Introducing Elisa Bone

Elisa is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education Curriculum and Assessment – STEM, at the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, where she works primarily within the FlexAP program advising academics across the University in curriculum innovation projects.

Elisa has a diverse background, with a PhD in Zoology from the University of Melbourne and experience as a production editor at CSIRO Publishing. She has worked as an instructor and researcher in the biological and ecological sciences in Australia, New Zealand and at Columbia University in the United States, as well as in education strategy at the University of Sydney. During her time in the US, she co-led a collaborative project to develop habitat assessment protocols for urban shorelines such as NY Harbor and was a senior consultant on the NSF-funded Billion Oyster Project Curriculum and Community Enterprise for Restoration Science (www.stemccers.com). Through this work, she gained a deep interest in using collaborative education projects to improve environmental literacy and awareness of global environmental problems, and worked with partners in the BOP project to build digital tools for shoreline biodiversity assessments.

Motivated to establish a related project in Australia, where we face similar problems with shoreline degradation, Elisa worked with local community groups and schools and built a mobile app – YourShore – in collaboration with the FAIMS group at Macquarie University that was initially slated for citizen scientists. With colleagues at Hong Kong University, the University of Johannesburg and the University of Melbourne, she has been adapting YourShore to the higher education context, with the goal to include it within a proposed digital learning ecosystem for upper undergraduate students in marine and coastal ecology at each institution.

But these projects can be difficult to get off the ground and her work to date has been as much about partnerships as it is about technology and pedagogy. To explore these ideas further, and incorporating ideas from systems thinking, risk matrices and change management, she is currently developing a predictive framework for elearning project success. More updates coming soon!

Recent related outputs:

Bone, E.K., Greenfield, R. Williams, G.A. & Russell, B.D. (2020). Creating a digital learning ecosystem to facilitate authentic place-based learning and international collaboration – a coastal case study. Concise paper: ASCILITE 2020 Conference Proceedings. Draft available at https://2020conference.ascilite.org/program/

O’Neil, J. M., Newton, R. J., Birney, L. B, Bone, E. K., Green, A. E., Merrick, B, Goodwin-Segal, T., Moore, G., Fraoli, A., Dennison, W.C. (2020). Using urban harbors for experiential, environmental literacy: Case studies of New York and Chesapeake Bay. Regional Studies in Marine Science 33: 100886. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsma.2019.100886

O’Neil, J.M., Taillie, D., Walsh, B., Dennison, W.C., Bone, E.K., Reid, D.J., Newton, R., Strayer, D.L., Boicourt, K., Birney, L.B., Janis, S., Malinowski, P. and Fisher, M. (2016). New York Harbor: Resilience in the face of four centuries of development. Regional Studies in Marine Science 8(2): 274–286. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsma.2016.06.004

Reid, D. J., Bone, E. K., Thurman, M. A., Levinton, J. D., Newton, R. and Strayer, D. L. (2015). Development of protocols to assess the relative habitat values of urban shorelines in the New York–New Jersey Harbor Estuary. Report to the Hudson River Foundation, New York, NY, USA. Available at: http://www.harborestuary.org/aboutestuary-habitats-shorelines.html

Reid, D. J., Bone, E. K., Thurman, M. A., Levinton, J. D., Newton, R. and Strayer, D. L. (2015). Preliminary protocols for assessing habitat values of urban estuarine shorelines using colonization devices. Report to the Hudson River Foundation, New York, NY, USA. Available at: http://www.harborestuary.org/aboutestuary-habitats-shorelines.html