The Research Teaching nexus and its potential to enhance the opportunities of those teaching Higher Education in Further Education Colleges

The paper reports on the enhancement of HE in FECs specifically Higher Education Institution (HEI) collaborative partnership colleges and their staff and mirroring the academic practice of offering enhancement opportunities within the HEI to promote research informed teaching. The main body of the paper reports on the background and developments of one HEI, which allowed me to build up a series of cumulative case studies that developed capability in and around the research teaching nexus as strategy to address the challenge of building a HE research culture in an HE environment in FECs. The findings demonstrate a shift in thinking through lecturers active participation in a series of enhancement events, which revealed scholarly capability and independence of knowledge, judgements practice and ownership of research base in a culture that was previously known to be “research deficit” (Davy, 2009, p.11)

Enhancing science education in the elementary schools

This article describes some collaborative activities of the authors, aimed at improving science education in elementary schools. These include curriculum enhancement, development of new apparatus (a wind tunnel), science-education web site contributions and production of a film about the physics of flight. The output of these projects is intended to be generally accessible or reproducible.Comment: To appear in the American Journal of Physics, 3 page

Collaborative Authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia by Enriching a Semantic Wiki’s Output

This research is concerned with harnessing collaborative approaches for the authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) systems. It involves the enhancement of Semantic Wikis with pedagogy aware features to this end. There are many challenges in understanding how communities of interest can efficiently collaborate for learning content authoring, in introducing pedagogy to the developed knowledge models and in specifying user models for efficient delivery of AEH systems. The contribution of this work will be the development of a model of collaborative authoring which includes domain specification, content elicitation, and definition of pedagogic approach. The proposed model will be implemented in a prototype AEH authoring system that will be tested and evaluated in a formal education context

Model-based groupware solution for distributed real-time collaborative 4D planning via teamwork

Construction planning plays a fundamental role in construction project management that requires team working among planners from a diverse range of disciplines and in geographically dispersed working situations. Model-based four-dimensional (4D) computer-aided design (CAD) groupware, though considered a possible approach to supporting collaborative planning, is still short of effective collaborative mechanisms for teamwork due to methodological, technological and social challenges. Targeting this problem, this paper proposes a model-based groupware solution to enable a group of multidisciplinary planners to perform real-time collaborative 4D planning across the Internet. In the light of the interactive definition method, and its computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) design analysis, the paper discusses the realization of interactive collaborative mechanisms from software architecture, application mode, and data exchange protocol. These mechanisms have been integrated into a groupware solution, which was validated by a planning team in a truly geographically dispersed condition. Analysis of the validation results revealed that the proposed solution is feasible for real-time collaborative 4D planning to gain a robust construction plan through collaborative teamwork. The realization of this solution triggers further considerations about its enhancement for wider groupware applications