David Parsons

academyEX

An underlying assumption of the BYOD (bring your own device) approach to classroom learning is that technology is naturally embedded into the wider life of the learner. By not only allowing, but requiring, school students to bring their own devices into the classroom, teachers in BYOD schools are acknowledging that 21 st century education must refl...

The future of mobile learning (mLearning) in education and training holds much promise, but it also poses many challenges and dangers. In imagining what mLearning may mean to us in the years to come, we should be wary of making predictions. Nevertheless, we can reflect on current and emerging technology and practice and usefully suggest how we migh...

Game-like activities are often seen as valuable teaching tools, because they foster engagement and can also encourage teamwork and self-directed learning. The agile software engineering community was an early adopter of game-like activities in its mission to educate software developers about various aspects of agile methods. In addition to the pote...

This article focuses on curriculum issues by describing the design of a micro-credential in software development, intended to provide a postgraduate, stackable, industry-relevant unit of study that provides a unique offering in the education marketplace. The key philosophy of this micro-credential was that it would bridge the often-siloed disciplin...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often framed as providing affordable, flexible ways to deliver education on a global scale. However, opportunities for further study are often neither massive nor open. This leads to questions about how MOOCs fit within the broader landscape of online education. The particular focus of this chapter is the rol...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often framed as providing affordable, flexible ways to deliver education on a global scale. However, opportunities for further study are often neither massive nor open. This leads to questions about how MOOCs fit within the broader landscape of online education. The particular focus of this chapter is the rol...

The relationships between education and industry are many and varied. These relationships can be very direct, for example where students do some of their learning in the workplace, or practitioners engage with schools and universities by bringing their knowledge of the workplace into the classroom. There are, however, many more creative relationshi...

This article reports on a study that was undertaken into enablers and barriers to Māori student success on a postgraduate programme for in-service teachers. The study was led by Māori researchers and followed a Kaupapa Māori research philosophy—research by Māori, for Māori, and with Māori. Data were gathered via a series of hui (meetings) to which...

This article reports on a survey of New Zealand teachers, designed to assess their experiences of distance learning during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The survey gathered detailed quantitative and qualitative data from 31 schoolteachers who had previously experienced professional development in digital learning. The questions addressed many areas of pr...

Physical field trips have long been used in education, but virtual field trips are increasingly being used to enhance them. This article focuses on the use of mixed reality to enhance a physical field trip before, during, and after the field experience as part of a project in teacher professional development. The context is a field trip to a landfi...

To integrate digital technologies into the curriculum, teachers must support learners to use digital tools in authentic contexts. Physical computing, which involves the use of small portable electronic devices, provides an opportunity to achieve these goals. This article reports on the initial stages of a design-based research (DBR) project that wi...

This systematic review has been developed against a background of rapid developments in augmented reality (AR) technology and its application in medical education. The objectives are to provide a critical synthesis of current trends in the field and to highlight areas for further research. The data sources used for the study were the PubMed, Web of...

https://www.learntechlib.org/j/MLEARN/v/2020/n/1/

Students who are innovating in a project-based context need appropriate frameworks to support applied research that is easily understandable, flexible to different contexts, and appropriate to their needs. Such support is particularly important when the research involves the development of a technology-related artifact, where students need empirica...

Building on the previous chapter, which covered how to make UI components appear on the screen, this chapter explains how component events can be handled to add underlying code to the UI. It outlines the features of Java that can manage events being fired from various components and mouse actions. Various types of event and event listeners are intr...

This chapter explains how inheritance can be used to write closely related classes that have some fields and methods in common. In the code examples, a set of classes are organized into an inheritance hierarchy of super and sub-classes that goes beyond the default behavior of Java classes to inherit directly from class “Object”. This use of inheren...

This chapter looks at threads, using both inheritance from the Thread class, and implementing the Runnable interface. It outlines the various states that a thread can be in during its lifetime (ready, running, non-runnable, and dead). Code examples illustrate how multiple threads can be run concurrently, and how they can be put to sleep for certain...

This chapter looks at some aspects of the Collections Framework. It begins by outlining some of the main interfaces in the framework, including Iterable, Collection, and Map, and explains how these can be used to implement object associations. It lists the general purpose classes in the Collections framework that link together high-level interfaces...

This chapter explains how to create and populate a database using the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS). It also demonstrates how a JDBC driver enables Java code to connect to and interact with a relational database using a standard API. Code examples cover the execution of queries to create a ResultSet, and the execution of updat...

