There is an amazing amount of interaction and collaboration taking place across the new media landscape these days, spanning a range of ideas, experiences, issues and opportunities related to the educational uses of emerging technologies to support learning and teaching. Happily there is an increasing presence of Sydneysiders amidst all this.
While the emergence of new media and high speed internet connectivity has done a great deal to break down barriers to interacting over the web, there is little substitute to engaging in person.
Several of my UNSW colleagues and I therefore propose to meet early next month (May 5th) to establish a Sydney Educators Networking Group (SENG) that will seek to put faces to the Tweets, avatars, blog posts, and instant messages.
About SENG
Our initial thoughts are that SENG would seek to establish an informal e-learning, educational technologies, new media network in Sydney with the aim of sharing progress and resources, and organising local Face-to-Face and/or online events.
In keeping with the nature and diversity of the participatory culture, where learning networks span many different levels of education and technical experience, we are hoping to see a similar degree of diversity in the people who elect to come to the meet-up. All are welcome.
We would ask however that any interested parties send an RSVP to Robyn Jay (r.jay AT unsw DOT edu DOT au) and CC me (m.bogle AT unsw DOT edu DOT au). We will then try to arrange some afternoon tea.
Location Details:
The details of the first meet-up are as follows.
- Location: Ultimo TAFE, Library Building, Room DG40
- Date/Time: Tuesday 5th May from 2-4pm (followed by drinks if people want to stay).
- Parking: limited in streets around with meters, Broadway shopping centre has 3 hrs free – about a 10 min walk away
- Access – via any surrounding street – library building faces Harris St in centre of campus – DG40 is in back left corner of ground floor
Map
The Ultimo College website has travel details here:
http://www.situltimo.net/ultimo/?Media_Index_ID=672&area=ultimo
A Google Map of the college is also embedded below:
This is fabulous and I would love to be involved, unfortuneatley I’m away in Mudgee that evening (I’m sure everyone is green with envy) so I can’t come on May 5 but congratulations on a really great idea. Thanks for putting this together and certainly count me in!!!
Hi Bernadette! Glad to hear you’re interested. We’re definitely hoping this will evolve into an ongoing thing, and I suspect we’ll need to experiment with days and times to ensure the meet-ups work the best with people’s schedules. Please let us know what your preferences are in that respect (you can comment here or email us at the addresses in the post above).
I suspect we’ll need to establish an online space or wiki at some stage – and especially a tag/hashtag for aggregation and syndication. But for the moment I’ll continue to post updates here while we work things out.
Great initiative. There are many opportunities and challenges in teaching with new media these days, and sharing insights can really help make good critical use of emerging innovations.
Unfortunately I can’t make a meeting at that time (teaching digital research and publishing at USyd). I’ll be there in spirit.
Chris Chesher
aka chrischesher on twitter.
Digital Cultures, University of Sydney