Conference Archives

17/03/202318/04/2023

English Australia: PD Fest 2023

This weekend, I’m presenting at a QLD English teachers conference. This post shares the four AI tools I’ll be presenting in my session. Enjoy! NG

This weekend, I am presenting at the English Australia QLD PD Fest 2023.

The EA PD Fest is an excellent opportunity to engage with fellow educators and share ideas and experiences about teaching, learning and educational engagement. I always look forward to this event and have attended several times before. See more on the EA PD Fest 2017 here and the EA PD Fest 2018 here.

The session I am presenting will explore how some AI tools can be incorporated by English teachers into classrooms. I’ve been experimenting with using AI with my English language students for a while now and I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences with other teachers – and hearing their ideas as well.

English Australia: PD Fest 2023. Bicycles Create Change.com 17 March 2023

Innovative AI Tools for English Language Teachers:
The Future is Now by Nina Ginsberg

Attention all English teachers! Join us for an exciting session where you will learn how to harness the power of AI in your ELICOS classroom. In this session, we use some of the latest AI tools to engage students and reinforce English language skills. Not only will you leave with a better understanding of how AI can support language acquisition, but you will also gain practical tips and strategies for effectively integrating AI into your existing curriculum and classes. All demos are in real-time so you can see exactly how quick and easy it is to create unique and purposeful AI-supported ELICOS activities.

Bring a laptop or iPad if you want to follow along. All participants receive a handy take-home AI teacher’s resource pack. Suitable for new AI users and teachers who want to know more. This is an opportunity to stay ahead of the curve in education technology and bring some excitement to your English language classroom. So don’t wait any longer, embrace the future!!

CLICK HERE: 2023 English Australia PD Fest Program

Here’s a copy of my presentation PPT:
Student permission has been given for all work shared.

Ninas AI tools PPT_EA PD Fest 2023 Download

Paint by Text is a free and simple AI image editor tool that allows users to create and edit images using natural language commands. Users can give simple instructions, such as “make the sky more blue” or “remove the background”. There are three stock images to edit or you can upload your own photo.

Start with simple instructions and check the basics

Get student suggestions and/or pre-teach some useful words
Start with one simple instruction
Use keywords not full sentences or complex instructions
Check spelling
Discuss ambiguity

AI takes things literally

Some good things to keep in mind from Re-Thought: Write positive prompts that describe what should be present, not what should be missing. “A man without a beard” will result in a bearded man. If it is in the prompt, it is likely to be mapped. So write “a clean-shaven man” for pictures with predictably clean-shaven man

Vocabulary: use concrete instead of abstract words. For example:

Concrete: koala, bicycle, sushi, spaghetti, fire truck (more predicable)
Abstract: hope, happy, success (more diverse results)
Build up instructions
Start with one word, then build up
Give students a few examples: night, Umbrella, Christmas, gift, purple ribbon, in Tokyo

Grammar: discuss different language features

Prepositions – above, next to, besides, from, in, out, under
number noun OR adjective + noun

Class Activity: Change the Picture

Give students a chance to explore the tool. Ask them to change a picture three times and record what prompts were used. Students can also upload their own picture to modify. In pairs or groups, use the four images to practice key English language features, such as

Compare and contrast
Vocab: clothing, colours, setting, time, objects
Past, present, future
Tell the story…
Predict what picture/will happen next
Discuss what worked and didn’t work with each photo edit

MURF AI is a text to speech tool that employs a versatile AI voice generator to produce natural-sounding speech from text inputs. MURF AI voice generator can customize the speech by selecting different voices, languages, and speech styles to suit specific needs. The free version offers a 300-word immediate voiceover recording and 10 mins in the studio and there is a massive range of voice selections.

The two MURF features I’ve used are the free text to speech and the Studio.

1. Text to Speech

Access this online via the NUF website Product tab. It gives 200 words and have 3 voices to choose from. Once you paste your text, it will take a few second to covert. You cannot download this copy, just listen online.

2. The Studio

Upload any documents, Google Sheets, PDFs or web links and you get 10 mins free audio. Also has a great range of voices and functionality to change speed, share and export.

Also try Speechify which is the next step up in Text to Speech.

Teach Anything is a simple and easy to use free, open-source AI tool that allows users to ask a question which it then creates two different versions – easy or professional – of the same answer.

This tool can be used in a variety of ways:

a tool to quickly modify a topic introduction for upper/lower levels
exploring diverse perspectives
outlining oral presentation topics
comparing language registers
discussing vocab/language shifts from spoken/written
In pairs. Give one student the ‘easy’, the other student has the ‘professional’ answer. As a team look, for language shifts and changes. Then together, rewrite the answer again as a ‘new’ third version. I like to use the third as an ‘academic’ answer. This task practices and reinforces academic structures (topic sentences, TEEEL paragraphs, transition words, include examples, specific details and evidence, intext citations…etc). Or as a news report. Or as instructions.

Night Cafe is one of many AI Art Generators that uses Artificial Intelligence to create unique pieces of art in a matter of seconds. Users can input a prompt and/or select from a range of styles. Once you sign in, the interface is relatively straight forward and you can generate one free image at a time or get a set amount of free tokens per day.

In class, I usually show three different AI art generators (Night Cafe is one) and let students experiment and chose their favourite one to work with.