This chapter begins by looking at the creation and use of some objects and methods related to String data (Strings, StringBuilders, StringBuffers and the “toString” method). This is followed by some important issues regarding the way that objects are referenced in memory when programming with Java, and the way that some operators work with objects....

This chapter looks at a range of different types of input and output stream, handling the input and output of bytes, primitives, Strings, and objects. The examples in this chapter focus on file handling because this makes it easy to demonstrate both input and output, but the chapter also explains how there are other sources and sinks of data, for e...

This chapter builds on the knowledge of classes and objects developed in the preceding chapters to create larger programs based on different objects communicating with one another. It illustrates different examples of the ways that objects can work together: association, where independent objects talk to each other, aggregation, where an object is...

This chapter looks at various aspects of using Java to create graphical user interfaces. These include Components (objects that the user interacts with such as buttons and check boxes) and Containers (components that can contain other components such as frames and panels). Several component types are described, including labels, buttons, radio butt...

This chapter introduces Java by describing how it has become a mature and popular language that is used across the world for all kinds of applications. It explains why to program successfully in Java it is necessary to understand object-oriented concepts and then apply them to Java objects. The chapter outlines how Java’s rich syntax and wide-rangi...

This chapter describes how Java’s control structures are used for selection and iteration. It looks at various types of selection syntax, including “if” and “switch” statements, and introduces the relational and Boolean operators that are used in the conditions that control “if” statements and loops. It also introduces the ternary operator, which p...

This chapter explores various aspects of exception handling in Java, including the keywords; “throws”, “try”, “catch”, “finally”, and “throw”. In order to help the reader understand how to use these keywords in code, it illustrates how the exception hierarchy divides exception types into checked exceptions, which are checked by the compiler and req...

This chapter introduces Ant (“Another Neat Tool”), a build tool that can be used to automate the build and deploy process, as well as running and testing code. It begins by showing how an Ant build file (by default called “build.xml”) can be created to copy source code out of Eclipse and build it independently of the IDE, while the build scripts th...

Following on from the coverage of Swing components and event handling in the previous two chapters, this chapter covers the basic components of a WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers) interface. It begins with an explanation of how to create dialogs, which provide richer options for interacting with the user through multiple windows and shows...

This chapter covers the various data types available in Java and differentiates between primitive types, which include numbers, characters, and Boolean values, and reference types such as arrays, and how variables of these types can be declared and initialized. The Java arithmetic operators are introduced, and code examples show how they can be use...

Following on from the coverage of Swing components and event handling in the previous two chapters, this chapter covers the basic components of a WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers) interface. It begins with an explanation of how to create dialogs, which provide richer options for interacting with the user through multiple windows and shows...

This chapter opens with some discussion of object-oriented concepts such as information hiding and the encapsulation of state and behavior inside objects. This is followed by an illustration of how classes and their fields and methods are represented in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Subsequent code examples show how new domain classes can be...

This chapter introduces the concept of unit testing which, as part of an overall test strategy, not only helps to improve code quality but can also help to drive the design of code. The examples in this chapter use the JUnit 5 test framework, which makes it easy to create and run unit tests that make assertions against code (in units under test) to...

This chapter outlines the basics of using the tools provided with Java to compile and run code. It describes how the source code of Java class is structured, how it can be compiled using the “javac” compiler (provided with Oracle’s Java Development Kit or the OpenJDK) and how it can be run on the Java Virtual Machine from the command prompt / termi...

This chapter covers a small sample of classes from some of the packages in the Java libraries. It begins with some coverage of the Object class, and the “clone” method, before looking at some other classes in the “java.lang” package (Math, System, and the wrapper classes). This is followed by coverage of two classes from the “java.util” package (Lo...

Changes to contemporary curricula are increasingly driven by the evolution of technology. The spread of personal digital devices and pervasive communication infrastructure has led to significant changes in global society. These changes have highlighted the need for schools to ensure that all students are prepared for the contemporary digital world....

Learning theories underpin the expectations of meaningful outcomes that any given learning task should have. However, educators' understanding and application of such theories is likely to vary with their own experience and context. In this article, we explore the potential value of a rubric for the design of mobile learning activities that is base...

Augmented Reality (AR) assumes that virtual content is intermediated between the viewer and the real world, but the extent of that intermediation, and the ways in which it is intended to enhance the real-world experience, can vary between tools and contexts. The links between an overlay and the physical world may be weak or strong, and the roles of...

This article outlines a case study of a team of secondary school students creating a commercially deployed immersive Virtual Reality (VR) game as part of their learning. Given the limited amount of relevant literature on the learning outcomes from students creating and deploying VR games to the commercial marketplace, the study adopted a grounded t...

