Cheryl and I have both got papers on the programme for the ELFAsia 2013 conference at Hong Kong Baptist University. It’s great to be back to this fantastic conference again after last year’s forum in Beijing. It’s really refreshing to come to a conference where there are so many folks from Universities across Asia to hear what’s going on here. Seeing how colleagues cope with really huge economies of scale in the Chinese Universities is an important reminder of how small our cohorts are in he UK and what we are competing with in terms of efficiency and what we have to offer in terms of close student contact and support.

Highlights for me have been:

– the plenary given by Dr Eva Wong and Dr Leevan Ling from HKBU. The amazing work they have done here to design and build a graduate attributes structure is truly impressive. This is the kind of ‘bigger picture’ that our work on the EBEAM project wants to slot into. She acknowledges that these are early days. As I mentioned to her over a coffee break: they have some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces that we don’t have and we think we have some of the others that they don’t have.
– the keynote from Mark Pegrum at U of Western Australia on mobile learning. What really made this paper stand out from the crowd of the hundreds of others that I’ve heard on the topic is just how well theorised it was. He offered some exciting case studies – but it left me reflecting that the things that we are going to be assessing in the future will be very different to how things are today. Finding ways to manage all of this material in an EAM that doesn’t make academics collapse under the strain is vital.

I’ve travelled to Hong Kong to participate in a user group for Turnitin.

Up first was Bee Dy from Hong Kong City U who is gave a presentation about her experiences with GradeMark. She reiterated all the things that I have said to people all over the world about my experiences and that of my colleagues. She’s also made fantastic use of Peermark and I think I might be stealing some of her ideas. She has a training session for using Peermark which also doubles as a writing training exercise. If she wants students to learn how to write a good introduction, she gives students a bid intro a better one and a really good one. She has the students first decide which is which and why. Then she has the students rewrite the weaker ones to make them better. She then has them bring an introduction that they have written themselves and gets them to self-evaluate it. They then submit it to peer-review and get two lots of peer-review. So students get practice at evaluating writing, self-evaluating and peer-evaluating introductions as well as using PeerMark. Brilliant! She also talked about how she eases student’s discomfort with peer review by saying to them that they ar the best people to do the review because they are the ideal audience and also get a sense of what it feels like to be a reader and then reflect on this when they are writing.

I was up next to talk about grading Analytics as a subset of assessment Analytics. Robyne Lovelock from Aldis Associates about the latest roadmap hot off the press from Turnitin in the states.

Garry Allen from RMIT U shared some insights from his perspective as Principal Advisor Academic for ICT Integration, eLearning Strategy and Innovation Group. He reported that from 2007-2008 their Internet traffic doubled in a year, primarily because of Facebook. It’s interesting to hear that they have legal clearance that an upload is equivalent to a signed legal agreement from the student that their work is original. It’s reassuring to hear that RMIT are emphasising academic integrity as part of their strategy.

Cheryl Reynolds from the EBEAM project at the U of Huddersfield. She spoke about how we might think about using Turnitin to support students in the transition from school to university.

I’ve travelled to Cape Town to participate in the first African Academic Integrity Conference. It’s been a great opportunity to catch up with Stella Orim from Coventry and her fascinating research on the attitudes of Nigerian students to plagiarism when studying in the UK. Her evidence is compelling and demonstrates the complexity of this issue; something that is relevant to many international students.