Student-created AI art can be used to in English language classes in several ways:

Speaking and Listening: Students work in pairs or small groups to describe the AI-generated artwork to their peers. This activity can help students develop their speaking and listening skills, as well as their ability to use of targeted language features like grammar, conjunctions, transitions phrases and who, what, when, where, how and why aspects.
Vocabulary Building: Elicit students’ own words, preteach or scaffold vocabulary. Use AI-generated art to reinforce and/or introduce new vocabulary words. Students identify objects, places or concepts within the artwork and practice using the new vocabulary in context.
Writing: Use AI-generated art as inspiration for the writing assignments. Students write a paragraph, short story, poem, or dialogue based on the image, and teachers can provide feedback on their writing skills, including grammar, vocabulary and style.
Paragraph/Essay Writing: Students write a paragraph or short essay (cause and effect, compare and contrast, advantages and disadvantages) about the image, focusing on developing vocabulary and grammar skills and applying language features learnt from class.

The example below is from a recent class. We had been working on the topics of climate change, animal extinction and social media to practice cause and effect writing. To end on a more positive note, I asked to students to reimagine a different, more positive future. I encouraged them to be as creative as they wanted. The students used Night Cafe to create an AI image and wrote a cause-effect explanation for their new vision which they then presented to the class. They love it! Here is one example (shared with student’s permission):

27/09/202125/03/2022

2021 Australian Walking and Cycling Conference

It’s that time of year again!

Woohoo!

The 2021 Australian Walking and Cycling Conference is on! Thursday the 30th of September and Friday the 1st of October – and this year it is all online!

This year’s theme is: Global Lessons, Local Opportunities.

I have been to this conference a number of times in the past and I’ve always enjoyed it.

There is always a good mix of research, community, international and local perspectives, sustainability, urban planning, and new and interesting ideas.

I am definitely going to miss not seeing delegates in person, or doing the side-conference activities and events – they are a real highlight!

But even without the trimmings, I’m excited about this year’s program.

I’m looking forward to connecting with some old conference mates and meeting some new people and hearing what some of ‘the big issues’ are in cycling research.

I’ve been pouring over the abstracts and speakers, checking out the new projects, selecting what sessions to go to, and preparing notes to add to chat discussions during presentations.

Below are a few extra details -see more on the AWCC official website here.

I’ve listed the program at the end of this post for those interested.

For anyone going – I’ll (virtually) see you there!

Conference vision

The simple acts of walking and cycling have the potential to transform the places we live, our economies and how we engage with our environment. The Australian Walking and Cycling conference explores the potential for walking and cycling to not only provide for transport and recreation but solutions to challenges of liveability, health, community building, economic development and sustainability. As one of Australia’s longest-running, best-regarded and most affordable active travel conferences, we bring together practitioners and researchers from Australia and across the world to share their work and engage with conference participants.

The Australian Walking and Cycling Conference aims to send zero waste to landfill.

AWCC

Keynote speakers

I am very excited about the keynotes speakers – especially Meredith. I have been following her work for a while (total researcher fan-girl crush!) and she is kick-ass! Meredith is also a consummate speaker, so I can’t wait to hear her present on her current work. Double Woohoo!

Meredith Glaser is an American urban planner, lecturer, and sustainable mobility researcher, based in the Netherlands since 2010. At the Urban Cycling Institute (University of Amsterdam), her research focuses on public policy innovation, knowledge transfer, and capacity building for accelerated implementation of sustainable transport goals. She is one of the world’s most experienced educators for professionals seeking to learn Dutch transport planning policies and practices. She also manages academic output for several European Commission projects and sits on the advisory committee of the Cycling Research Board. Meredith holds master’s degrees in public health and urban planning from University of California, Berkeley.

Fiona Campbell has been working for the City of Sydney since 2008 and is the Manager Cycling Strategy. She is deeply committed to making Sydney a bike-friendly city and to helping others achieve similar goals. Fiona is currently managing the roll out of 11 new City of Sydney cycleway projects, three of which are permanent designs to upgrade temporary Covid-19 pop-up cycleways. Fiona mostly rides a Danish (Butchers and Bicycles) cargo trike, and on weekends accompanied by two Jack Russells. Fiona will present on “Global lessons, local opportunities”. This title is also the Conference theme.

2021 AWCC Book of Abstracts Download

22/07/202122/10/2021

New Materialisms SIG: Entanglements in the World Becomings.

New Materialisms SIG: Entanglements in the World. Bicycles Create Change.com. 22nd July 2021.

For this month’s New Materialisms (NM) Special Interest Group (SIG), we thought we would do something different.

I recently attended the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry 2021: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry, where I presented my session Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research.

So instead of having our usual guest presenter, we thought we’d use the recent conference to hold a Popcorn Session.

Popcorn Sessions are where we watch and discuss NM ‘research clips’ such as conference recordings (15-20 mins long each) to think-with creative and cutting-edge NM ideas and experiences.

These research clips explore a range of different ideas and approaches and are lead by some of the world’s leading posthumanist and NM scholars/researchers – so we are very lucky!

The focus for this popcorn session is taken from the ICQI session called Entanglements in the World Becomings.

In this ICQI session, there were five scholars responding to Bronwyn Davis‘s recently published book entitled Entanglements in the World’s Becomings and the doing of New Materialist Inquiry. For our NM SIG, we watched three of the five papers – see below.

July Popcorn Theme: Entanglements in the World Becomings.

Recognition, Creative-Rationality, Writing and the Excess of Inquiry – Jon Wyatt (Uni of Edinburgh).
Crafting a New Materialist Becoming – Lise Jean Claiborne (Uni of Waikato).
Slow Dancing and kinship. The Holly Oak, the horse chestnut, Bronwyn and Jane. Jane Speedy (Uni of Bristol) & Bronwyn Davis (Uni of Melb. and Western Sydney Uni).

NM SIG Discussion points and lines of flight

..if we only write for ourselves (or for other NMs) is that limiting?

….what is the purpose?

…….delighting in ‘swerving off course’

………….human ‘desire lines’

…………….a picture I drew about my PhD research

…………………I couldn’t stay longer

…………………….contact – what is your ‘best’ contact?

