Date: 19/05/2021
Speakers: Jayashri Ravishankar, Roger Hadgraft, Anne Gardner, Enda Crossin and Sasha Nikolic
Jayashri Ravishankar
- Met contacts through conferences
- Make use of funding to travel
- Bringing collaborators as a keynote
Roger Hadgraft
- Finding common ground, connections at AAEE (use coffee breaks)
- Introductions from AAEE community to international community (get to know older staff)
- Very difficult to predict – cannot tell which connections will take root
- “Be a social butterfly”
Anne Gardner
- Attending conferences are good for senior staff to set up project teams
- Two different types of networks – reading from authors (textual network) -> meeting people (personal network)
- Participating in executive committees in professional bodies, e.g. AAEE committee (Australasia + ACED connection), REEN board (Australasia, international network), cross-university links (monthly research meetings, strengthening ties)
- Supervisory panels, good way to find out how others supervise and examine PhDs too
- Not everyone you talk to will be someone you work with on a long-term project, but don’t let this deter you from continuing to try
Enda Crossin
- https://www.belongeng.org/
- Read deeply
- Recruitment at AAEE – common interests, interest and engaged, willing to commit time, excitement – used contacts to meet people on the team
- Expectation of the project team – what you want from them? What you can give back? Be realistic about expectations. Consider governance framework for impact
- Support from outside, e.g. ACED, EA
- Check with colleagues – use them to form the idea and insights from outside of engineering education
- Have a project plan – keep things ticking over
- Aim for diversity in your team - region, gender, career stage, research background.
Sasha Nikolic
- Conference dinner (move between tables, build social network)
- Work hard and show that you’re capable (usually invites from referrals)
- Mentorship opportunities, look for connections
- Reach out to people – start small collaborations at first
Institutional barriers
- Red tape everywhere – don’t just believe what you’re told, challenge it
- Intellectual property, memoranda of understanding (risk-averse) – deal with it later
- Not everyone has the same ethics process (some institutions have more straight-forward processes) – find a collaborator with a potentially quicker, simpler process
- Finding time to work on cross-institutional collaborations (institutional support)
- Use alternate avenues of funding (not necessarily just educational ones) – no harm in trying, make sure you have a strong justification
- Look for funding from the institution for professional development
Joint authorship
- Work with people you trust
- Different abilities and willingness to write
- Get involved in other people’s books
Conferences
- AAEE
- ASCILITE
- IEEE (TALE)
Avenues for reaching out
- FB: Posting invitations for workshops
- Exec can also put things on the AAEE page
- FOR code for engineering education research and practice – write an ARC grant towards this. New code, might not be that many applications