Preparing millennials as digital citizens and socially and environmentally responsible business professionals in a socially irresponsible climate

As of 2015, a millennial born in the 1990's became the largest population in the workplace and are still growing. Studies indicate that a millennial is tech savvy but lag in the exercise of digital responsibility. In addition, they are passive towards environmental sustainability and fail to grasp the importance of social responsibility. This paper provides a review of such findings relating to business communications educators in their classrooms. The literature should enable the development of a millennial as an excellent global citizen through business communications curricula that emphasizes digital citizenship, environmental sustainability and social responsibility. The impetus for this work is to provide guidance in the development of courses and teaching strategies customized to the development of each millennial as a digital, environmental and socially responsible global citizen

Purposive Teaching Styles for Transdisciplinary AEC Education: A Diagnostic Learning Styles Questionnaire

With the progressive globalisation trend within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, transdisciplinary education and training is widely acknowledged as being one of the key factors for leveraging AEC organisational success. Conventional education and training delivery approaches within AEC therefore need a paradigm shift in order to be able to address the emerging challenges of global practices. This study focuses on the use of Personalised Learning Environments (PLEs) to specifically address learners’ needs and preferences (learning styles) within managed Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). This research posits that learners can learn better (and be more readily engaged in managed learning environments) with a bespoke PLE, in which the deployment of teaching and learning material is augmented towards their individual needs. In this respect, there is an exigent need for the Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) to envelop these new approaches into their organisational learning strategy. However, part of this process requires decision-makers to fully understand the core nuances and interdependencies of functions and processes within the organisation, along with Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and barriers. This paper presents findings from the development of a holistic conceptual Diagnostic Learning Styles Questionnaire (DLSQ) Framework, comprised of six interrelated dependencies (i.e. Business Strategy, Pedagogy, Process, Resources, Systems Development, and Evaluation). These dependencies influence pedagogical effectiveness. These finding contribute additional understanding to the intrinsic nature of pedagogy in leveraging transdisciplinary AEC training within organisations (to improve learner effectiveness). This framework can help organisations augment and align their strategic priorities to learner-specific traits

Integrating Mobile Web 2.0 within tertiary education

Based on three years of innovative pedagogical development and guided by a participatory action research methodology, this paper outlines an approach to integrating mobile web 2.0 within a tertiary education course, based on a social constructivist pedagogy. The goal is to facilitate a student-centred, collaborative, flexible, context-bridging learning environment that empowers students as content producers and learning context generators, guided by lecturers who effectively model the use of the technology. We illustrate how the introduction of mobile web 2.0 has disrupted the underlying pedagogy of the course from a traditional Attelier model (face-to-face apprenticeship model), and has been successfully transformed into a context independent social constructivist model. Two mobile web 2.0 learning scenarios are outlined, including; a sustainable house design project (involving the collaboration of four departments in three faculties and three diverse groups of students), and the implementation of a weekly ‘nomadic studio session'. Students and lecturers use the latest generation of smartphones to collaborate, communicate, capture and share critical and reflective learning events. Students and lecturers use mobile friendly web 2.0 tools to create this environment, including: blogs, social networks, location aware (geotagged) image and video sharing, instant messaging, microblogging etc… Feedback from students and lecturers has been extremely positive

Integrating content-based language learning and intercultural learning online: An international eGrops collaboration

Learning language through content in the tertiary context presents a challenge in that language teachers, particularly in EAP/ESP contexts, are not necessarily experts in their students’ speciality subject areas, while subject experts might lack language teaching methodology. Furthermore, intercultural awareness, a key qualification in today’s global work environment, tends to take a back seat in a content-based approach. This paper reports on a didactic concept which integrates subject-based language learning with intercultural experience through online collaboration in an international eGroups set-up. The creation of a collaborative learning space aimed to bring together learners from different cultural contexts (New Zealand and Germany) and with different target languages (German and English) towards shared learning outcomes. Data from student interactions will help illustrate to what extent the eGroups model promoted interactive, communicative and intercultural competence through content-related bilingual collaboration

Issues for consideration to adopt educational computer games for learning and teaching

Computer games have started to gain attention in the domain of learning and teaching. The integration of computer games for education in the classroom has starting to gain acceptance in some countries. However, for schools which have never used computer games in the classroom, study still need to be conducted to investigate the teachers' belief and attitude toward the usage. The purpose of this paper is to examine issues for consideration when adopting educational computer games for learning and teaching. This paper also examines the concepts that related to educational computer games and aspects of learning and teaching. In addition, the theories of technology acceptance which use to assess the perception, belief and attitude of teachers and students have also been investigated

Strategies for mlearning integration : evaluating a case study of staging and scaffolding mlearning integration across a three-year bachelor’s degree

This paper outlines the third iteration of integrating mobile web 2.0 within a Bachelors level course. An analysis and comparison of the impact of mobile web 2.0 across all three years of the 2009 course enables the development of implementation strategies that can be used to integrate mlearning into other tertiary courses, and inform the design of further Product Design mlearning integration iterations

Reflections on 3 years of mlearning implementation (2007-2009)

This paper discusses the implications of 3 years of action research mlearning projects investigating the potential of mobile web 2.0 tools to facilitate social constructivist learning environments across multiple learning contexts. Highlighted are the design framework, identified critical success factors, and implementation strategy developed from the thirteen mlearning projects undertaken between 2007 and 2009. The projects encompassed five different courses, forming five case studies spanning from one to three years of implementation and refinement. KEYWORDS Mlearning, web 2.0, social constructivism

weSPOT: a cloud-based approach for personal and social inquiry

Scientific inquiry is at the core of the curricula of schools and universities across Europe. weSPOT is a new European initiative proposing a cloud-based approach for personal and social inquiry. weSPOT aims at enabling students to create their mashups out of cloud-based tools in order to perform scientific investigations. Students will also be able to share their inquiry accomplishments in social networks and receive feedback from the learning environment and their peers