…………………………the importance of …(more).. thoughtful relationally

……………………………I don’t mind staying

………………………………..Does NM work best when it is unseen and hidden?

……the Holly Oak …….. the horse chestnut ……. the table top……

leaving marks

I’m happy to watch

https://thestitcherycollective.org.au/

Making (y)our work speak to other-than scholars?

groovy

nothing is ordinary – ponder that!

………………………………………….

Below are two 100-word wordings I wrote based on my discussion notes and reflections from participating and thinking-with this NM SIG Popcorn Session.

Coextensions swerving off course

Births of practicality. Limitations of relations, power and ethics. Does ‘anything’ really ‘go’? Using ‘swamps’ to describe things. Leaving marks and theory debt. The uncomfortable possibility that what we reject, we have actually adopted. Discovering Rautio’s four balancing arts. Interweaving the academic and the everyday. Audacious engagements are more-than-method. We are crafting a New Materialist Becoming. Ethical propositions transforming behaviour. The delights of swerving off course. Human desire lines and co-extensions. Considering how to make our work ‘speak to’ other-than scholars. The performativity of being and academic. People want to stay later – there is so much more! Nothing is ordinary.

Slow Dance and Kinship

We’re in the private world of two scholarly lovers: a voyeuristic delight of intellect and intimacy. Slow dance and kinship. Paramours from opposite sides of the world exchange thoughts, writing, photos, drawings, and poetry. They sit under special trees, thinking deeply about each other and the world. Intraspecies tree empathy, tabletops, and hospitalisation for a stroke. Frothy entanglements with nomadic feminist scholars, grainy wood(ly) figures, solitude, ‘eyeless’ gazes and being bodily compromised. Our ancients believe. Vulnerability and the interconnectedness of all things. Pink and purple lines with green dots trace the hidden, yet (un)known. Mycorrhizal assemblages of love.

14/04/202111/06/2021

ICQI 2021 Accepted! Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research

ICQI 2021: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry

ICQI…..you know….only the largest ……. and most respected qualitative research conference IN THE WORLD! … and with all the biggest names!

My PhD supervisor said I should consider submitting an abstract for this conference.

Doing so is a VERY BIG DEAL – this congress is the pinnacle in my field. I’ve never presented at this conference.

For the first time ever, the ICQI 2021 will be held online. This is a super attractive feature for me as it will mean if I get an abstract accepted to present, I wouldn’t have to spend the extra money to travel to the USA as was required for all previous (and probably subsequent) ICQIs. If I ever wanted to give ICQI a solid shot – this is it!

So I did – and my abstract got accepted! Woohoo!

My ICQI 2021 Abstract

Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research.
This paper traces some experimental and experiential wonderings of researching gendered journeys on bicycles in West Africa. This session shares what is unfolding for one rider-researcher as she works to excavate the entanglements, tensions and possibilities of becoming(s)-with post-qualitative inquiry that foregrounds African landscapes, smells, desires, dynamics, beliefs, practices and peoples with emerging feminist posthuman ontologies. My research puts to work feminist New Materialisms to explore how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education. This undertaking is bold, complex and unsettling. It requires (re)turning (Barad, 2006) and challenging habitual preoccupations about bicycles, embodiment, movement, identity, ecology, sp/pl/p/ace and methodology. There is much about gendered bodies navigating trails that commands attention, yet defies explanation (McLure, 2013). Drawing on key encounters experienced in Brisbane (Australia) and Lunsar (Sierra Leone), I trace the skills, wills, spills and thrills from which a velo-onto-epistemology is emerging.

Below are some ICQI 2021 details to get a sense of what’s on offer.

The 2021 Congress theme is: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry.

The rapidly changing social, cultural, political, economic, and technological dynamics brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are inescapable as we endeavor to move forward. The pandemic has also amplified hard truths about everyday life: the ongoing historical devaluation of teachers, nurses, and service workers, and the precarity of the working classes, the unyielding privileging of business and the free market as the answer to all social and health ills, the differential experience of the virus relative to race, class, and gender dynamics, including as related to co-morbidity and mortality rates, access to care, and visibility, the rise of right-wing populism and its deleterious impact on positive governmental responses to pandemic conditions, the prominence of conspiracy theories in mainstream and social media discourse (e.g., masks don’t help, virus is man-made, etc.).

At the same time, we cannot overlook the broader context in which the 2021 Congress will take place: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo creeping authoritarianism, environmental crises, economic shocks to higher education and continuing public health crises.

Collectively and collaboratively, this moment calls for a critical, performative, social justice inquiry directed at the multiple crises of our historical present.

We need a rethinking of where we have been, and, critically, where we are going.

We cannot go at it alone.

We need to imagine new ways to collaborate, to engage in research and activism. New ways of representing and intervening into the historical present. New ways to conduct research, and a rethinking of in whose interest our research benefits.

Sessions in the 2021 Congress will take up these topics, as well as those related to and/or utilizing:

feminist inquiry
Critical Race Theory
intersectionality
queer theory
critical disability research
phenomenology
Indigenous methodologies
postcolonial and decolonized knowing
poststructural engagements
diffraction and intra-action
digital methodologies
autoethnography
visual methodologies
thematic analysis
performance
art as research
critical participatory action research
multivocality
collaborative inquiry
………..and the politics of evidence.

Sessions will also discuss:

threats to shared governance
attacks on freedom of speech
public policy discourse
and research as resistance

Scholars come to the Congress to resist, to celebrate community, to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new technologies of representation.

Together we seek to develop guidelines and exemplars concerning advocacy, inquiry and social justice concerns. We share a commitment to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference.

As critical scholars, our task is to bring the past and the future into the present, allowing us to engage realistic utopian pedagogies of hope.

