Who are the TALE 2018 General Chairs?

Sasha Nikolic

Dr Sasha Nikolic is a lecturer in engineering education at the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia, where he is also a Fellow of the Wollongong Academy of Tertiary Teaching and Learning Excellence. He was previously a laboratory manager at UOW, and before that worked in operations analysis and telecommunications support in the banking and financial services industry.

Sasha is a Senior Member of IEEE. He has chaired the IEEE Education Society’s NSW Chapter between 2014 and 2017. He is currently Chair-Elect for the IEEE NSW Section. He has also served as Student Activities Chair for the IEEE Australia Council and as a member of the IEEE Teacher In-Service Program, providing engineering education training to K–12 teachers. He played an instrumental role in the organisation of two recent IEEE conferences, namely POWERCON’16 (held in Wollongong) and ANZSCON’17 (held in Sydney).

Sasha has been the recipient of a number of teaching and learning as well as research awards from IEEE, AAEE and ASCILITE. In 2011, he was recognised at an institutional level in 2011 with a UOW Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning, and at a national level in 2012 with an Australian Government Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.

Sasha's research publications are focused on learning in the laboratory, augmented virtual worlds, transnational and industry-supported learning.

Mark J. W. Lee

Mark J. W. Lee is an adjunct senior lecturer with the School of Education at Charles Sturt University (CSU), Australia. He has broad research interests in educational technology, in computer science and engineering education, and in tertiary teaching innovation. Google Scholar places him among the 25 most highly cited authors in online and e-learning worldwide.

Mark was founding chair of the IEEE Education Society’s New South Wales (NSW) Chapter and has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Education since 2011, and of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies since 2016. He has been a member of the Steering Committee of TALE since its inception. In addition to TALE, Mark has been involved in the organisation of numerous academic conferences, having had experience in and exposure to almost every conferences committee role from Technical Program Chair to Reviewer. He was partly responsible for spearheading the establishment of ACM’s videogame symposium series in 2006.

In 2016, Mark was named a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society for his distinguished contributions to ICT education and the use of ICT for education. He is also a Fellow of the Commercial Education Society of Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Training and Development, and a senior Member of IEEE and of ACM.

Mark's recent research publications focus on creative and playful pedagogies and learning designs that transcend multiple spaces, temporalities and/or modalities.