Three new CRADLE Fellowships for 2026!
25 March 2026
This year’s CRADLE Fellowship round proved to be very competitive and we received many quality applications. We are pleased to announce that three Fellowships have been awarded for 2026.
Associate Professor Katrina Clifford
Associate Professor in Communication, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Dr Colin Simpson
Lecturer in Learning Futures in Deakin University’s Faculty of Business and Law
Associate Professor Martin Potter
Associate Professor, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Katrina Clifford
Reflective Assessment as Evidence of Learning in Communication WIL
Katrina’s project builds on her existing work by examining how reflective assessment is conceptualised, designed, and evaluated in Communication Work-Integrated Learning, and what this reveals about underlying assumptions regarding reflection as evidence of student learning, professional judgement, and identity formation. It will explore how educators and students interpret reflective assessment, and how reflective quality, authenticity, and validity are evaluated in the context of the rise of GenAI and the contingent nature of WIL experiences. While grounded in Communication, the project is attentive to the challenges of designing and calibrating reflective assessment in transdisciplinary WIL contexts, and aims to generate conceptual clarity and practical guidance to support educator capacity-building, particularly for staff new to teaching in WIL pathways.
About Katrina Clifford
Katrina Clifford is an Associate Professor in Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Education, specialising in media criminology and framing analysis. Her research sits at the intersections of trauma, public health, media, law and justice, with a focus on how media representations inform public understandings of crime, criminality, and criminal justice processes.
Katrina has published widely in this field and brings more than a decade of professional experience to her research and teaching, having previously worked as a journalist, editor, and communications strategist.
Colin Simpson
Sustainable ePortfolio initiatives in higher education
Colin’s Fellowship research will extend the understanding of the types and life cycle of innovative educational initiatives in higher education and the factors which enable and inhibit their sustainability. The project will focus particularly on the drivers of change which are currently under-represented in such research by examining the contributions and perspectives of institutional leaders and those of the third space practitioners (e.g. learning designers, academic developers, educational technologists) who are commonly tasked with facilitating the implementation. The outcome of this research will be a greater understanding of educational innovation in higher education and factors shaping its sustainability. This will also inform the development of a set of guidelines and processes which can be used to support effective and sustainable educational innovation initiatives.
About Colin Simpson
Colin is a Lecturer in Learning Futures in Deakin’s Faculty of Business and Law. He has a passion for unravelling and understanding the complex bundles of practices and practice arrangements that make up learning and teaching in higher education.
Colin has published widely and is a founder and co-convenor of ASCILITE TELedvisors (educator advisors) network, an Australasian community of practice for learning designers, educational technologists, and academic developers.
Martin Potter
A-Eye* TechTales – Co-creating films with and about AI to foster AI Literacies
Martin will investigate how co-creation of short films – using and critiquing generative AI (GenAI) – can foster students’ evaluative judgement and AI literacies. The project takes its conceptual cue from Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye, re-imagined as A-Eye: positioning AI not as a tool for automated output, but as a mediating “eye” that reshapes how we see, know, and value knowledge.
Partnering with EngageMedia and the DISRUPT AI Film Festival (DAIFF), the research explores AI literacy through a lens of Collective Intelligence. The focus shifts from individual academic integrity to how student co-researchers collectively navigate ethical and creative boundaries of human-AI collaboration.
About Martin Potter
Martin is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Director of the Deakin Motion Lab, and a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, transmedia producer and scholar specialising in participatory media, communication for development and creative practice research.
Martin’s work bridges academia, community engagement and cultural production, enabling diverse voices – particularly marginalised communities – to share their own stories. Martin is President of Engage Media, a non-profit media, technology and culture organisation that uses video and open technologies to facilitate social and environmental change across the Asia Pacific
What is the CRADLE Fellowship Scheme?
The objectives of the CRADLE Fellowship Scheme are to attract Deakin academics to foster the development of relevant research expertise, and support excellent practice in assessment and digital learning at Deakin. Fellows are given access to our facilities and researcher team, and are financially supported to develop both their individual and faculty’s research profile. The benefits of a CRADLE Fellowship include mentoring and financial support for research, gaining worldwide recognition as part of an international research centre, and opportunities for research partnerships with eminent researchers from overseas.
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