The University of Technology Sydney’s Connected Intelligence Centre launched 1stAugust 2014, when I moved down under, after close on 19 years at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. Two years ago, I marked CIC’s 10th Birthday, but today this chapter came to a close. I’ve had the privilege of 12 years leading this amazing team in a research-active innovation centre within the VP/DVC Academic’s Education Portfolio. My thanks to Shirley Alexander for conceiving CIC, and Kylie Readman who continued to recognise our work. I now return to my substantive position as an academic, moving out from a central unit to a new academic home. But not just any home…
Those of you who’ve been in Sydney or closer to developments at UTS over the last few years will be aware of all the organisational drama, which I won’t rehearse here. Suffice to say we are reconfiguring for the future. As such processes always are, this has been costly to us all, those who have left, and those still here.
If we glance in the rear-view mirror, I think it’s not too much to conclude that CIC made its mark within UTS, and well beyond. The organisational dynamics of getting a hybrid R&D&Service centre like CIC to work are interesting. In some of my writing I’ve tried to capture the DNA of our human-centred approach to co-designing advanced data science and generative AI tools used by many tens of thousands of students, upskilling academics who aligned their learning design and assessments to integrate the tools into a coherent student experience. A very partial snapshot:
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- Launching the Master of Data Science & Innovation, the transdisciplinary data science program that CIC coordinated from 2015-18. The Victorian Blackfriars building that was our home for many years became a very special incubator of the next generation of data scientists now embedded in so many teams across diverse sectors.
- Instant writing feedback since 2016 using the pre-GenAI technologies of the day, and the world’s first feedback on reflective writing.
- Customised feedback emails to each student in sometimes large cohorts of hundreds, tailored to what they had accomplished, their goals, or their learning pathway.
- Embodied teamwork analytics augmenting our simulation wards with sensors to pick up who’s doing what and where in a nursing team exercise, with automated visualisations ready to support the immediate debrief.
- Multiple GenAI-powered applications for educators, students and researchers, developed in close partnership with our technology, analytics and AI colleagues.
- All of them pedagogically-grounded tools, deployed in our degree programs, with empirical evaluations. Rigorous research published in the leading journals and conferences that put UTS on the international research and practice map in Learning Analytics and AI in Education.
- Pioneered the use of Deliberative Democracy for student/staff consultation on AI/EdTech Ethics
- Listening not only to educators on the challenges and opportunities of GenAI, but also to the diversity of student voices.
- PhD alumni who’ve conducted Design-Based Research in partnership with faculties to develop co-design approaches, iterate next generation feedback tools, and advance conceptual frameworks and methods.
- And so much more — see the website and news stories.
To all the students, academics, and professional staff who’ve been part of the CIC journey — your dedication, expertise and teamwork made the magic happen — Thank You! CIC has been a significant chapter in many lives 🙂
But now the page is turning, and we embark on the next chapter. I’m delighted to announce that I and my PhD students are crossing the few steps from the UTS Tower over Alumni Green, to join the Transdisciplinary School. TD School is where you’ll find the most extraordinarily eclectic group on campus, inhabiting the edges and liminal spaces where disciplines rub shoulders (not always comfortably), working with stakeholders on their most pressing societal challenges, breaking new ground pedagogically with students, and advancing knowledge about a world that isn’t carved into disciplinary boxes. “Transdisciplinarity is… when great minds don’t think alike”.
Some of you will have registered a shift in my work over the last few years which makes this move particularly significant. While the warnings of planetary overshoot have been there for decades, for those ready to listen (Limits to Growth anyone?), it’s becoming quite clear every passing month how serious the disruption to life as we know it is going to be. This is not just a climate crisis, but a deeply entangled set of ecological, societal, political, technological, psychological (and hence unavoidably educational) systems interactions. The global polycrisis is just one of the latest names to bring deep systems thinking and change strategies to our attention. The move to TD School opens fresh conversations and trajectories, as I figure out the work I am called to do, and who to do it with. I already work closely with some TD colleagues and PhDs (indeed two CIC alumni are now faculty: Simon Knight and Antonette Shibani), and so I very much look forward to seeing what emerges next.
And if you wish, do please share a CIC memory/reflection…
