Andrew is an independent education technology consultant with 22 years’ classroom experience. He has won numerous awards for his work with emerging technologies in education, including the The Victorian Education Excellence Award for Curriculum Innovation, An Australian Government Quality Schooling Award and the Microsoft Worldwide Innovative Teacher of the Year.  As a conference presenter, he inspires teachers to think differently about their role in the learning process and to be more innovative in their approach to teaching.  He shares high-concept ideas and low-tech tools that make it easier for teachers to do their work of capturing the interests of young people.

Director of Environment Campaigning at the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) I love the beauty of ordinary places. Growing up in a small town taught me how tough and necessary it is to go against the flow when things aren’t right. For over a decade now I have been working with non-government, philanthropic, government and business sectors to create policy and law reform across issues of drought, nature conservation, natural resource management, rural water allocation, environmental flows, urban water supply and nature-based solutions to carbon pollution mitigation and climate adaptation. During this time I wrote The Murray: A River and its People (Melbourne University Press), an environmental and cultural history of the Murray River. I also worked with two of Australia’s leading artists, Mandy Martin and the late John Davis, on collaborative art projects exploring the importance of arid rangelands and river environments to Australian national identity. I am currently a member of the Community and Industry Advisory Board for Environmental Programs at the University of Melbourne and the World Commission on Protected Areas; I was recently a member of the Australian Government’s National Wildlife Corridors Plan Advisory Group. My work at ACF involves thinking a lot about how and what we can do to help places and species have the best chance of adapting to the impacts of climate change. I am lucky to work with a talented campaign team who build community, business and government support for initiatives that conserve and restore Australia’s safe climate and ecosystems.

Dr. Andrew Brookes joined the Bendigo College of Advanced Education, later to become part of La Trobe University, in 1988 when university courses for Australian outdoor education teachers were in their infancy. Prior to that he had run an outdoor program for Glen Waverly High School, at Nayook camp, and worked for the Bushwalking and Mountaincraft Leadership Course, Ski Tour Leaders Certificate Course, and various Education Department in-service courses for teachers. At La Trobe he has contributed to the development of undergraduate and post-graduate courses as course coordinator, Head of Department, and Head of School, at different times. He left La Trobe as research-intensive Associate Professor at the end of 2014 to pursue private consultancy and to prospect for gold. He has a long-standing interest in clarifying and strengthening the role of university OE courses, and in research. His research has focussed on curriculum questions that follow from the location of OE in specific places, critique of OE aims and purposes, and serious incident prevention based on systematic study of actual incidents. His research is highly regarded internationally. He has extended periods of service on the editorial advisory boards on several international journals, including the Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, and Journal of Experiential Education, and frequently peer-review papers for several journals. He helped found the International Outdoor Education Research Conferences, and has been on the academic committee for all past conferences. Some of his research papers have sunk without a trace, but others are among the most cited works in the publications they appeared in. Overall his work makes him one of the 5 most cited OE researchers internationally since 2000. He has consulted for a number of law firms, and was a member of the 3 person review team which reported on the Mangatepopo tragedy in New Zealand. He lives on a rural property with his offspring and a small mob of tame kangaroos.