No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
A course in collaborative computing
Abstract
Recent calls for a new discipline of 'web science' have proposed extending computer science to incorporate the social dimensions of computing. In this paper we outline a Masters course in Collaborative Computing, which employs a combination of collaborative pedagogy, collaborative technologies, and a corpus of research data from Global Virtual Teams to blend the technology and the social dimensions within a research linked course context. We review the effectiveness of this model of learning and the conduct of the course over the five years since its inception.
The first Australasian computing education conference was held in 1996. Australasian authors had presented papers at SIGCSE, but a local conference gave them a far more affordable option, and it flourished. Australasia has also been well represented at both ITiCSE and ICER since their inceptions. Other Australasian innovations in CER include the conventicles, local meetings at which the computing educators in a city could meet and share papers that they had presented at conferences further afield. This chapter summarises the history and growth of computing education publication, and subsequently of computing education research, in Australia and New Zealand. At a more detailed level, it briefly discusses a number of research projects in New Zealand, in Australia, and across the oceanic divide between the two. It also devotes a section to school-level computing education, an area that has seen a great deal of recent activity in both countries.
Context: Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the predominant form of software development for global companies and has given rise to a demand for students trained in GSE. In response, universities are developing courses and curricula around GSE and researchers have begun to disseminate studies of these new approaches.
Problem: GSE differs from most other computer science fields, however, in that practice is inseparable from theory. As a result, educators looking to create GSE courses face a daunting task: integrating global practice into the local classroom.
Aim: This study aims to ameliorate the very difficult task of teaching GSE by delineating the challenges and providing some recommendations for overcoming them.
In the higher education context within which computing educators now teach, an increasing range of forces are conspiring against innovative teaching practice. Pressures of academic workload, pressures from consumerist students and regular course evaluations, pressures from increasingly managerial policies and practices, from so-called 'quality assurance systems', pressures to continually expand research output, all lead towards stifl ing conformity and a natural conservatism in teaching practice. The increasing focus on consistency in a mass production model of teaching militates heavily against innovation. This paper presents an instrument used by the author to diagnose the student perceptions of the pedagogy of his course, by mapping it against Reeve's fourteen dimensions of an interactive learning system [12]. The outcomes demonstrated signifi cant differences in style between this course and the overall programme within which it was situated. It enabled the author to gain insight into how the course differed and issues about it that had discomfi ted students. This enabled constructive dialogue with the students and an explicit discussion of the underlying collaborative mode of pedagogy. The tool is presented here for others to adopt in order to diagnose or make explicit to students the style of their own courses, and hopefully encourage innovative teaching practice.
SUMMARY This paper tackles the need for universities and practitioners to train their students and engineers in the new challenges that global software development entails, which are principally related to communication, collaboration and cultural differences. Teaching the necessary skills requires practical experience. However, training in educational environments is difficult, and some challenging issues must still be confronted. We have focused our work on the development of a virtual training environment that can simulate global software development scenarios involving virtual agents (VAs) from different cultures. The VAs interact with learners, who use typical communication tools to solve predefined problems. This environment considers common problems caused by distance and cultural differences when using English as a means of communication. It allows learners to train at any time, because the VAs are always available, and it also permits them to play different roles in the various stages of the project. In this paper, we depict the design and development of the tool, as well as an initial evaluation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Working in global virtual teams (GVTs), raises a number of issues variously relating to technology, tasks and people working in their different locations and institutional contexts. Achieving alignment across these elements can be challenging. Collaborative Technologies inherently require the participants to work in collaboration and globally distributed settings can place strain on these arrangements. An added complication comes from the need to work not only across boundaries of time and place but also across cultures. This paper reports the findings from a study of a global virtual collaboration between three universities in New Zealand, Sweden and USA. It discusses the complex and multi-layered concept of 'culture' and presents a means of mapping "cultural fit" across a global virtual team context.
Explanograms provide "a sketch or diagram that students can play" [10]. They are a directly recorded multi-media resource that can be viewed dynamically. Often they are used in teaching situations to provide animated explanations of concepts or processes. Explanograms were initially based upon proprietary paper and digital pen technology. The project outlined here augments that design by using a tablet PC as a mobile, general purpose capture platform which will interoperate with the existing server based system developed in Sweden. The design of this platform is intended to achieve both learning and research outcomes, in a research linked learning model for global software development. The project has completed an initial development phase during which a prototype has been built, and a consolidation, extension and evaluation phase is now underway. The origins and goals of the research, the methodology adopted, the design of the application and the challenges that the New Zealand based team have faced are presented.
Researching global software engineering teams (GSETs), presents several phenomena of interest, and raises several issues relating to choice of method. Given the important function of both time and space when studying GSETs in field settings, dasiasnapshotpsila research methods (such as the use of questionnaires, and even interviews), tend to fall short in capturing some of the innate complexities. Researchers from the Information Systems discipline have recommended the use of such research methods as qualitative case studies and action research, but for software engineering researchers such methods appear uncommon. Action Research in particular, where the researcher is an active participant and even change agent challenges the notion of dasiaobjectivepsila science. This paper focuses on the design and conduct of empirical software engineering research from an interpretive viewpoint, and demonstrates its application to theory development in field studies within global virtual team contexts. The paper argues for a wider set of perspectives and an extension of the repertoire for researching the complex, dynamic and essentially human phenomena represented by GSETs.
