborative research culture framework (Gasson & Bruce, 2018a), featuring trust and respect as core elements of healthy collaborations, to support the research success of Higher Degree Research (HDR) students. Higher Degree Research is a term used in Australia to reference Doctoral and Master by Research programs. We propose that by positioning collaboration as part of a research culture built on trust and respect, discussion about and development of healthy collaborative research culture will be facilitated. A healthy culture is defined as one that supports sustainable and productive collaborative research.The applications of the framework demonstrate the role the framework can play in supporting researchers to understand, engage in and manage collaborations. Reflection on discussions to date has led to our view that collaborative success requires a unique set of skills (i.e., skills in the development of a collaborative research culture) and that the framework provides a deliberate and overt way of supporting development of those skills.The framework helps HDRs develop the capacity to build healthy collaborative research cultures vital for their research productivity and longer term success as researchers