Education’s not black and white, it’s vibrant grey

This paper offers a learner’s eye-view of a journey through education, written in an auto-narrative style. Sarah’s story spans from Secondary School to College and through University finishing at the point of Graduation. Revealed in this open and honest account is an insight to coping with home life whilst navigating the trials of the Education system. Sarah makes criticisms of her peers at every level reminding us how competitive some students have to be to get on and achieve success in their education. Critical judgements are also made about Sarah’s School teachers and University lecturers, which are at times as rewarding as they are uncomfortable, but always truthful. Consequently, there is much to learn by both academics and students from this sensitive and vulnerable personal revelation. Sarah’s evidence in turn points to some fundamental questions about the genuine outcomes of the Educational system, e.g. what are we actually teaching young people to be like? And do we like the product in terms of their values, beliefs and motives? A concluding message from Sarah’s perspective is that greater independence in learning, freedom in thinking and equipping people to reason, judge and make decisions in whatever realm, may be defining steps towards becoming educated

Improving outcomes-based engineering education in Australia

Graduate attributes are now a ubiquitous feature of higher education in Australia and internationally, and have been part of engineering education for more than a decade. The idea of graduate attributes is an apparently simple concept, focusing on educational outcomes, rather than inputs and process. While there is evidence of some benefits in engineering education arising from the introduction of outcomes-based accreditation, there is also evidence of many short-comings of the graduate attributes approach. There would be significant value in Engineers Australia providing additional discipline-specific guidance on attribute development. There would be significant value in Engineers Australia simplifying and consolidating the current multi-document accreditation system. A genuinely outcomes-based accreditation system would be based (only) on the demonstrated individual student attainment of appropriate graduate attributes, which might be delivered/gained by a range of means, including distance education. To fully meet the letter and spirit of the law for accreditation, programs will need to adopt some method of certification of individual student attainment of graduate attributes - one such method would be the use of student portfolios.<br /

The limitations of speech control: perceptions of provision of speech-driven environmental controls

This study set out to collect data from assistive technology professionals about their provision of speech-driven environmental control systems. This study is part of a larger study looking at developing a new speech-driven environmental control system