Katrina Falkner
Bio: Katrina Falkner is an Associate Professor and Head at School of Computer Science, the University of Adelaide. Katrina is a leading researcher in computer science education. In 2010, she established the Computer Science Education Research (CSER) Group at the University of Adelaide, which has been conducting extensive research supporting the specific educational requirements of Computer Science as a discipline and the use of technology within education at-scale. Katrina is the winner of a number of significant awards including 2012 Endeavour Executive Award, 2008 Australian Learning and Teaching Council Citation, and 2008 Stephen Cole the Elder Award for Excellence in Teaching. Katrina has attracted in excess of $2.9 million in funding across her research fields in computer science education and distributed systems, and manages a sizable research team of 13 (research associates, software developers, and HDR students).
In 2014, the CSER Group, in collaboration with Google, launched the CSER Digital Technologies MOOC, designed to support Australian Primary School Teachers within the upcoming challenge of the Australian Curriculum Digital Technologies learning area.
Keynote: Digital Technologies – the new literacy
Digital Technologies represent an ever changing force in our world – change the way that we engage socially, how we do business, and how we innovate. The Digital Technologies learning area represents a fantastic opportunity for our next generation of students to move past capabilities in using technology, to developing literacy in creating technology. This represents a shift were students gain awareness of the problem solving processes that underpin the creation of technology, and are able to pokiesaustralian.com harness that power to drive innovation in new technologies that can change the world around us.
So how can we teach this problem solving process in our classrooms? What key pedagogy underpins this? What are some of the key learning and teaching issues we should really be aware of? In our work with the CSER Digital Technologies MOOC, we are starting to explore such ideas, working with a community of teachers to help understand how we can think about Digital Technologies education in the primary and junior secondary spaces.