Last week was full of wonderful catchups and new learnings for me.  I attended the Australian Council of Deans of Education Vocational Education Group’s Research, Policy & Teaching Practice: building connections conference at Sydney TAFE and UTS on 8 and 9 December.  Build connections it did!  Many of the high achievers of the vocational education research world, as well as international researchers and a few new faces were in attendance.  Watch this website for some of the presentations.  It was such a thrill to be present for the Rozzie Brennan-Kemmis Scholarships presentation (and I will need to ask someone who the scholarship holders are I am sorry).

The Innovation Agenda has a lot of traction in Australia (and internationally) at present.  There are a lot of voices attempting to highlight the importance of including vocational education as a significant contributor to innovation.  If you would like to contribute to an important research undertaking, being sponsored by the National Vocational Education and Training Research (NVETR) Program and conducted by Francesca Beddie and Linda Simon, please drop over the NCVER site to see the outline of the research. Francesca and Linda provided an update of the current state of play with the research and urged (I do mean urged) all those present to provide input to the questions being asked by this research.  Go on … have a look and make your contribution.

As I said, keep an eye out here for presentations from the ACDEVEG conference.