Academic procrastination is a common behavior among tertiary students. In particular, part-time adult students who undergo professional training usually find it very difficult to balance tertiary study, work, and family responsibilities. It is important to investigate factors contributing to and consequences resulting from adult students' academic...

This article explores the various ways that teachers and learners can navigate different learning worlds with the support of digital tools. Increasingly, teaching and learning takes place in spaces beyond the classroom, whether physical or virtual. Place, navigation and movement have all been recognised as important concepts in approaches to unders...

There is growing interest in applying both agile and lean concepts in the classroom to improve educational experiences. In this chapter, we draw together the disparate ideas of these two fields from industrial practice and the existing work within this area to develop and frame the major concepts of agile and lean thinking for teaching and learning...

This book explores the application of agile and lean techniques, originally from the field of software development and manufacturing, to various aspects of education. It covers a broad range of topics, including applying agile teaching and learning techniques in the classroom, incorporating lean thinking in educational workflows, and using team-bas...

Agile and lean concepts from industry are increasingly being brought into education. The most common way in which agile methods are used in the classroom is to manage student learning using an adaptation of processes such as Scrum, while the most popular adoption of lean thinking is to manage the pull and flow of learning via a Kanban board. Suppor...

The concept of a digital curriculum has been discussed widely both nationally and internationally in recent years. In New Zealand, the 2017 Digital Curriculum (Hangarau Matihiko) outlined a vision for two technology areas that provide both an entitlement curriculum (to which every student should be entitled) and a specialist curriculum (for electiv...

This chapter explores the relationship between mobile learning and policy as it pertains to the curriculum. Instructional content is often guided by national or international curricula, which reflect the education policies of government agencies or other organizations. Few of these curricula directly address mobile learning, but many include refere...

This paper outlines the development and testing of an online mobile tool, the Mobile Learning Activity Design Analyser, intended to assist educators in designing mobile learning activities that leverage important concepts from a set of relevant learning theories. We describe the first cycle of a 6 stage design science process from motivation throug...

The development of effective mobile learning activities requires the careful selection of, and emphasis on, appropriate learning theory. However, operationalising the various principles of learning theories in mobile learning activity design can be challenging due to the dynamic changes in technology and learning environments taking place in educat...

Implementing mobile learning in curriculum-based educational settings faces challenges related to perceived ethical and learning issues. This study investigated the affordances of mobile technologies to support mathematics instruction by teachers. An exploratory study employing questionnaires and semi-structured interviews revealed that, while math...

The literature on the professional development of primary and secondary teachers suggests that isolated initiatives are not effective in bringing about changes in teachers' practices and beliefs. Research argues that changes in belief result from changes to practice that are perceived to improve student learning. This study examines the influence o...

Crowdsourcing is a twenty-first century phenomenon that relies on Web 2.0 technologies to enable the public to contribute to data gathering by organisations. It offers new ways of researching emerging topics that leverage the wisdom of crowds. Crowdsourcing originally developed as a way of identifying one or more 'winning' solutions from a crowd of...

Learning theories underpin the expectations of meaningful outcomes that any given learning task should have. However, educators' understanding and application of such theories is likely to vary with their own experience and context. In this article, we explore the potential value of a rubric for the design of mobile learning activities that is base...

Implementing mobile learning in curriculum-based educational settings faces challenges related to perceived ethical and learning issues. This study investigated the affordances of mobile technologies to support mathematics instruction by teachers. An exploratory study employing questionnaires and semi-structured interviews revealed that, while math...

Adoption of mobile learning in New Zealand schools has spread rapidly in recent years as the power and usability of portable devices, along with broadband penetration and speed, have changed the technology landscape. This has major implications for higher education, both because it is tasked with training the future teachers who will work in digita...

Those who work to promote the use of mobile tools for teaching and learning do so in a complex environment. There are many different stakeholders who can have a profound influence over the acceptance and support of such innovations. To what extent these stakeholders choose to either promote or constrain mobile learning depends on their own perspect...

In 2010, the New Zealand government embarked upon an ambitious programme of broadband infrastructure investment, a process that will continue until at least 2019. Part of this investment is specifically targeted at compulsory education, with initiatives that include bringing fibre connections to the school gate, supporting on-site network upgrades...

Designing mobile learning activities requires us to consider which key affordances of mobile devices can support the optimum learning experience. This short paper reports on the design and testing of a BYOD mobile learning activity that was based on an analysis of af-fordances and a survey of student preferences. It outlines the affordances and pre...