Working in global software engineering teams (GSETs), presents a plethora of challenges. In addition to the global developers working directly within their teams, a number of further actors perform support roles through a set of dasiabackstagepsila activities which underpin the degree of ldquoCollaborative Technology Fitrdquo between the sites. While crucial to the success of GSETs, the work of these actors in establishing and maintaining alignment between the sites has been little researched. A novel ldquoTheory of Collaborative Technology Fit (CTF)rdquo incorporates these ldquotechnology-use mediationrdquo activities in a multidimensional model and provides both a theorization and a diagnostic tool for potential use by a variety of Global Virtual Teams. Three field work studies that have utilized the model in various ways are reported in this presentation.
ContextThe globalisation of activities associated with software development and use has introduced many challenges in practice, and also (therefore) many for research. While the predominant approach to research in software engineering has followed a positivist science model, this approach may be sub-optimal when addressing problems with a dominant social or cultural dimension, such as those frequently encountered when studying work practices in a globally distributed team setting.The investigation of such a team reported in this paper provides one example of an alternative approach to research in a global context, through a longitudinal interpretive field study seeking to understand how global virtual teams mediated the use of technology. The study involved a large collective of faculty and support staff plus student members based in the geographically and temporally distant locations of New Zealand, the United States of America and Sweden.
This paper reports selected results from the most recent of a series of international collaborative trials between students at Auckland University of Technology and Uppsala University. The trials require students to work together in virtual groups, comprising students from each institution, to perform a common task. The topic of this paper is how to form and sustain more effective virtual groups. In this trial a cyber-icebreaker task has been introduced and its contribution to group effectiveness is explored. Some conclusions are drawn pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses of this trial design, and some insights into effective design of electronic collaborative learning groups are gained.
The Internet and World Wide Web hold many possibilities for virtual communities. In this paper we describe the development of a first-generation Web-groupware system called TCBWorks that enables anyone with a Web browser to use groupware. We discuss the design strategy, the overall design, and the technical architecture, and contrast it with other forms of groupware. We then discuss the results of a series of interviews with users in four organizations and a survey of sixty-nine organizations to better understand how organizations are using Web groupware and the advantages and disadvantages they encountered.
To use information technology to improve learning processes, the pedagogical assumptions underlying the design of information technology for educational purposes must be understood. This paper reviews different models of learning, surfaces assumptions of electronic teaching technology, and relates those assumptions to the differing models of learning. Our analysis suggests that initial attempts to bring information technology to management education follow a classic story of automating rather than transforming. IT is primarily used to automate the information delivery function in classrooms. In the absence of fundamental changes to the teaching and learning process, such classrooms may do little but speed up ineffective processes and methods of teaching. Our mapping of technologies to learning models identifies sets of technologies in which management schools should invest in order to informate up and down and ultimately transform the educational environment and processes. For researchers interested in the use of information technology to improve learning processes, the paper provides a theoretical foundation for future work.
This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis
of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures.
A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with
a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of
the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development.
These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for
Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web
Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way
to focus its development on key communicational and representational
requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the
development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic
approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures,
are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially
embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and
governance are also reviewed.
This article provides an introduction to the special issue on Expanding the Boundaries of E-Collaboration. It presents an operational definition of the term e-collaboration, and a historical review of the development of e-collaboration tools and related academic research. That is followed by an introductory development of the notion of e-collaboration boundaries. The article concludes with a summarized discussion of the articles published in the special issue.
Many attempts have been made to account for the relation between teaching and research. In general, studies have assumed the nature of this relation and characterised it as one that exists between externally defined indicators such as teaching effectiveness and research productivity. Most frequently used indicators are quantitative measures such as students' evaluations of teaching and publication counts. In contrast, few studies have explored how academics experience teaching and research and their inter-relation. The results of this small, qualitative study, consisting of interviews with a sample of academic staff who expressed strong views of the teaching/research relationship, show that there is substantial variation in academics' experiences of the meaning of this relation. The results suggest that such variation requires further exploration using methods that differ from those that have been associated with past research in this area.
A meta-analysis is performed on the last twenty years of SIGCSE Technical Symposium Proceedings, looking for the kind of CS Educational Research that has been done at the CS1/CS2 level. A six-point taxonomy of articles types is described. It is shown that about one in five of all CS1/CS2 presentations have used some kind of experimental model, albeit "experimental" is defined quite broadly. Over the last ten years both the number of experimental models, and the percentage of experimental models among CS1/CS2 has significantly increased. SIGCSE members are challenged to adopt a research model for their presentations to the Technical Symposium.
The role of Web science in connecting computer science to the interdisciplinary possibilities of the Web's socially embedded computing technology is discussed. The commitment to pervasive or ubiquitous access for users as they travel reflects more than just technological challenge. Cell phones are more than information-access devices, restructuring social expectations and offering life-altering opportunities, as well as life saving resources. The Web science framework can be stated as a proactive research agenda that deserves serious review but that already needs expansion to adequately address important issues such as social computing, universal usability, and interdisciplinary strategies.
Critical Enquiry in Computer Science Education. in Fincher, S. and Petre, M. eds. Computer Science Education Research: The Field and The Endeavour, Routledge Falmer, Taylor & Francis Group
- Clear T
Researchers Hooked on Teaching
- Lengnick-Hall C
Academic Work in the Engaged University: What is the Research/Teaching/Community Service Nexus and how can it be Encouraged?
- Melrose M