This paper will describe ways in which both the formal and informal curriculum can be used to improve the student experience of internationalisation - and the importance of focussing on both to encourage and reward intercultural engagement.



It draws on the results of several research studies to present some strategies for facilitating meaningful interaction between students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds in and out of the classroom.



Principles and guidelines for structuring formal and informal curricular activities and services, teaching and learning activities and a taxonomy of intercultural competence to guide learning and assessment task design are described.



The paper concludes that the development of intercultural competence in students is a key outcome of an internationalised curriculum which requires a campus environment and culture which obviously motivates and rewards interaction between international and home students in and out of the classroom. This means that while academic staff have a critical role to play, a much larger group will need to engage with the internationalisation agenda in order to improve interactions between home and international students.



This talk was the keynote presentation at the Internationalisation of the Curriculum Showcase held at Swinburne University of Technology in July 2008.

We explore how light behaves near massive objects, and show that for gravitational lenses, gravitational redshifts and black holes, the main concepts can be understood in general terms from Einstein's oft-quoted equation, E=mc^2. Light paths are changed as they pass close to the sun and to massive galaxies, so giving us the idea of gravitational lenses which can change the appearance of distant galaxies and quasars. Some examples of multiply imaged quasars and lensed galaxies are given. Gravitational redshifts of light from compact stars have been measured. In the extreme case of very compact objects - black holes - no light can escape at all. There are compelling reasons for believing that massive black holes reside near the centers of many galaxies, and particularly the center of the Milky Way.



Professor Carswell was invited to Swinburne under the Board of Research Visiting Professor Grant Scheme, and this lecture was presented as part of the PVC(R) Visiting Professor Lecture Series.

This seminar presents the semantic services science modelling framework to support service descriptions that capture system/technical, human, organizational, and business value/requirements aspects. We believe that a combination of Web2.0 and semantic technology can be used to energize services across the broad service spectrum.



Professor Amit Sheth (Wright State University, Ohio) was invited to Swinburne under the Board of Research Visiting Professor Grant Scheme, and this lecture was presented as part of the PVC(R) Visiting Professor Lecture Series.

All the flag waving in the world won't stop the food riots, or the sea rising or the icecaps melting. Happily, the wine still flows, carbon trading shows promise and we can watch disaster movies on laptops. The food gets finer, even as the fish disappear. We face peak oil, peak water, even peak civilization; but let's not mention the resource wars.



Now is the time to stretch our mind skills, such as adjusting to paradox, adapting to change and engaging the future. Do we face a long boom, a long emergency or a slow, startling and irresistible decline into a Third World lifestyle.



Pass the lentils, light the dung. Hot rocks in the outback could

replace the need for coal; skyscrapers might grow food, water tables may be refreshed with artificial rain or the tears of the Gods and through it all, you'll need to learn to live in three time zones.



Confused? Welcome to the future - it's where you'll spend the rest of your life.



http://www.richardneville.com/

The term Software Engineering (SE) was coined at a NATO conference in 1968 in a somewhat provocative sense. Shouldn't it be possible to build software in the way one builds bridges and houses, using sound and proven design and construction techniques as in other engineering fields? By now, after 40 years of development, we can safely say that a lot of progress has been made. Life without well-engineered computer systems is inconceivable.



In this lecture, Professor Hans van Vliet (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) will sketch the developments in the field, and focus on recent developments that are having a huge impact: - the rise of agile methods - the shift from producing software to using software - the success of open source software - the globalization of software development These developments have widened the scope of the field. It is increasingly being recognized that there's more to SE than engineering. In particular, SE has an important human and social dimension as well.



Professor van Vliet was invited to Swinburne under the Board of Research Visiting Professor Grant Scheme, and this lecture was presented as part of the PVC(R) Visiting Professor Lecture Series.

Natural products are words and messages in a global communication system of species interactions. They have a special meaning and will effect an answer, which is not constant, but depends on the given situation. We are just beginning to understand this language of nature, to compile the vocabulary and to decipher the grammar.



Natural products are weapons and defence systems, attractants and repellents, or simply communication signals which are important for the survival of species. Development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a logical and unavoidable response to environmental effects, which we can only overcome by a better understanding of the 'microbial conversation'. As a consequence, the investigation of ecological interactions and a continuous and efficient search for new natural products with potential application in medicine is a steady and indispensable task. However, since the number of natural products is limited, every newly isolated product will diminish the chances to find further hits. And every re-isolated known compound is an avoidable loss of time and money.



Two techniques are widely applied to overcome these problems. The first one is activity-directed high throughput screening, which is an expensive and fully automated, mainly industrial process; the other one is the so-called chemical screening. We are using a third technique, a type of dragnet search, where we compare easily accessible data of isolated and purified compounds with comprehensive databases of more than 50,000 marine and microbial natural products, AntiBase or MarinLit. Comparison of sub-structures, NMR, MS, and UV data allows a very fast decision as to whether a given natural product is already known or not, which enables us to save time and resources, avoid frustration, and to concentrate on the really new topics.



This presentation will explain modern dereplication techniques using MS/MS, 2D NMR and database methods. The procedure will be highlighted by some simple and some very complex examples from our ongoing research on marine bacteria.



Professor Laatsch (University of Gott) was invited to Swinburne under the Board of Research Visiting Professor Grant Scheme, and this lecture was presented as part of the PVC(R) Visiting Professor Lecture Series.

Professor George Kaptay (BAY-NANO Research Institute, University of Miskolc, Hungary) describes the different work he has been conducting over the past few years. From the field of interfacial phenomena he will be talking on the formation of a nano-layer on the surface of immiscible alloys and on its influence on the Marangoni convection and on technologies like welding. He also will show the reasons why nano-nuclei can be stabilized during nucleation from diluted liquid solutions or vapour. From the field of chemical thermodynamics he presents a new formalism to describe temperature dependence of excess Gibbs energy to avoid calculated artefacts during phase diagram calculations. From the field of transport properties he presents his recent unified equation for the viscosity and self-diffusion coefficient in liquid metals, and also the equation, connecting the composition dependence of viscosity and heat of mixing in liquid alloys. Finally, the way in which metallic foams and emulsions can be stabilized by solid particles is described.



Professor Kaptay was invited to Swinburne under the Board of Research Visiting Professor Grant Scheme, and this lecture was presented as part of the PVC(R) Visiting Professor Lecture Series.

Professor Andrew Wood and Dr Ray Kemp discuss current research around whether powerlines and mobile phones pose a real health risk. Do we really have cause for concern or is it all just media hype? This seminar was presented as part of the "Double Take" series, where two academics present differing points of view on a particular theme.



Andrew Wood has served on government and international committees to evaluate health effects of these issues. Ray Kemp has specialized in the area of emotions in risk perception, working in both the UK and Australia.

Professor Hal Pawson (Heriot-Watt University, UK) discusses approaches to measuring public service performance and investigates whether there is credible trend-over-time evidence of UK public service performance improvement over the past decade. He then goes on to examine the measures adopted by the UK's New Labour administration with the aim of improving local government services, including the roles of external inspection and quasi markets.



Professor Pawson was invited to Swinburne under the Board of Research Visiting Professor Grant Scheme, and this lecture was presented as part of the PVC(R) Visiting Professor Lecture Series.

Professor John Bowden's perspective on Tertiary Curriculum Development in the next 10 years, specifically talking about issues around learning for the unknown future and capability development through the experience of variation. John also discusses the curriculum development inplications of these two items.



Learning for an Unknown Future was a keynote presentation at the Learning and Teaching Showcase held at Swinburne University in May 2007.