Theory is often neglected when planning and analysing mobile learning projects, beyond perhaps a brief but unexamined list of learning theories in the introductions to articles. Theory is, however, important since it underpins the expectations of meaningful learning outcomes that any given mobile learning activity should have. Attention has been pa...

The Digital and Collaborative Learning postgraduate programme of The Mind Lab by Unitec not only provides teachers with transformational approaches to 21st‐century learning, but also with opportunities to create connections with those who teach different student age groups, are from different teaching disciplines, or are from different regions of t...

Mathematical literacy plays an important role in supporting individuals to fulfil their professional roles in modern society. The affordances of mobile technologies as well as the emergence of new theories in mobile learning have the potential to promote mathematical literacy. However, implementation of mobile learning in Indonesian society faces c...

Context Coderetreats are reflective communities of practice, where participants congregate informally to apply their coding abilities to a clearly defined problem setting with the aim of developing their software design skills. One of these events is the global day of coderetreat (GDCR) involving more than two thousand software developers worldwide...

This paper reports on the first two years of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative in a New Zealand secondary school, using data derived from a series of surveys of teachers, parents and students, who are the main stakeholders in the transformation to a BYOD school. In this paper we analyse data gathered from these surveys, which consists prima...

This article reports on a survey of teachers undertaking a postgraduate applied practice certificate in digital and collaborative learning. The survey was intended to capture how mobile learning was currently being used by the teachers both on the course and in their own classrooms. The objective was to investigate to what extent mobile learning wa...

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a mobile assisted language learning tool that teaches some aspects of the Māori language within a virtual game world. The game uses a simulated world, which reflects aspects of Māori art and culture, to structure Māori language learning experiences. It was developed using the Corona SDK and can...

This paper reports on the first two years of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative in a New Zealand secondary school, using data derived from a series of surveys of teachers, parents and students. In this paper we present the data gathered from these surveys, which includes not only quantitative data but qualitative data from free text response...

This paper investigates some participant outcomes from a part-time postgraduate course for in-service teachers, focusing on digital and collaborative learning and leadership, delivered in several locations across New Zealand. In order to monitor the success of the course, regular anonymous feedback is gathered. One question in particular is essenti...

The software development community includes people from a wide spectrum of age and experience. While the industry itself is constantly evolving with new languages, tools and methods, developers themselves are advancing through their careers. A consequence of these two paths of change is that future demand for software-related skills is unpredictabl...

Technology mediated learning provide potentially valuable resources for learners' academic and social development. However, according to recent researches, as the adoption stages of ICTs advance there arise further levels of digital divides in terms of equity of information literacy and learning outcomes. For the last three years we have been worki...

Agile methods have emerged in recent years as a new paradigm in software development, promising to free the process of building software systems from some of the constraints of more traditional approaches. However the plethora of overlapping methods makes it difficult to identify the core features of an agile approach that transcends any particular...

Given the fast growing nature of software engineering data in online software repositories and open source communities, it would be helpful to analyse these assets to discover valuable information about the software engineering development process and other related data. Big Data Analytics (BDA) techniques and frameworks can be applied on these dat...

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are the subject of increasing interest for educators and trainers. In the context of software development, they are beginning to see increasing use both as learning spaces and as a richer means of collaboration for virtual teams. This chapter reflects on a project that developed and evaluated a virtual agile...

Mobile learning has been a research topic for some 20 years. Over that time it has encompassed a wide range of concepts, theories, designs, experiments and evaluations. With increasing interest in mobile learning from researchers and practitioners, an accessible overview of this area of research that encapsulates its many facets and features can pr...

Student course surveys provide an important feedback mechanism for universities. However the quality of this feedback depends largely on the level of participation. New technologies have enabled course surveys to evolve from written paper-based tools to web-based and mobile channels, but using these channels does not necessarily lead to better resp...

Regression testing is a well-established practice in software development, but in recent years it has seen a change of status and emphasis with the increasing popularity of agile methods, which stress the central role of regression testing in maintaining software quality. The objectives of this article are to investigate regression testing strategi...

The UNESCO policy guidelines for mobile learning are intended to guide governments, educational institutions and other relevant organisations in the integration of mobile learning into education policy. Their main goal is to support and enable teaching and learning through the safe, affordable and sus-tainable use of mobile technologies. Like all p...

The current use of mobile technology in the classroom has attracted many educators and researchers to develop mobile web based learning tools for educational purposes. In school science education, deductive or inductive forms of inquiry are used, while the use of abductive form of inquiry has been sparsely explored. ‘ThinknLearn’, an abductive enqu...

