Ian Kennedy

University of the Witwatersrand | wits

Starting research or struggling in your research? This new E-book introduces crucial concepts for today's researchers which are not handled elsewhere. It presents frank tips on how to creatively solve research problems and problems in researching. The E-book shows you how to easily find your thesis-theme, design your research, prepare your literatu...

In developing countries, students are sensitive to the cost of education and lecturers do not have much support. We present a new, constructivist technique for educators in developing countries, of lifelong benefit to their students. Course materials are often incoherent to students until a lecturer does an analysis and provides the pedagogical lin...

To think about how educational design will evolve in the future, we need to first analyse its previous evolution. The paper draws lessons for progress in the continuing educational design of successful courseware. Educational design is here the ongoing analysis of educational needs and the systematic development and refinement of educational course...

The author argues that engineers must at least understand formal research, and that engineers should be formally educated in how to do research. He argues that the only way to do this effectively is through a deliberate plan on education and hands-on exercises. A course on educating engineers in how to do research is described, with particular refe...

Research-based projects are conventionally regarded as the capstone of an undergraduate degree. These projects combine what students have learned in their coursework with the undertaking of small, independent research projects. We advocate engaging students towards completing their final research projects from their very first year in science and e...

By nature, research is a trek into the unknown by routes that may include a research pilgrimage like attending academic conferences, conducting interviews and experiments, and reading related research often via the digital environment that characterizes higher education in the 21st Century. They may find all sorts of information to include pointers...

By nature, research is a trek into the unknown by routes that may include a research pilgrimage like attending academic conferences, conducting interviews and experiments, and reading related research often via the digital environment that characterizes higher education in the 21st Century. They may find all sorts of information to include pointers...

By nature, research is a trek into the unknown by routes that are somewhat unpredictable and unplannable. This trek may include a research pilgrimage like attending academic conferences, conducting interviews and experiments, and reading related research to find vital information to aid in researchers’ discoveries. They may find all sorts of inform...

Teamwork is commonly required in industry. At university students learn teamwork by working in groups. Lecturers need an assessment of the cooperation of individual team members in addition to their evaluation of the overall group performance. Group dynamics affects the group's productivity. Cooperation data can only be provided by the students inv...

This chapter summarises what the authors have learned during the research process and recommends a number of directions. One of these is the importance of listening to the wisdom of educators with diverse skills in more concerted ways. The authors also learned the importance of individual and collective efficacy, and the disrupting of the known to...

Starting research or struggling in your research? “My new E-book introduces crucial concepts for today's researchers which are not handled elsewhere. It presents frank tips on how to creatively solve research problems and problems in researching. The E-book shows you how to easily find your thesis-theme, design your research, prepare your literatur...

The posts from an online global exchange were categorised into themes that revealed a comprehensive picture of new and pre-existing 21st century skills. Central to the required skills that the educators’ addressed were critical thinking, problem-solving, collaborative learning, learner-centred teaching and digital literacy.

This chapter explores the plethora of literature on teachers’ 21st century skills. The authors explore two broad paradigms found in the literature. The first and most prominent advocate educational reform; formulating ways to better the existing systems and provide teachers with new skills to teach. The second seek to replace the existing systems i...

In this Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the ideas of posters in a global online exchange are compared to a group of Big Thinkers in 21st century education. The analysis reveals many commonalities in their desire for urgent and radical change. Both groups are in agreement that a new paradigm of education is required, providing far more autonomy to...

This chapter describes and defends the Thematic Analysis and the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) used in the research design. In the Thematic Analysis, a total of 1812 responses were generated from the question posed on ResearchGate: What skills must 21st century teachers have to promote high quality learning? From these responses, 200 posts...

Three teachers / researchers asked: what is the collective wisdom about teachers’ skills for 21st century students and how does it compare with literature on educational change? They elected to study a topic thread, posted by one of the three authors, which was: What are the skills that 21st century teachers must have to ensure that high quality le...

First you have to do the research! Then you document each step you take as you go along, so that some other competent researcher can effectively duplicate your results. Then you follow the IMR&D formula for Introduction, Methods and Materials, Results and Discussion. You add in the Conclusion, write the Abstract, and finally invent a catchy title t...

"Robert Mugabe Resigns as Zimbabwe’s President, Ending 37-Year Rule" on 2017-11-21 Many countries across the African continent have property and construction sectors that have been destroyed through the ravages of political and military conflict. This paper reports on an original investigation into the quantitative role (“Reliance”) that each prim...

In the Construction industry, there must also be a Collective Culture of Safety. One of the challenges facing the construction industry is in determining what more can be done about Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S). Stakeholders may appear to comply with all OH&S legislation. However, what else should be done? This paper therefore presents an...

We present a recursive form of the equation for the probability that the queueing delay in an M/M/r/K/K queue is larger than a given bound. The recursive form is computationally efficient and is not subject to numerical overflow. The practical implication of the recursion is that the teletraffic engineer has an accurate, practical formula for calcu...

The ten papers in this special issue focus on the topic of plagiarism. The motivation behind the special issue is to uncover the root causes of plagiarism and suggest new ways of counteracting theses causes. A short review of the papers is provided here.