ICQI provides leadership to demonstrate the promise of qualitative inquiry as a form of democratic practice, to show how qualitative inquiry can be used to directly engage pressing social issues at the level of local, state, national and global communities.

The Congress sponsors the journal International Review of Qualitative Research (IRQR), three book series, and occasional publications based upon the more than 1,000 papers given at the conference each year. It the largest annual gathering of qualitative scholars in the world.

09/12/201901/01/2020

AARE – Australian Association of Research in Education 2019 Conference

The Australia Association for Research in Education (AARE) annual national conference was held in Brisbane this week.

I was supposed to be in Cape Town (South Africa) presenting at two conferences: The 2019 New Materialist Reconfigurations of Higher Education Conference (Dec 2-4th 2019)and then straight after that conference Pedagogies in the Wild – the 3^rd South African Deleuze & Guattari Conference on 4-6^th December.

But I withdrew due to rising safety concerns UWC was shut down following heated local protests against gender-based violence, rape and femicide during the recent World Economic Forum that continued to escalate.

What is AARE?

AARE is Australia’s premier network for educational researchers. A key aim for AARE is to inform and improve policy and practice in education – and share these insights with other interested parties.

AARE blog is where experts share opinions, raise questions and explore education themes and issues.
AARE has an impressive range of special interest groups (SIGs).
The annual conference is the most popular AARE offering. Each year, local educational professionals from Australia and around the world come together to network, share ideas and hear about the latest educational research, projects and approaches. Here are some keynote presentations from past conferences and some past papers.

AARE 2019 Conference

The theme for this conference was ‘Education for a Socially Just World.

The sessions on offer are extensive (dare I say overwhelming?).

The truncated program of abstract titles only alone is 274 pages – click here.

The complete program (full abstracts) is a whopping 1162 pages – click here.

So many great sessions to choose from – and some very big names.

As I am a researcher working with New Materialisms, I definitely wanted to go to and see independent (New Materialist) scholar Bronwyn Davies.

In order to save my sanity, time and effort I just decided to stick with seeing what the Post- Structural Theory SIG had on offer – and then go to any other sessions/speakers who caught my eye.

Here, in no particular order are some of my hot tips for AARE 2019 sessions:

Sarah Healy (Melbourne Uni), Alli Edwards (Monash Uni), Alicia Flynn (Melbourne Uni). Welcome to the Playtank! Re-_____ing research.
David Bright (Monash Uni). Qualitative inquiry and Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature: In which I consider verisimilitude as a criterion for judging the quality of qualitative writing with reference made to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5 albeit not really in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore. (I went to this session and it was amazing! It ended up winning the Best Session Award 2019 for the whole conference – and rightly so!).
Parlo Singh (Griffith Uni) and Gabrielle Ivinson (Manchester Metropolitan Uni, UK). Radical Inclusion Research in/with Schools Serving High Poverty Communities.
Sarah E. Truman (Melbourne Uni), David Ben Shannon (Manchester Metropolitan Uni, UK). Queer textualities and temporalities: speculating-with Alpha Centauri.
Lucinda McKnight (Deakin Uni), Melissa Wolfe (Monash Uni) and Bronwyn Davies (Independent scholar). Is new materialism incompatible with social justice? Panel Discussion with Professor Bronwyn Davies.
Maria Ejlertsen (Griffith Uni). “I don’t fit in, I fit out”: Enabling more-than inclusive spaces for student belonging and engagement with school through attention to more-than-human entanglements of spacetimematter.

I went for the full three days and to as many sessions as I could (these were just a few).

I also went to the below session which was the first in a series of AARE Post-Structuralist SIG Event Series feat. Professor Bronwyn Davies funded by AARE Poststructural Theory SIG Major Grant 2019. See abstract below.

Exploring the poetics and the ethics of new materialist inquiry: Professor Bronwyn Davies

As researchers, our task is to get inside the processes of those materialisations of the world that we encounter (where encounter is not a collision but a mutual affecting and being affected); it is to find or generate the concepts that will enable us to see those encounters not in normative, already-known terms, but in ways that open up new possibilities for sensing and responding, for becoming sense-able and response-able. That is the ethics of new materialism.

And what of the poetics? New materialist research is necessarily playful. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, messing those boundaries up; it works with new and emergent philosophical concepts, bringing them to life through art, poetry, literature; it enters into the very specificity of sensual existence as it is caught in a moment of spacetime and simultaneously opens up, or finds its way into life itself. Through such explorations it seeks to break loose from old dogmas, old methods, old binaries—all the paraphernalia of a normalized set of thoughts and practices that place the individual human above and separate from the world, and that constrain research through the repetition of the already-known. It seeks to open up thought, giving space to emergence of new ways of understanding, new ways of becoming, throwing off the shackles of the clichéd conventions of rationality and order.

In the workshop following this paper, I will present one or more of my own explorations that begin with where I am, or slip right into the middle, and then reflect on what was involved in going there. What re-conceptualising was involved? What new practices? What ethics? What poetics? I will then open up that exploration with the audience, inviting them to shift from being audience to becoming participants, giving them an opportunity to talk and write about something that matters to them in their encounters with more-than-human relationality, that called/calls on their sense-ability and response-ability.

17/11/201920/11/2019

International Cycling Safety Conference (ICSC2019)

International Cycling Safety Conference 2019. Bicycles Create Change.com 17th Nov 2019. — Image: ICSC 2019

This week the best minds working on cycling safety are coming to my home town!

The 8^th International Cycling Safety Conference (ICSC2019) is being held in Brisbane this week on the 18-20 November 2019 at QUT.

This is the first time this conference has been held in Australasia.

This event is hosted by the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety-Queensland (CARRS-Q).

Included among the delegates attending are Australian and international keynote speakers, advocacy groups, researchers, practitioners, businesses and policymakers.

