Keynote Speakers

 Keynote Speakers


 
Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne
“The changing geo-politics of creativity:  Rise of the Post-Confucian university"

 


Peter Murphy, Professor of Creative Arts and Social Aesthetics and the Head of the School of Creative Arts at James Cook University
“Beautiful Minds and Ugly Buildings: Object Creation, Digital Production, and the Research University. Critical Reflections on the Aesthetic Ecology of the Mind”

 


Michael A. Peters, Professor of Education, University of Waikato  & Emeritus Professor University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

 “Open Science Economy: Collaboration and Creativity”












 


Tina Besley, Professor of Education, University of Waikato

“Academic Entrepreneurship, Creativity and re-imagining the University”

Abstracts

Simon Marginson - “Creating a Global Education Environment”

The paper reflects on ways of seeing internationalization and globalization in and through higher education. Along the way it comments on ‘Western’ ways of seeing ‘Eastern’ higher education and specifically, the emerging East Asian knowledge and education systems. It maps a distinctive approach to comparative and global study of higher education and higher education policy that may enable us to encompass more than one national political culture.

Peter Murphy - “Beautiful Minds and Ugly Buildings: Object Creation, Digital Production, and the Research University. Critical Reflections on the Aesthetic Ecology of the Mind”

Knowledge is a form of objectivation. It involves the positing of objects in the world. Viewed from this angle, the contemporary research university is an object producer. But how well does it do this? The paper reflects on the conditions under which intellectual object production occurs. And considers whether the practices of digital and open-peer production have improved or deteriorated intellectual production? The evidence to date suggests that digital means of production reduces some of the costs associated with intellectual production. On the other hand, in the era when the digitisation of production and peer production models spread, both the quality and the seriousness of intellectual production have declined. The case example of cultural and social theory is explored against the background of a long-term multi-decade decline in the arts and the sciences. The reasons why this has happened and continues to happen are discussed. Digitisation is not culprit but it is not the corrective either. In trying to explain what might be the corrective, the paper returns to some socio-cognitive fundamentals. In particular it considers the role of ‘inspiring environments’ in mediating intellectual object creation. This view is in part drawn from the tradition of John Dewey, Robert Park, and George Herbert Mead. The paper will suggest that part of the reason for the measurable and chronic decline of the contemporary research university has been the widespread failure of universities in the last half century to provide an adequate aesthetic ecology of the mind.  

Michael A. Peters – “Open Science Economy: Creativity, Collaboration and the Commons”

The open-science economy (OSE) is a rapidly growing sector of the global knowledge economy utilizing open-source models and its multiple applications (e.g. open access, open archiving, open publishing, open repositories) in distributed knowledge and learning systems. This rich-text, highly interactive, user-generated OSE has seen linear models of knowledge production give way to more diffuse, open-ended, decentralized, and serendipitous knowledge processes based on open innovation and technology. These peer-to-peer distributed knowledge systems rival the scope and quality of traditional proprietary products through the diffusion speed and global access of open-source projects, especially in both software and open-source biology. OSE encourages innovation-smart processes based on the radical non-propertarian sharing of content, cloud data computing, and the leveraging of cross-border international exchanges and collaborations. Furthermore, it encourages a culture of distributed, collaborative, decentralized model research that is genuinely participatory, involving the wider public and amateur scientists along with experts in the social mode of open knowledge production. OSE provides an alternative to the intellectual property approach to dealing with difficult problems in the allocation of resources for the production and distribution of knowledge and information. Increasingly, portal-based knowledge environments and global science gateways support collaborative science. Open-source informatics enables knowledge grids that interconnect science communities, databases, and new computational tools. This paper explores the concept of “open science economy” referencing its dimensions and charting its significance.

Tina Besley - “Academic Entrepreneurship, Creativity and re-imagining the University”

The principle of criticism and the concept of criticality have traditionally been advanced as the raison d’etre of the Kantian university and the basis of peer review and peer governance. This presentation argues that these traditional Romantic notions of creativity now must be supplemented by a concept of creativity “the design principle” (after Peters, 2009) that embraces a social and public dimension of entrepreneurship. Creativity as ‘the design principle’ is considered to be a social concept rooted in social relations. It surfaces in related ideas of social capital, situated learning, and P2P accounts of commons-based peer production. It is a product of social and networked environments – rich semiotic and intelligent environments in which everything speaks. This new social and networked notion of creativity is the basis for a kind of academic entrepreneurship that encourages creative teaching and creative learning..