Purpose of this paper The objective of this research was to categorize and assess the nature of construction engineering project questions that were proposed for final year research. Method Research questions proposed by construction engineering students were collected over two years. Common words in the field were identified. Also, questioning w...

Rogoff (1994) believes that technology can act as a catalyst influencing change from a traditional classroom to an environment of community of learners. One way to successfully integrate technology in schools is to use a constructivist approach. Here the environment provides facilities for students to learn by doing, to work with others, and to hav...

Without growing sources of new retrievable academic and practical knowledge, society will become poorer. This paper asks: what future model is suitable for retrieval from the digital library? What kind of Information Retrieval (IR) education does research and teaching in Higher Education demand? The scholarly publishing process in higher education...

This paper concentrates on the (social and engineering) networking aspects of a network of mobile laptop computers as a powerful educational tool to raise the quality of life in the poor rural community. It is a description of the One Laptop Per Child and One Laptop Per Teacher network and their changes on the way people learn and teach, especially...

An adaptive educational system is complex to model. Such a system should allow various didactic, educational and student styles and is traditionally divided into four modules for analysis and building: Domain Knowledge Base, Tutoring, the Student Interface, and the Student. In particular, the system should adapt to differences between students and...

At AFRICON 2002, the authors presented papers covering the business strategy of a New Entrant Operator (NEO) seeking to provide telecommunication services in South African. Two years on, the Department of Communications announced that the two short-listed bidders would each be awarded a 13% stake in the NEO. So, the authors here re-model the busine...

I believe that education is an investment for the future of society. To develop our society we need to achieve the best education for every individual through providing every appropriate means for the particular individual. To provide the best education for each individual, we must perforce adapt our education to the individual. One adaption is to...

Convergence is taking place in the telecommunication, broadcasting and information technology industries. Services that in the past were offered only on one platform are now offered on any platform by the three industries. The evolution of convergence has led to an increased demand for access to services and content. This, in turn, has led to the d...

At AFRICON 2002, the authors presented papers covering the business strategy of a New Entrant Operator (NEO) seeking to provide telecommunication services in South African. Two years on, the Department of Communications announced that the two short-listed bidders would each be awarded a 13% stake in the NEO. The authors here re-model the business p...

This paper contributes by providing a linear differential equation which captures the response of residential dial-up subscribers to a tariff function. South African data was gathered on residential subscribers who were making use of cheaper off-peak rates for dial-up Internet service outside business hours. Traffic intensity was found to be heavil...

We analyse the behaviour of subscribers using cheaper off-peak rates and capped-rates for dial-up Internet service as provided outside business hours in certain countries. The traffic intensity is heavily dependent on call tariffing, with the steepest increase in traffic occurring at the time of rate changeover: Calls connecting at the start of the...

Following the general worldwide trend of deregulation and privatisation of the telecommunication market, the South African Government issued an Invitation to Apply for the second public switched telephone network (PSTN) licence. The second national operator will be issued with a PSTN license to provide competing services. The entry of such a new en...

As part of its business plan, a new entrant operator (NEO) that is planning to enter an existing telecommunications marketplace will carefully analyse the demographics and demand patterns of its potential customers. The NEO will source the components of the network to meet this demand. This paper models the temporal and spatial characteristics of t...

Courseware is any form of computer or Web based learning material or computer aided learning system, using digital media. Courseware engineering (CE) is a new discipline that adapts and applies methods of software engineering (SE) to develop courseware. The aim of SE is to bring engineering rigour to the task of software development. SE is a system...

E-commerce is becoming increasingly important in all sectors of society. Yet, although educational institutions have been early adopters of information and telecommunications technology, few have taken on e-commerce as a secure way of doing business transactions. Most institutions see e-commerce only for business environments. Thus they miss noting...

Courseware is any form of computer or Web based learning material or Computer Aided Learning System, using digital media. Courseware Engineering (CE) is a new discipline that adapts and applies methods of Software Engineering (SE) to develop courseware. The aim of SE is to bring engineering rigour to the task of software development. SE is a system...

Continuing Professional Development requires engineers and educators to maintain lifelong learning. Both roles require the professional to research. Because of its immediacy and freshness, we cautiously accept that the initial port of call is the World Wide Web. Now, how should professionals find and manage relevant material in this proverbial hays...

The fast conversion to digital media is a priority for Teaching, Learning and Assessment in Electrical Engineering Education (TL&A in EEE). Experience has shown that this approach has many advantages over conventional teaching methods. We modularize teaching material and use questions as titles in authoritative, attractive, engaging hypertext and p...

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a quality of service contract between a service provider and a customer. The customer may be the end user, another service provider or an interconnect agreement customer. The agreement guarantees that the customer will receive a specific level of performance. This year (2001), at the ITC Seminar on Access Networks...

The design and implementation of a simulation of voice transmission over ATM using cell multiplexing is described. Structured and Mini-cell multiplexing methods were more efficient at low traffic loads. Minicell Multiplexing was the most efficient of the multiplexing methods. A critique of the simulator is presented.

Measurements of calls within the South African X.25 and X.28 public networks justify a theoretical model for predicting the number of calls between any two nodes. The importance of the study is that it dispels many myths about the number and the growth of calls between nodes