Mobile learning has been a research topic for some 20 years. Over that time it has encompassed a wide range of concepts, theories, designs, experiments and evaluations. With increasing interest in mobile learning from researchers and practitioners, an accessible overview of this area of research that encapsulates its many facets and features can pr...

A coderetreat is an event where software developers gather to spend a day exploring their craft in an informal yet intellectually challenging environment. It encourages reflective practice by addressing a single programming problem from different perspectives, with multiple coding partners, freed from the daily pressures of deadlines and the need t...

Critical thinking is an essential quality in complex problem solving. Many researchers have proposed that collaborative peer learning could enhance critical thinking, because learners could understand more diverse views by sharing different perspectives on a given situation. The work presented in this paper aims to explore a possible relationship b...

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are the subject of increasing interest for educators and trainers. In the context of software development, they are beginning to see increasing use both as learning spaces and as a richer means of collaboration for virtual teams. This chapter reflects on a project that developed and evaluated a virtual agile...

Mobile learning has been a topic of research and development for 20 years. Over that time it has encompassed a wide range of concepts, theories, designs, experiments and evaluations. With increasing interest in the subject from researchers and practitioners, a comprehensive, yet accessible, overview of mobile learning that encompasses its many face...

This chapter presents the current state of the art on school science inquiry investigations using technology enhanced learning. Traditionally, school science education has been dominated by deductive and inductive style of inquiry investigations. However, abductive style of inquiry investigation has been sparsely explored in the literature related...

Recent advancements in digital technology have attracted the interest of educators and researchers to develop technology-assisted inquiry-based learning environments in the domain of school science education. Traditionally, school science education has followed deductive and inductive forms of inquiry investigation, while the abductive form of inqu...

A number of questions have been raised by both practitioners and researchers regarding the compatibility of service oriented architectures and agile methods. These are compounded when both approaches are combined to maintain and migrate legacy systems. In particular, where test driven development is practiced as a core component of an agile develop...

The current educational system continues to face challenges in the wake of new technological advancements in our society. Continuous advances in education technology have provided the mobile learning community with inquiries on how these innovative devices may be used for teaching. Innovations in Mobile Educational Technologies and Applications pr...

This study is investigating the phenomenon of digital divides, in the context of integrating one-toone ICTs into the learning process. For this purpose, we are studying a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) initiative by a New Zealand School. This poster discusses the background and agenda of the study, as well as some of the initial findings from an an...

Offshore software development (OSD) is a leading business sector in the global IT marketplace, and vendors in different countries are opening software development centres to take advantage of new business opportunities. However, software development is both a technical and a social process in which various software modules are integrated, requiring...

There is growing interest from science educators and researchers to develop technology-assisted inquiry based learningenvironments in the domain of school science education. Traditionally, school science education has been dominated bydeductive and inductive styles of enquiry investigations, while the abductive style of inquiry investigation has pr...

This paper investigates an initiative by a New Zealand School to integrate one-to-one ICTs into the learning process, called 'bring your own device' (BYOD). Prior to embarking on the BYOD initiative, similar past initiatives have been studied and some persistent issues have been identified. Before starting with the detailed investigation of BYOD, a...

This paper describes the current phase of a long term project to create a reusable, configurable mobile learning game. The game uses a location aware augmented reality scenario in which players, in teams of two, role play business consultants to a technology company that is facing problems. Early versions of the game were developed on the Java Micr...

The use of ontologies has become increasingly widespread in many areas, particularly in technology enhanced learning. They appear promising in supporting knowledge representation and learning content creation for domains of interest. In this paper, we show how ontology-based scaffolding has helped mobile learners to perform scientific enquiry inves...

Ontologies have emerged as one of the most popular and widely accepted tools in technology enhanced learning supporting, among other things, knowledge representation and learning content creation. In this paper, we describe the development and evaluation of an ontology supported mobile learning application that supports abductive enquiry based lear...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current glocal (global and local) environment to answer the following research questions: How does the glocal environment influence software exporting industries in India? How is the evolving “sticky” knowledge from individuals and teams assimilated into organizational knowledge repositories?...

The use of ontologies has become increasingly widespread in many areas, particularly in technology enhanced learning. They appear promising in supporting knowledge representation and learning content creation for a particular domain. In this paper, we show how ontology-based scaffolding has helped mobile learners to perform scientific enquiry inves...

This paper describes the design and development of a mobile serious game and discusses the outcomes of a prototype evaluation. The game augments a physical location to represent a virtual company. Players take the role of business consultants hired by this company to help it address its problems and 'interview' virtual employees, obtaining informat...