Open ICT tools project

The paper will introduce a project titled the ‘Open ICT Tools’ which aims to explore and trial out ICT tools to facilitate a global collaborative and secured engagement with external business and community partners. The challenge is to facilitate a communication and multimedia data exchange between Northumbria University and participating external educational and business organisations without compromising the security of either Northumbria University IT infrastructure or that of the partner organisations. This is one of eight projects funded by the JISC infoNet from across the country under its Trialling of Online Collaborative Tools for Business and Community Engagement programme. The Open ICT Tools project is directly connected with the Global Studio, an innovative model of research informed teaching and learning. The Global Studio is a cross-institutional collaboration between Northumbria University and international universities based in the USA, Australia, UK and Korea as well as industry partners such as Intel, Motorola and Inverness Medical. The Global Studio was initiated by the School of Design three years ago and since then it included nearly 300 students from six international universities such as Hong-ik in Korea and RMIT in Australia. The aim of the Global Studio is to equip design students with skills for working in globally networked organisations particularly development of skills in intercultural communication and collaboration. To achieve this aim, students from the participating universities work together on industry led projects. However, attempting to use existing university technical infrastructure has been problematic. A particular problem relates to software licence agreements, which limit use of certain software and/or the virtual learning environment to a particular institution’s students. Attempts to use open source software has not been straightforward, for example using Skype for synchronous cross – institutional communication has often failed as students cannot log into a university’s technical infrastructure, begin a Skype based dialogue with students in another institution and simultaneously view a PowerPoint presentation. Online file sharing has often failed, primarily due to the file size. Therefore the aim of the Global Studio project is to build on the excellent ICT infrastructure at Northumbria and to identify and trial a diverse range of collaborative Information Communication Technology (ICT) tools that: (a) could support engagement between the university and its external collaborative business and community partners and (b) be embedded with the current university IT infrastructure. This paper explores how various ICTs are being trialled in the Global Studio to facilitate information and data exchange between students, teachers and industry partners and how this enables/constrains collaboration. The paper will explore the technologies that have been chosen as well as the rationale underpinning their choice

Global Teamwork: A Study of Design Learning in Collaborative Virtual Environments

With the recent developments in communication and information technologies, using Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) in design activity has experienced a remarkable increase. In this paper we present a collaborative learning activity between the University of Sydney (USYD), and the Istanbul Technical University (ITU). This paper shares our teaching experience and discusses the principles of collaborative design learning in virtual environments. Followed by a study on students’ perception on the courses and collaborative learning in both universities, this paper also suggests future refinements on the course structure and the main areas of collaborative design learning. Keywords: Collaborative Design; Collaborative Virtual Environments; Design Teaching And Learning</p

Assessment for learning in architectural design programmes

This paper compares the learning and teaching strategies practised in the programmes of the Architectural Subject Group at the University of Northumbria with best practices of assessment (‘Assessment for Learning’) as promoted by the Centre for Excellence in Learning in the same University. These best practices are grouped under the umbrella concepts of ‘Assessment for Learning’ and comprise six key criteria which can be paraphrased as; authenticity and complexity in methods of assessment; use of summative assessment as the main driver for learning; extensive opportunities to develop and demonstrate learning; rich in formal feedback; rich in informal feedback; developing students’ abilities to direct their own learning, evaluate their own progress, and support the learning of others

Dissemination of innovative teaching and learning practice : the global studio

This project aims to disseminate teaching and learning resources from an innovative programme called the Global Studio to the ADM-HEA community. The area of innovation developed in the Global Studio was to link student teams across the globe in ‘designer’ and ‘client’ roles in order to undertake a product development project. This built on and extended the learning philosophy of learning in and through doing provided in a more traditional design studio. Throughout the project students worked in geographically distributed work groups in order to provide them with experience in using skills that would enable them to work successfully in distributed design teams

Peripatetic electronic teachers in higher education

This paper explores the idea of information and communications technology providing a medium enabling higher education teachers to act as freelance agents. The notion of a ‘Peripatetic Electronic Teacher’ (PET) is introduced to encapsulate this idea. PETs would exist as multiple telepresences (pedagogical, professional, managerial and commercial) in PET‐worlds; global networked environments which support advanced multimedia features. The central defining rationale of a pedagogical presence is described in detail and some implications for the adoption of the PET‐world paradigm are discussed. The ideas described in this paper were developed by the author during a recently completed Short‐Term British Telecom Research Fellowship, based at the BT Adastral Park

Internationalisation from home- global collaborative project based learning

This paper explores how cross-institutional project-based-learning facilitated by Web 2.0 ICTs supported cross-cultural and cross-institutional student peer learning experiences. The focus of this paper relates to the most recent project named ‘The Gift’ conducted through ‘The Global Studio’. At each institution the students formed small local project teams which were paired with teams of students from one of the other collaborating universities. Initial findings suggest the majority of students perceived this innovative initiative as having facilitated their learning, especially in the intended areas of development of virtual teamwork and communication skills. This paper focuses on initial findings with regards peer learning in relation to ICTs and cross-cultural communication

Integration of virtual reality within the built environment curriculum

Virtual Reality (VR) technology is still perceived by many as being inaccessible and cost prohibitive with VR applications considered expensive to develop as well as challenging to operate. This paper reflects on current developments in VR technologies and describes an approach adopted for its phased integration into the academic curriculum of built environment students. The process and end results of implementing the integration are discussed and the paper illustrates the challenges of introducing VR, including the acceptance of the technology by academic staff and students, interest from industry, and issues pertaining to model development. It sets out to show that fairly sophisticated VR models can now be created by non-VR specialists using commercially available software and advocates that the implementation of VR will increase alongside industryis adoption of these tools and the emergence of a new generation of students with VR skills. The study shows that current VR technologies, if integrated appropriately within built environment academic programmes, demonstrate clear promise to provide a foundation for more widespread collaborative working environments

New technologies for urban designers: the VENUE project

In this report, we first outline the basic idea of VENUE. This involves developing digital tools froma foundation of geographic information systems (GIS) software which we then apply to urbandesign, a subject area and profession which has little tradition in using such tools. Our project wasto develop two types of tool, namely functional analysis based on embedding models of movementin local environments into GIS based on ideas from the field of space syntax; and secondlyfashioning these ideas in a wider digital context in which the entire range of GIS technologies werebrought to bear at the local scale. By local scale, we mean the representation of urban environmentsfrom about 1: 500 to around 1: 2500