Thursday, October 02, 2008

Teaching Computer-Mediated Communication for Governance

At the Varietas Multidisciplinary Teaching Interest Group on Wednesday we discussed what was required for a learning management system (LMS). What quickly became apparent was that selecting an LMS should be treated like other requirements analysis for an ICT system. Rather than start with a shopping list of features found in typical LMS, we should work out what the learning objectives are, the appropriate learning styles for that learning and then how ICT can support it.

LMS can have document creation and document/record management facilities, person to person and person to group communication, meeting management, assessment management and course delivery features. What many of these have in common is computer-mediated communication (CMC):
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is defined as any communicative transaction which occurs through the use of two or more networked computers.[1] While the term has traditionally referred to those communications that occur via computer-mediated formats (i.e., instant messages, e-mails, chat rooms) it has also been applied to other forms of text-based interaction such as text messaging. [2] Research on CMC focuses largely on the social effects of different computer-supported communication technologies. Many recent studies involve Internet-based social networking supported by social software.

From: Computer-Mediated Communication, Wikipedia, 28 September 2008, at 11:06
Even the document/record management facilities and assessment, could be considered a form of communication. The record management facilities are used for communicating from now to the future, and the assessed is the assessor communicating to those who may wish to employ the student.

This analysis should work well for the courses on web design and electronic document management I present, as the topic of the course is also Computer-Mediated Communication.

To test if this would be a useful approach I tried the same technique wh9och I had used with "learning commons". A web search on CMC, returned about 2.5 million hits. Narrowing the search to the last 24 hours, produced just over 10,000 documents. This suggested the term was widely used, but the real surprise came when I narrowed the search to CMC for 24 hours at ANU, which found 4 documents, including an announcement of a seminar a few hundred metres from my office by an expert in lexicography and computer-mediated communication: The 5-Concentric Circles Model & the Australian English Dictionary, Vincent B Y Ooi, The Australian National Dictionary Centre, CEDAM Seminar Room, Building #96, 10 October 2008.

Rather than arguing the merits of Wiki, Blog, Podcast, Webinar, Feed or whatever new technology may be around the corner, it should be possible to apply the analysis developed for CMC, such as synchronicity, persistence, multimodality, privacy and security.

My courses on web design and e-document management largely address the needs of governance. This could be generalised as CMC for governance; that is using computer based systems to coordinate an organisation, or a society. In this way we can step back from the detail of how email or word processing documents should be archived in a company or a government agency and look at how computers can be used to make decisions, have those decisions implemented and satisfy the community the process was properly carried out. Different forms of CMC can then be assessed to see how they assist governance.

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Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Learning Management Systems for multi-disciplinary teaching

Srinivas ChemboliSrinivas Chemboli runs the Varietas Multidisciplinary Teaching Interest Group at the Australian National Unviersity in Canberra. This week's meeting is on learning management systems (LMSs) for multi-disciplinary teaching (all welcome):
The Varietas TiG will meet today at 11:30 at N329, CSIT Building [Bldg 108]

Agenda
  • LMS needs for multi-disciplinary and disciplinary teaching/research/collaboration
    • What should a wish-list for a LMS comprise of?
    • Document creation/management tools
    • Focus on function and goals, not specific technologies
    • Communicate/discuss the proposed draft outline for group activities via LMS
    • Support for logically ordered communication
    • Calendaring/meeting-manager support
    • Support for blended/flexible learning
  • Set up a time-frame/agree upon an action-plan to draft the needs statements for an LMS
  • Assess existing LMS options in the context of the needs statements
  • Integrating cross-disciplinary strengths in teaching
  • The logistics of a cross-disciplinary group course

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

ANU Multidisciplinary Teaching Interest Group

Srinivas ChemboliSrinivas Chemboli has issued an invitation to those interested in Multidisciplinary Teaching to join the Varietas Multidisciplinary Teaching Interest Group at the Australian National Unviersity in Canberra:

Varietas-TIG is a Teaching Interest Group (TIG) that focuses on multi-disciplinary themes in teaching.

Wednesday, 17 September, 16:00 - 17:30, N335 CSIT Bldg (Bldg 108)

Topics of discussion will cover (but are not necessarily limited to):
1) A multi-disciplinary approach to teaching and course management
2) Reconciling different pedagogical approaches across disciplines
3) Incorporating a wider spectrum of research-led themes as guides for teaching
4) Integrating reusable knowledge across disciplines in skills and services-oriented curriculum
5) Develop an effective methodology to reuse the semantic richness of multiple disciplines

Website: http://alliance.anu.edu.au/autoreg/varietas
Topics for Discussion This Week:
  • Format/ideas for TiG activities
  • Multi-disciplinary activities at the ANU
  • Discussing the practice and personal experience in cross/multi-disciplinary teaching
  • Equity in multi-disciplinary courses, a pipe-dream?
    • Suggested activities for analyzing the trend in cross/multi/inter-stream courses
  • Tying in assessment with disciplinary objectives
  • Paper discussion: Multidisciplinary students and instructors: a second-year games course

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Saturday, September 13, 2008

Reassuring children about the world's end

In "Reassuring children about the world's end" (Caroline McClatchey,
BBC News Magazine,11:17 GMT, Friday, 12 September 2008) the worry which talk of black holes generated by the Large Hadron Collider would cause for children was discussed. An educational psychologist was quoted. It happens my brother is an educational psychologist and prepared advice for teachers on what to do in such situations. This may also be of use to parents: "In stressful times what can we as teachers do?".

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Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Web standards compliance

Lecturing to university students is a daunting experience. While telling them how to design web pages one student asked how come only the first page of my own web pages printed out.

I found my web pages were effected by a known bug with printing in Microsoft Internet Explorer. If the CSS "float" property is used, then the part of the floated element is not printed after a page break. I use "Float" to position the main content of may page, so only the first page prints.

To fix this I added "float:none" in my print style sheet. The float is not really needed for printing, as it was used to wrap the main text around a menu, which is not displayed on the printed version.

While I was at it I found a couple of more problems, in the formatting. I had made any link text 95% the width of the page on the print version. That broke up any sentence with a link in it with large amounts of white space. I removed the 95% to fix the problem.

Finally I noticed that when printing with a small font then images tended to bunch up together on the page. The images are floated on the right, so remove the problem I added "clear: right". This way they got one under the other.

You might ask why I don't just provide a PDF version of the notes so they will print well. But the precise formatting control of PDF is not really needed for the notes. Also it can impede readability, as with a web page the user can resize the text, omit images and the like, for printing. New standards, such as CSS3 Paged Media, should all but remove the need for PDF, by providing control over headers, footers and the like in web pages.

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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Making popular and accessible web pages

Tenix-Navantia Proposal for the Australian Defence Amphibious Ships ProjectAccessible web design can make your web pages very popular. I am talking about this in "Teaching Web Accessibility at an Australian University" at a forum of the Web Accessibility Network for Australian Universities. The forum is on at the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee office in Canberra Wednesday 11 April.

An example of a popular web page is one I did last year on the Australian Defence Amphibious Ships Project. This has a short summary of the multi-billion dollar project to build two new Australian aircraft carriers. I hadn't realized how popular this was until I had a message from one of the international defence industry consortia bidding for the project. They explained my page was the most referred to one on the project and suggested some extra links. In a nice touch they provided a link for the rival bider as well as their own.

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