This conference includes research presentations, workshops, technical tours, poster presentations, networking opportunities and other social events.

Full Conference Program here

What is on?

The conference goes for 3 days and is jam-packed full of sessions.

The program also boasts a host of international guests, with delegates coming in from the Netherlands, New Zealand, Denmark, Japan, Norway, USA, Sweden, Canada and as the host country – Australia has a very strong representation from pretty much every University nationwide.

Presentation sessions are discussing ideas such as: obstacle avoidance manoeuvres, e-scooters/e-bikes, infrastructure challenges, rider/pedestrian conflicts, traffic control, crash data, bikeshare data and social media interfaces, and lane marking/intersection analysis, bicycle delivery modalities, and studies using agent-based modelling – and more!

I ‘m not attending this conference because I prefer to focus on the positive aspects of bicycle riding – which of course safety is part of…I just don’t want to be constantly working with ‘negatives’ such as crash figures, injuries and traffic hot zones and contestations – also crunching quantitative data is not my strongest research skill. But I appreciate that this is super interesting to many cycling researchers and policymakers. Such conversations and information sharing is critical to progressing more innovative solutions to cycling dilemmas and to increase the take up of biking universally.

Daily synopsis

Monday is the first conference day. The day is split into four sessions under two main streams: Workshops and Technical Tours. The two workshops offered are: Low-cost infrastructure for low cycling countries and Using bikes for all kinds of deliveries. Concurrently there are 5 technical tours: Inner City (x 2), Riverside, Bicentennial Bikeway and Connecting the infrastructure. The evening is the Welcome Reception and Stakeholder Dinner.

Tuesday before morning tea is official registrations, Introduction and Opening Keynote Trends and innovation research in cycling safety by Prof Christopher Cheery (Uni of Tennessee, USA).

Then there are 2 rooms running concurrent 20 min presentation sessions all the way up to afternoon tea except for a Conference Plenary and another Keynote Cycling Infrastructure: if you build it, will come? (and will they be safe?) by Dr Glen Koorey (ViaStrada, NZ) after lunch.

Tuesday afternoon session has two 1-hour Rapid Oral Presentation sessions followed by Meet the Poster Author’s Function and then the official Conference Dinner.

Wednesday morning opens with a Conference Panel session entitled Arising trends & challenges: what, why & how. Then a full day of 1-hour and 20 min concurrent presentation sessions all the way up to 4.30pm… Phew – what a long day!

At 4.30 it is ICSC Awards and official conference close. The final official event is the Peoples’ Night from 5pm.

Then it’s party time!

People’s Night

For the first time, the ICSC community is inviting the general public to attend the Cycling Conference free People’s Night.

I love the idea of a conference having a ‘People’s Night.’ Every conference should have one!

This is a unique opportunity to meet, discuss and network with conference delegates, check out the digital research poster, hear about some of the latest innovations, technology, infrastructure, developments, trends and findings in cycling safety research.

This event is offered in the spirit of the conference guiding principle to share cycling safety research with ALL stakeholders – which I think is a great move. Not everyone is interested or can afford the money or time to attend the whole conference, but to open up your doors and invite the local public an opportunity to interact with delegates is a very smart move – good for the conference, good for the locals!

I’ll be heading in for this event, so if you are in Brisbane on Wednesday night, I might see you there! If you would like to attend you can RSVP via the ICSC FB page HERE. Details below.

Date: Wednesday 20 November
Time: 5pm-6.30pm
Venue: The Cube, P Block, QUT Gardens Point Campus, Brisbane
Cost: Free
Inclusions: Complimentary food and non-alcoholic beverages

If you are riding your bike in and around Brisbane this week, check out the ICSC. Always good to get the latest intel of what is happening in the cycling world!

Hopefully, the safer it is to ride a bike, the more people will ride.

If that is the case, get ya conference on ICSC 2019!!

24/08/201903/10/2019

Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019- Abstract Accepted!

Hooray!

My abstract for the upcoming Pedagogies in the Wild Conference has been accepted!

This is great news because I already have an abstract accepted for the international 2019 New Materialist Reconfigurations of Higher Education Conference (Dec 2-4th 2019) and this conference follows straight after (4-6^th December) and is at the same place – the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa).

I am working towards a research trifecta: 2 conferences and fieldwork in the one trip.

This conference is being affectionately referred to ‘the D & G conference’.

That is because it focuses on integrating the work of two highly influential scholars whose work is transdisciplinary and has had ‘epic consequence’ in many fields – Deleuze and Guattari. Gilles Deleuze is a philosopher and Felix Guattari is a psychoanalyst. Some their most influential works are: Anti-Oedipus, What Is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus. They have written extensively together on an array of topics. In particular for my project, their work has been foundational in extending New Materialists understandings.

The Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019 is being run for the third time and is solely focused on unpacking, exploring and apply Deleuze-Guattarian thinking and approaches.

As many regular readers of this blog know, my research is complexified by interrogating various aspects of power relations – such as gender in/justice, post-colonialism, and what/who are academic/research/educational ‘experts’.

The session I will be presenting is based on a publication I currently writing with my amazingly brave PhD Supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon.

Here is what I presenting

Title: Cycling-with-through-and-on the edge of the PhD supervisor-candidate relationship: A post-humanist bike ride to a different place.

Abstract: Traditionally, the PhD supervision relationship is predicated on a supervisor as expert – supervisee as learner/novice model of knowledge transmission. Most of the supervisory work is performed either on the university campus or via digital channels that allow the ‘expert’ to direct the conversation and establish the performance expectations for both candidate and supervisor. But what might be possible if the formalities and associated materialities of this power structure were to be disrupted and reframed?

