Newsletter November 2011

It’s less than a month to Christmas, how time has flown, definitely time for a newsletter. This will be my last as I have resigned as chair of CITRENZ and Samuel Mann has been elected as my replacement. I wish to say thank you to all those who have supported me in the position over the last three years and I wish to congratulate Sam on his appointment and wish him well.

CITRENZ

“Promoting excellence in computing education”

I am pleased to report that CITRENZ now formally exists as an entity, the rules and regulations have been updated and details are available at the Charities Commission web site.

When CITRENZ was established, a representative model consisting of five regions was adopted. The following table shows the representatives for each of the regions.

Since the last AGM the lower South Island industry representative (Matt Tulloch) and the central North Island academic deputy (David Scadden)  have resigned. Thank you David and Matt for your involvement, we wish you well with your future endeavours .The two regions will now need to nominate replacements.

At the AGM, the membership gave approval for the establishment of an academic committee and three focus groups. The chair of each group and the activities that each of the groups is expected to look after are listed below:

Academic Committee (Mary Proctor)
Industry Relevance
Quality Management
Policy and Procedures
Revamp of the Moderation system and implementation
Reporting to NZQA

Representation of CITRENZ for member institutions
Internationalisation of qualifications
Accreditation – partners

Research and Professional Development Focus Group (Mike Lopez)
Support for communities of practice
Conference organisation
Publications – Journal,  Proceedings and any other
Industry partnership and research
Research seminars
Funding advice
Reviewing
Mentoring
Collaborative projects
Professional development seminars by industry
Liaise with professional bodies

Stakeholder Engagement Focus Group (Samuel Mann)
Brokerage on shared teaching modules
Marketing and Branding
Liaison  with industry
Website and social media (facebook)
Recognise individual academia
Newsletters regular
Liaise with High School groups
Inter institution links and cooperation
Best graduating student in each institution team awards
Liaison with external bodies
National student awards
Internships
Careers
Student communication

Qualifications Focus Group (Chris McCarthy)
Develop new framework and qualifications L3 +
Maintain CITRENZ curriculum and qualifications
Provide support for non-CITRENZ qualifications
Liaise with Industry to ensure currency of curriculum
Vendor qualifications
High School qualifications
Computing + X (breadth of computing)

The Targeted Review of Qualifications (TRoQ)
NZQA are currently reviewing the qualifications that exist in the level 1 – 6 of the qualifications framework. The review of the computing qualifications is planned to commence in 2013. CITRENZ along with NZCS, Te Wananga O Aotearoa and a number of PTE representatives are discussing options to see if a collaborative team approach can be taken to leading the review.

Update of the Bluebook Qualifications
A number of meetings have been held to identify a way in which the current Bluebook qualifications can be updated. There is general agreement that the current 7 credit, competency based course structure should be replaced by a 15 credit achievement based structure. At the moment there is some confusion about how the development should proceed alongside the TRoQ and clarification is being sought from NZQA. Since the responsibility for updating the qualifications falls within the Qualifications Focus Groups area, Chris McCarthy will be leading the charge.

The 25th CITRENZ Conference
The second CITRENZ conference has been and gone, and thanks to David Scadden and his team of willing helpers it was a great success.  The 2012 conference is being held in Christchurch, and Chris McCarthy and his team are promising that the third CITRENZ conference will be just as exciting. So now is a good time to start thinking about what you are going to present in 2012 and start writing. Remember that the dates for the Christchurch conference have been changed from July to September, the conference will occur between October 7 – 10. The call for papers has gone out, full papers and proposals should be submitted to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by the 27th April 2012.

(Note: we’ve decided to reflect our long history and will subsume the NACCQ conference count, hence this will be the 25th CITRENZ Conference).

Research focus group report
At the last CITRENZ conference, the research panel attempted to take stock of where we are as a sector in research, the current issues we face, and how we see our future unfolding.  From this, it became clear that many of our members are now established and internationally recognised researchers and their needs probably relate mainly to the conference, publications (PACIT, and BACIT/JACIT) and perhaps support for the upcoming PBRF round. However, not all our members are engaged with the PBRF and it is encouraging to see we have a number of new and emerging researchers. We would like to find ways to support these emerging researchers and to encourage others to start their research journey.

Starting with this newsletter, the research focus group would like to put forward some ideas on how to do this and canvas members on their views. Data will be collected in an on-line survey (Google docs) and reported back to members in future newsletters. The survey has just five questions: one on PBRF, three on collaborative projects and one on the general direction we should take.

Our goal is to align the work of our focus group with what matters to our members and this survey attempts to help us find out what that is. We welcome input from all members with an interest in research. The online survey can be found at:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dHp1SmU2a0tab2xaelhwZnVaaWRiTWc6MQ#gid=0

CITRENZ academic committee
An inaugural meeting of the CITRENZ academic committee was held during conference this year.  During the meeting:

• The membership of the committee was confirmed and a draft terms of reference discussed.
• Trevor Nesbit was appointed the moderation coordinator for the committee.  This will include both blue book and degree moderation.
• It was agreed that the committee will convene later in the year to endorse documentation of the terms of reference and an academic management policy.
• In 2012 one of the main tasks of the academic committee will be to carry out the academic approval process for the proposed new CITRENZ qualifications (Levels 4-6).

If you have any questions about the academic committee, please contact Mary Proctor (NMIT): This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Cluster Meeting Hosted by Wintec
Paul Matthews, CEO of the NZCS, and Tim Bell, Associate Professor Computer Science at Canterbury university, attended a recent ICT cluster meeting involving 40 secondary school teachers from over 60% of the schools from the Waikato region and Hamilton city. The title of the meeting was “Creating Opportunities for
Senior Secondary School Students to Pathway into ICT Careers, the Highest Paid Profession in NZ” and “Digital Technologies – Implementing the New Achievement Standards”.

The event, organized by Garry Roberton, together with David Whyte from Hamilton St John’s College, was sponsored by Datacom and Wintec.

The idea behind these events, where the ICT cluster group meets once per term, is to help:

• Support the ICT teachers implementing the new digital technologies achievement standards
• Create a talent pipeline from secondary schools into tertiary institutions to address the well documented NZ ICT skills shortage

Paul Matthews spoke about the significant amount of work that has occurred over the last three years in redefining what ICT means in a secondary education sense, culminating in the release of the first new NCEA ICT Achievement Standards this year, or "Digital Technologies", as they're referred to. He also mentioned the significance of the work in empowering students to change their world  through technology and gave a brief history of the introduction of digital technologies

• May 2008 – NZCS report on Achievement Standards (18 of them) -  computing needs a curriculum (Body Of Knowledge) and its own achievement standards
• Early 2009 -  DTEP formed http://dtg.tki.org.nz/
• March 2009 NZACDITT formed http://nzacditt.org.nz/
• May 2009 DTEP reported
• 2011 level 1 achievement standard released, and then each year for next level

Tim Bell then gave a very enjoyable presentation that included examples of how to make the presentation of complex computer science topics entertaining as well as informing.

He involved several of the teachers in demonstrating his techniques, much to the delight of the rest of the group. Mention was also made of CS4HS (http://www.cs4hs.com/) , an initiative sponsored by Google to promote Computer Science and Computational Thinking in high school and middle school curriculum. Tim also stated that information would soon be available on the NZACDITT site for the Level 2 Computer Science Standards.