Workshop A
Embracing a culture of innovation in the era of AI
Presenter: Professor Shane Dawson and Professor Abelardo Pardo
Location: BH4-23
The education sector has been under increasing pressure from many systems wide forces – economic, social, environmental and technological. Most recently, technology advances in the area of Artificial Intelligence have prompted a significant need to rethink of education practice. This unprecedented pace of change has raised significant questions regarding how institutions deal with innovation, and more importantly, the leadership structures and contexts required to embrace it. Current institutional leadership structures are not conducive to foster a culture of data-informed, cross disciplinary processes that operating in the current fast-pace changing landscape. In this talk we propose a framework to identify the required stakeholder groups and spaces to systematically nurture technological initiatives from inception to potentially institutional deployment. The framework proposes the explicit creation of cross-disciplinary spaces where emerging solutions are triaged and discussed followed by a methodology to test and evaluate impact and move them from the innovation space to day-to-day operations.
Workshop B
Title: Futures Thinking: Anticipating the Future of AI in Education
Presenter: Dr Srecko Joksimovic and Maria Vieira
Location: BH4 - 30
Step into the realm of "Futures Thinking" – a methodology for exploring and imagining multiple possible futures to inform decision-making in the present. In this dynamic workshop, you will explore the potential intersections of AI and education ten years down the line, employing various innovative techniques to envisage future scenarios. Rather than aiming to pinpoint a single future outcome, our goal is to stretch your creative and critical thinking muscles, helping you grasp the range of possibilities and their implications. By the close of our session, you will have honed your ability to think expansively and critically about the future, recognising that Futures Thinking is less about forecasting a singular future and more about opening our minds to myriad potentialities. Come, enrich your thinking, and contribute to a collective vision for AI in education!
Workshop C
Title: AI and Creativity
Presenter: Dr Rebecca Marrone and Professor David Cropley
Location: BH4-32
This session explores the concept of creativity, a critical skill for the 21st century. We will examine the challenges educators face in evaluating creativity in today's classrooms. Addressing the limitations of conventional, lengthy evaluations, it introduces advanced AI techniques, such as verbal and figural automatic assessment models. Practical examples will be provided on how to embed creativity into AI driven classrooms.
Workshop D
Title: GenAI and assessment: Unlocking the potential of artificial intelligence to support and determine student achievement
Presenter: Associate Professor Chris Deneen
Location: BH2-12
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has shown immense potential to revolutionize education. Implications for educational assessment are of special concern. Assessment is an essential means of supporting learning, determining students’ outcome achievement, and generating required evidence for progressing students through their formal study. Will GenAI enable or disable these essential educational functions? Answering this question requires educators to explore the meeting place of GenAI and assessment in the context of their authentic practices.
This workshop aims to address the opportunities and challenges associated with using GenAI in assessment of student achievement. Through interactive activities and practical demonstrations, participants will delve into the diverse applications of GenAI in processes associated with assessment of, for, and as learning. Participants will explore integrating GenAI into existing assessment frameworks as well as creating new designs and affordances. Additionally, the workshop will address relevant concerns around potential biases, data privacy, and academic integrity in the use of GenAI-powered assessment tools.
By the end of the workshop, attendees will gain valuable insights into how GenAI can be harnessed to enhance assessment practices, promote student engagement, and foster more inclusive and data-informed approaches to educational assessment.
Workshop E
Title: AI Playground – Gamifying the learning experience with artificial intelligence
Presenter: Prof Maarten de Laat, with Ember Chittenden, Travis Tooley and Daniel McKee
Location: BH4-29
Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are set to transform society, including how people work and learn. This growing ubiquity of AI in society poses significant challenges for educational systems: what will citizens in the 21st century need to know about, and do with, AI? Currently, there is very little research and experience on how schools and teachers adopt AI into the classroom and how our students work and learn together with AI.
In this workshop, we will demonstrate the AI Playground where secondary school students will work together with AI to solve complex problems. The AI Playground offers students a way to learn to learn with AI and technology, in order to solve problems that humans cannot solve on their own. Our mission is to offer an AI learning environment where students can take ownership over AI, experiment with it and develop AI to follow their imagination.
Workshop F
Title: Learner Profiles – Monitoring Student Learning Progressions with Learner Profiles
Presenter: Dr Vitomir Kovanovic
Location: H2-16
Learner Profiles have recently attracted significant attention from educational organisations and policymakers in Australia and internationally. They are essential for advancing current personalised learning approaches and providing better monitoring of learning progressions over time, accounting for the student diversity in their prior knowledge, abilities, interests, career aspirations, and other factors. There is an increasing focus on using learning analytics and artificial intelligence technologies to develop learner profiles, given their ability to provide new insights about student learning progression from the already collected data. This session will explore how learner profiles can support student competency development inside and outside the classroom, specifically focusing on adopting learning analytics and artificial intelligence for learner profile development. We will also discuss the ethical considerations of learner profiles, particularly around equity, bias and privacy. Finally, we will discuss the challenges and limitations of these technologies and how we can bring the student voice into the picture to further support their learning and development.