This session presents insights that emerged when a PhD candidate and her Supervisor shared a bayside bicycle ride in Brisbane, Australia, to see what would happen. While the candidate was an expert bike rider, her Supervisor was far less experienced and somewhat anxious about her (st)ability. The bicycle ride was viewed as a way of deliberately disrupting and displacing traditional notions around academic performances, spaces of learning and who gets to navigate.

What emerged was surprising, revealing and uncomfortable.

The bicycle ride enabled encounters with/in the world/self that worked to queer the way in which both Supervisor and candidate understood their relationship. We contend that the candidate/supervisor relationship is an iterative and dynamic entanglement of forces wherein subjectivities, bodily performances, past experiences, fears, technologies, planned and unplanned encounters are forever and always entangled.

Influenced by Baradian philosophy, this session focuses on the material-discursive-affective phenomena that emerged as the experience of riding-with the candidate/supervisor. In this way “systems of entrapment that manifest power relations in the academy” and “instigate codes of conduct and…exclusionary practices that can limit how academic knowledges…are produced” (Charteris et al., 2019, p. 2) are able to be troubled, re-thought and re-balanced.

What is Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019?

Here is more about the conference: The recent #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests have set South African higher education on a new course towards transformation, focusing on equitable access to higher education, Africanisation and decolonisation.

Similar movements have reverberated across the globe, addressing issues of neoliberalism, for example in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands and Chile; racism, as in Ghana and the US; and curfews on women students in India.

This has raised important questions regarding knowledge production; continuing structural racism, patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia; the use and value of western theorists in research and curricula; and who gains epistemological and physical access to higher education.

On the other hand, we have seen many productive junctures between pedagogy, education studies and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. In particular, there has been a focus on cartography, schizoanalysis, corporeal theorising, rhizomatic learning and nomadic thought in socially just pedagogical praxis.

These junctures and innovative genealogies and methodologies can both address these issues and be further improved and made more precise by engagements with what it means to transform and reconfigure pedagogies and practices in higher education.

My Conference Stream – Topic 2. Spaces, Spatiality and Unschooling

Topic 2. Spaces, Spatiality and Unschooling: Places of/and/un/Learning in Higher Education

How can we challenge assumptions such as ‘knowledge belongs to experts’ in favour of materialist/experimental/experiential collaborations in teaching and learning?

Expanded Conference Topic 2

Higher education spaces are usually considered in relation to how they optimise student learning and, increasingly, how they optimise marketing potential to attract new students.

In addition, meanings of ‘space’, ‘place’, ‘environment’ and ‘context’ are often elided, and it is taken for granted that learning happens in classrooms, seminar rooms and lecture halls.

Such discourses take space for granted as a neutral background on which human endeavour is located.

Unschooling (in a meta sense rather than the narrow sense of homeschooling) resists this kind of pedagogy in favour of building real communities and replacing dry, nationalist agendas with different kinds of training programs, learning opportunities and methodologies, apprenticeships, internships and mentorships.

Unschooling thus represents a material politics aimed at genuine social freedom and enjoyable learning. Normative ways of understanding space and schooling are challenged by Deleuze-Guattarian understandings which, instead, conceptualise space as an entangled ‘constellation of human–nonhuman agencies, forces and events’ (Taylor, 2013: 688) within which objects, bodies and things do surprising and important if often unnoticed and mundane work as material agents and actants.

Theoretically, such work draws on and takes forward the rich traditions of feminist and postmodernist understandings of space developed by Doreen Massey, Henri Lefebvre, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of space and striation.

This theme therefore wishes to open up debates about higher education spaces by considering questions such as:

What is the role of architecture, design and infrastructure in higher education?
How might the materialities of higher education spaces and places be conceptualised via inter-, multi- and post-disciplinary frameworks?
How can we take account of the importance of places of informal learning?
How does the iterative materialisation of space-time-matter come to matter in higher education spaces?
How is higher education being spatially reconfigured in relation to global flows of bodies?
Which/ whose bodies matter in higher education spaces?
What new spatial imaginaries are needed for higher education to thrive?
How can feminist new materialisms in its overlaps and divergences with Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy aid us to produce new understandings of space-place-matter entanglements in higher education?
How can we challenge assumptions such as ‘knowledge belongs to experts’ in favour of materialist/experimental/experiential collaborations in teaching and learning?
What kinds of material and affective potential does unschooling offer us for thinking about curriculum development in Higher Education.

Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019- Abstract Accepted! — Exploring space-place-matter re-imaginings. Image: Joana Coccarelli

02/07/201926/08/2019

New Materialism Conference – Abstract Accepted!

New Materialisms Conference 2019 - Abstract Accepted! Bicycles Create Change.com 2nd July, 2019.

I got an email yesterday saying that my abstract submission for the 10th Annual New Materialisms Conference of Reconfiguring Higher Education has been accepted!

Woohoo!

This conference will be held at University of the Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa) from 2-4 December 2019.

This is great news!

I have been working furiously on my Ethics Submission. Ethics continues to be an epic mission because of the international fieldwork aspect where I will be bike riding with locals (the Ethics board want Risk Assessments, Ethics for me, the project and the locals). This means an added level of evaluation, justification and paperwork, more so than if I just had local Brisbane participants. But I am up for the challenge!

So for this event, aside from the opportunity to participate in an international theory/practice conference, I am also engineering this trip to work in with my fieldwork.

