Michelle Selinger


Dr Michelle Selinger

Dr Michelle Selinger

Biographical note
Dr Michelle Selinger joined Cisco in 2001 and in 2007 moved to Australia from Europe to join Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group Public Sector team for Asia-Pacific as Director of Education. She is responsible for developing and delivering an integrated program of education leadership and engagement across the Asia-Pacific region. Michelle is a key contributor to Cisco's growing expertise and experience in education and has worked in major education projects in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She has worked with a number of governments through Cisco's social investment programmes in education as well as running visioning workshops on the future of technology-enabled education. She has a strong background in education, and immediately prior to joining Cisco she was the director of a research centre for new technology in education at the University of Warwick. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney and Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway University, London in the ICT4D collective. Michelle also sat on the steering group for the European Commission's e-learning conference in 2005 and was a member of the advisory group for e-Europe 2005 which informed the European Commission's i2010 initiative. She has led a number of evaluation projects on technology-enabled learning and has published widely on many aspects of ICT in education.

Keynote presentation: Through the looking glass
In the future education will not look like it does today, or will it? In this talk I will take you on a fictional journey through the future with a glimpse of some of the technology tools that will become available. I will set the scene for the themes of the conference and offer some challenges around content creation and the impact of web 2.0 on knowledge and who owns it; consider the impact of globalisation on the appropriateness of the technological and pedagogical cultures we create, and the competition we encounter for overseas students as well as our own; and confront the way we will need to think about life and work in higher education as student populations increase and diversify, and demands for even more flexible modes of learning increase. Will there be a stronger business focus with industry incubation hubs and students as workers, and if so will the societal values that are debated and developed in today's institutions be maintained or lost?