Education Symposium 6 December – COMBIO 2009
Over 90 people registered to attend an education symposium that preceded the 2009 COMBIO Conference held in Christchurch this week. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the varied range of topics from an interesting group of presenters. These included the 2009 Invitrogen Education Award winner, Dr Graham Parslow of the University of Melbourne. As he spoke on teaching with new technology for new generations, he warned of ‘feature creep’ reminding us that more add-ons and repackaging may not deliver any more effectiveness. At some stage over-featuring detracts from value.
John Harper of Charles Sturt University introduced his free web-based educational tool Supermarket B
otany – a resource for teaching and learning.
In their presentation, Drs Erik Brogt and Keith Comer (image) from the University of Canterbury’s Centre for Teaching and Learning described a collaborative undertaking with the university’s Biological Sciences lecturers. They used the results of focus group interviews with Year 2 students about what had helped prepare them for their second year of study, to enhance first year biology programmes.
These and other presentations from the symposium are to be collated and shared on our website in the new year.