I am very excited! There are a few big NM names also presenting, including:

New Materialisms Conference 2019 - Abstract Accepted! Bicycles Create Change.com 2nd July, 2019: NM Reconfiguring Conference

Conference Streams

There are 6 conference streams this year. They are:

New materialities, decolonialities, indigenous knowledges
Slow scholarship
Arts-based pedagogies/research in HE
Neurotypicality, the undercommons and HE
New materialist reconfigurings of methodology in HE
Political ethics of care, the politics of affect, and socially just pedagogies

My Abstract

Title: An athlete-teacher-researcher mountain bike race (re)turned: entangled becoming-riding-with

In this paper, I share how engaging with new materialist approaches have enabled me to think deeply and disruptively about my unfolding athlete-teacher-researcher performativities and methodology. Using as a starting point a ‘moment of rupture’ (Lennon, 2017) during a popular female-only mountain bike race, I problematize how representation, subjectivity and embodiment matters in my research with respect to my own athlete-teacher-researcher-becoming entanglements. In doing this, I draw on Wanda Pillow’s (2003) concept of ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ and Karen Barad’s (2014) diffractive ‘cut together-apart’ to reframe critical becoming-riding-with moments in alternative ways. In doing so, I delve into some messy and destabilizing ways of becoming-to-know and knowing as I continue to experiment with foregrounding the agential force of bicycles within my research unfolding.

Conference Info.

Taken from the official conference website: Annual New Materialisms Conferences have been organised since 2009 by an international group of scholars who received the EU’s H2020 funding from 2014–18.

The conferences are meant to develop, discuss and communicate new materialisms’ conceptual and methodological innovations, and to stimulate discussion among new materialist scholars and students about themes and phenomena that are dear to the hosting local research community as well as interdisciplinary new materialist scholarship.

After having visited many cities across Europe, as well as Melbourne (Australia), the conference will come to Cape Town (South Africa) in 2019 in order to discuss the dynamic higher education landscape that we find ourselves in today. The recent #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests have, in particular, set South African higher education on a new course towards transformation, focusing on equitable access to higher education, Africanisation and decolonisation.

This has raised important questions regarding knowledge production beyond the South African context, particularly in relation to the use and value of western theorists in local research and curricula, as well as who gains epistemological and physical access to higher education.

On the other hand, we have seen many productive junctures between pedagogy and the new materialisms, including the use of Deleuze and Guattari in education studies. In particular, there has been a focus on cartography, schizoanalysis, corporeal theorising, rhizomatic learning and nomadic thought in socially just pedagogical praxis.

These junctures and innovative genealogies and methodologies can both address as well as be further improved and made more precise by engagements with transformation toward accessible, Africanised and decolonised curricula, and research agendas and practices.

It seems fitting, then, that the 3rd South African Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference will be held directly after the 10th Annual New Materialisms Conference as we grapple, together, towards new ways of being and seeing in relation to higher education.

08/06/201912/06/2019

AWCC 2019 – Abstracts open!

It’s Australian Walking and Cycling Conference (AWCC) time again!

Hooray!

I really like this conference.

The people are great, the program is always interesting – and it doesn’t cost and arm and a leg to get there. Perfecto!

In 2017, I presented an AWCC roundtable session entitled Bicycles Create Change: An innovative guide to creating memorable and meaningful engagement in community bike projects.

The session went very well and it was great to share my work people outside of Griffith Uni and Queensland.

It was also a valuable opportunity to network and meet some incredible people. I came home from the last AWCC with a big smile and many new ideas and resources.

Last year, the 2018 AWC Conference was held in the Victorian regional city of Bendigo,

This year, AWCC is returning to Adelaide on October 24-25^th 2019.

AWCC 2019 – Abstracts open!

The 2019 conference and related activities aim to engage more directly with local issues of climate change mitigation and adaption in relation to walking and cycling.

The 2019 AWCC theme is Active transport in a changing climate.

Abstracts for AWCC sessions are now open.

Session Formats

Learnshops: 20 min podium presentations with 10 mins Q & A.

Spin cycles: Short, fast-paced podium PPTs of 3.45 mins for 15 slides.

Roundtables: To a table of 10 – present for 10 with 15 mins group discussion

Key dates

Abstract submission opens: Monday 22 April
Abstract submission closes: Monday 22 July
Authors notified of outcome: Monday 19 August
Authors notified of program placement (date/time): Mon 26 Aug
Presenting author registration deadline: Monday 16 September
Conference: Thursday 24 and Friday 25 October

Below is more info from the AWCC website.

Conference vision

The simple acts of walking and cycling have the potential to transform the places we live, our economies and how we engage with our environment. The Australian Walking and Cycling conference explores the potential for walking and cycling to not only provide for transport and recreation but solutions to challenges of liveability, health, community building, economic development and sustainability. As one of Australia’s longest running, best regarded and most affordable active travel conferences, we bring together practitioners and researchers from Australia and across the world to share their work and engage with conference participants.

Conference theme: Active transport in a changing climate

We aspire to promote work which creates a transport mode shift away from cars towards walking and cycling, and using active means to link with improved public transport in suburbs and rural towns. We want to shift away from CO2 reliant mobility and keep people active as temperatures rise, and extreme weather becomes more common.

What can a transport mode shift in our suburbs and rural towns contribute to CO2 reduction nationally? What concomitant air quality benefits are felt in suburban streets and towns as a result? Acknowledging that climate change is occurring, what changes are to be made to suburban and town environments so that walking and cycling are almost always convenient, pleasurable, safe and life affirming even in the face of rising temperatures? What does a small town or suburban neighbourhood retrofit look like in the next ten or twenty years, so that people are out and about and interacting? How do people of all ages and abilities avoid retreating to air-conditioned ‘comfort’ – ‘comfort’ that is inactive, isolated and CO2 producing?

These questions indicate the directions we hope to explore in the 2019 conference.

21/05/201912/06/2019

What happened at BikeHack19?

I’m still recovering from BikeHack19! It was intensive, fun and interesting for many reasons. I’m constantly being asked ..What happened?! So, here’s a summary snapshot of each day at BikeHack19. Congrats to all involved. Well done all! NG.

What happened at BikeHack19?

