Developing Australian Academics' Capacity: Supporting the Adoption of Open Educational Practices in Curriculum Design

This seed project initiative addressed an identified gap in Australian higher education between awareness of open educational practices (OEP) and implementation of OEP, particularly the production, adaptation and use of open educational resources (OER) to support the design of innovative, engaging and agile curriculum. In response, the authors aimed to design, develop, pilot and evaluate a free, open and online professional development course focused on supporting curriculum design in higher education. The specific aim of the course - Curriculum design for open education (CD4OE) - is to develop the capacity of academics in Australia to adopt and incorporate OER and OEP into curriculum development, for more effective and efficient learning and teaching across the sector

Student and supervisor perspectives in a computer-mediated research relationship

A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. This paper presents the reflective perspectives of the student and supervisor in a successful computer-mediated research relationship at Deakin University (Australia). Key contributing factors are discussed in a dialog format covering the role of computer-mediated communication (CMC), the projection of social presence, student self-efficacy beliefs, the role of information and communication technology (ICT), and interaction in online professional networks. Drawing on relevant theory, inherent challenges are addressed, informing some concluding suggestions as to how supervision might become more responsive to the emergent forms of research learning being experienced by escalating numbers of postgraduate students studying at a distance via ICT.<br /

Design for resilience at home: Integrating housing and regenerative food systems

At the core of this design research is the profound question of how to nourish, shelter and foster the well-being of our burgeoning population on earth, in a regenerative and equitable manner. Contemporary housing and food systems in Australia, as in many developed settings, are largely modernist legacies reflecting a bygone era of cheap and plentiful resources, and persistent anthropocentric perspectives disconnecting humans from our ecological dependencies. Viewed from a resilience perspective, dominant housing types and food system institutions are deeply implicated in widening 'ecological overshoot' and biospheric disruption, as are associated practices of design. In response, I propose how housing and food systems can be integrated as an urban resilience strategy through a merger of ecological design research and resilience inquiry. The re-visioning of the homescape central to the thesis builds upon recent developments in urban agriculture, emergent 'productive housing', alternative food movements, and broader sustainable living strategies. The design research approach, interrelating resilience strategies, practice theories, questions of type and participatory design, was conducted over three overlapping phases. Phase 1 ‚ - research into design ‚ - involved a social-ecological analysis of dominant food culture and domestic design centred on the kitchen, thereby establishing critical context for Phases 2 and 3. Phase 2 ‚ - research for design ‚ - comprised my ethnographic participation in 12 Tasmanian food-producing households, representing a range of density and tenure types. In Phase 3 ‚ - research through design ‚ - householders engaged in participatory design workshops to speculate how the home could better support their food producing practices. In this final phase, I also undertook design iterations in response to a design meta-brief synthesised from the Phase 2 and 3 participatory methods. The resulting regenerative food axis design patterns address high-density, medium-density, inner urban, suburban and peri-urban housing, and are represented using schematic models and indicative spatial layouts. In these design outcomes, the kitchen-garden interface is illuminated as the catalyst of regenerative energy, water and nutrient cycles, in addition to important social functions. I follow with discussion of material and immaterial design considerations, scaling out from the kitchen-garden system to community-based alternative food networks. Home-based food production is further located within a resurgence of homecraft, the know-how and making skills of which I highlight as complementary threads in enhancing urban resilience. In order to activate ecological restoration in our vast suburban tracts, I explore roles for design practice embedded within 'living labs' and grassroots networks. The thesis concludes with a strategic framework for integrating housing and regenerative food systems aimed at Australian design practice and design education, and for re-contextualisation in other developed and developing settings

Co-citizen design labs in resilience making

In this paper we share our resilience making approach for a first year design program in which we work intentionally with scale – through the subject matters of resilience, and through our learning design. We respond to the provocation of matters of scale in design to progress our design research in two ways. The first contributes to discussion of design education's remit from within ecological and existential crises, relative to expanding (design) knowledge. We then give focus to the co-citizen design lab that students conduct to illustrate how the inter-scalar relations we explore manifest through students' design action. Here we draw on the 2019 and 2020 co-citizen design labs and evolve its learning design for a third iteration of resilience making in 2021. We conclude by suggesting resilience making as a purposeful way of practising hope and small, ecologically and socially viable transformations

Becoming designers with Earth: propositions for design education

This paper is an account of a design inquiry grounded in teaching design processes with first year students in an international undergraduate design program. Guided by linked questions of how we foster consciousness of living and acting within planetary limits in the context of becoming designers, while shifting from modernist to planetary ways of being, the inquiry flows from critical engagement with a transdisciplinary scholar in the role of discussant. Three urgent propositions for design education emerge: 1) Live with, not on Earth; 2) Let go of being modern, and 3) Translate action with Earth. We discuss each proposition in the context of our co-teaching practice, potentially spurring critical reflection and seeding pedagogic strategies where fellow design educators find resonance. Equally, our propositions may well be challenged in reflection of pluriversal practices of design education as we experience intensifying Earth system destabilisation through the interlocking crises of the Anthropocene in diverse and increasinglyunjust ways

Transfection of primary human skin fibroblasts by electroporation

Primary human skin fibroblasts are an accessible source of phenotypically and karyotypically normal human cells, but are difficult to transfect with exogenous DNA. Here we demonstrate that both transient expression and stable transformation can be carried out by the method of electroporation. Highly efficient transient chloramphenicol acetyltransferase expression was shown after transfection with plasmid pRSVCAT. Stable transformation of human skin fibroblasts to G418 resistance was obtained after electroporation with neo-containing plasmids at an efficiency of approximately 1.4 x 10-5/[mu]g DNA. The ability to easily transfect these cells with exogenous DNA may have important applications in the study of human genetic diseases and cancer.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/27179/1/0000177.pd

Making resilience through design doing

We propose ‘resilience making’ in this paper as urgent, creative and adaptive action through an account of its exploration with students in the first year of an international BFA in design. We focus on the learning design being carried out for the fourth iteration of the module ‘Resilience’ - the last of eight modules completed by students in an introductory year structured around design tools and processes.Our core proposition is that context-rich, place-based making is a means to connect students within social-ecological systems as continua, rather than positioning them as separate from the abstract concepts and systems theory we typically expect them to comprehend. Arising from this learning design process, we highlight insights around sustainability epistemologies, meaningmaking in place, and our valuing of contextual and traditional knowledge.As design practitioner-teachers, we outline our working position in relation to sustainability and resilience education, and our aims of integrating design knowing, seeing and doing. We then detail how the module will unfold with students during May 2019 - a month characterised by: • place-specific making days progressing in focus from personal, to community, to large-scale system resilience • structured reflection by students on their first year learning and placebased making; and • a culminating, ‘co-citizen’ lab week in which students are challenged to carry out adaptive action by linking their own system and timescales in the context of their diverse learning community. We close by questioning how we might advance ‘resilience making’ as designled adaptive action, and strengthen our own resilience as practitioners and teachers of design in a time of crisis

MICROCOSM: An Open Model for Hypermedia With Dynamic Linking

There are currently a number of commercially available hypertext and hypermedia systems, of varying levels of sophistication and usability, but there are still many problems to be resolved in the design of such systems. In this paper, we itemise some of the major problems that we have identified as possibly causing a barrier to the growth and development of hypermedia applications outside the research community. A model of an open hypermedia architecture with dynamic linking features is proposed that moves some way to resolving these problems, and the first implementation of the system, Microcosm, is presented and discussed