Previously, I posted details about the upcoming BikeHack19 event in Brisbane. BikeHack19 is Australia’s first hackathon-style event where teams work to address the challenge of getting more people on bikes more often in Queensland.

It was a 45-hour intense event.

There were 90+ people, 79 hackers, 26 pitches, 13 final teams, 3 business development masterclasses, 3 mentor round-robin sessions and 1 customer focus group (30 pax) and a final pitch to an expert panel of 4 judges who decided on the prize winners. PHEW!

There was $25,000 in prize money for the 4 main categories as well as other additional prizes.

Friday Day 1: Initiation

The event started 5 pm Friday night.

On arrival, there was time for hackers and organisers to meet-and-greet and network before the official opening.

The opening address had guest speeches by the Minister for Transport and Main Roads The Honourable Mark Bailey, Matthew Longland (Deputy Direct Generals Translink TMR), Adam Rogers (Director, Cycling & Walking TMR) and Matt McQuaid (Client Director Aurecon).

The event was facilitated by Aaron Kirby who did a great job of keeping all the teams motivated and on task all weekend. At this stage, Aaron ran participants through a warm-up game Is that your personality in your pocket? – a fun activity to get the hackers interacting and set the scene well for the ideas pitch and team formation yet to come.

A quick aside note..during the weekend, Aaron also set an additional challenge for hackers to: connect with 10 people, teach someone a skill, stay involved and build something awesome – another great way to mingle and share skills with other teams.

After the warm-up game, was the initial ideas pitch.

This is an important element of hackathons because its where hackers get to share their ideas – and its the first time other participants hear and chose what projects they might want to work on for the rest of the weekend.

Overall, there were 28 1-minute ideas pitched to the audience. Below are my quick notes on each idea and the pitches with a star next to them ended up forming teams that night (with others teams being added on Saturday).

If you’ve not been to hackathon, the 1-min pitches briefly detail who you are, what your idea is, the name of the project (if you have one) and who is needed for the team to make it happen.

We then got to vote for our favourite 3 ideas and started forming teams.

Some of the teams and people changed, joined, splintered and morphed over the next 12 hours until the teams were fully set by 10 am Saturday.

Then it was game on.

Saturday – Day 2: Development

After an 8 am breakfast, teams got started working on their projects.

It was an intense day.

Many teams were still getting to know each other, as well as running around the city (and online), doing customer validations, continuing research, and developing and consolidating what their actual project/idea was.

From 8.30am until 6 pm, teams had a series of startup workshops (like how to use a Lean Startup model, Facebook Ads, and the event Slack platform) and a constant round-robin of consultation with mentors, industry experts, sponsors and subject matter experts.

Each mentor session added an extra layer of complexity, understanding and reality to the projects. Mentor whiplash!

At different stage throughout the day, people were running in and out of the building – hackers were busy interviewing would-be customers, making phone calls, pivoting on their ideas, tweaking concepts, mocking up product trials, sending out online surveys, designing pilots, making AV documentation, calling in favours – oh yeah…and voting in the election!

At 6 pm, all the teams had 10 mins each to explain their ideas to a focus group of 30 people who gave immediate feedback and asked questions – everyone was exhausted by this stage.

Sunday – Day 3: Final Day

After another early start, the morning sessions included a workshop on the final pitch and another series of last-minute mentor meetings to finalise ideas.

By lunch, all teams were working on final pitch rehearsal and preparation.

At 3 pm, all worked stopped. All team PPTs were submitted.

Guests started arriving for the final 4pm panel presentation.

For final pitches, each team had a 5-min to present with a PPT (and other realia or prototypes) to a panel of 4 judges.

The four judges, Neil Scales OBE, Evelyn Storey, Peter Bourke and Majella Edwards.

The judging criteria: Validation, Business Model and Execution.

Here’s the final team panel pitch order:

Individual BikeHack19 Awards

A big thank you also to Prof. Rowena Barrett and QUT (Queensland University of Technology) Business School, (QUT Fondary and QUT Real World) who offered 5 additional cash and recognition prizes to individual hackers.

Spirit of the Hack
Best social media engagement
Hustler Award
People’s Choice
Pivot Award

It was a real honour to receive the Spirit of the Hack Award. It was a little embarrassing when the Aaron asked the whole room to stand up and point to the person they think embodied the spirit of the event – and everyone pointed to me! I was awarded it for helping other teams, being enthusiastic and having a passion for getting more people on bikes – of course!

Beyond BikeHack19

This BikeHack event must have been a massive effort to get organised.

As a participant, I was impressed by how available and supportive the organisers and sponsors were over the whole weekend.

Congrats and thanks to all!

A massive big thank you to the amazing sponsors, organisers, mentors and volunteers who made this weekend possible.

This includes event organisers Fishburners Sarah and Issac who were particularly outstanding. Sarah I will not forget your stairwell help! Fishburners supplies a brilliant range of inspiration, collection and connection to support tech startups including a collaborative office space in Brisbane.

Aurecon supplied their amazing office for the event. It was an absolute delight being able to work in their office space – thank you!

The TMR Queensland staff were always on hand to answer questions and help out where and whenever they were needed.

And kudos to the supporting sponsors Deloitte, 99 Bikes, Pedal, Merida and event facilitator Aaron Birkby.

I think all the teams did really well and as a participant I can appreciate all the extra hard work behind the scenes that no-one else sees. I also commend all the teams on their final pitches – it is such a difficult thing to do.

Below are the 4 category winners and the DG’s special prize.

Overall it was an epic event. The weekend was full of the necessary ups and downs that come with hackathons, startups and working with new people.

A big congrats to all the hackers who participated and gave their time, skills, ideas and energy to help explore ideas get more people on bikes more often in Queensland.

Great job everyone!

See you for the next BikeHack!