Engineering: good for technology education?

Recent curriculum changes in the educational system of Australia have resulted in study options being available in Engineering for senior secondary students to use for university entrance. In other educational systems, Engineering is playing an increasingly important role, either as a stand-alone subject or as part of an integrated approach to Science, Mathematics and Technology. These developments raise questions about the relationship between Engineering and Technology education, some of which are explored in this paper

Digital libraries and information literacy issues within virtual learning environments : an e-learning impasse?

The DIDET digital library and VLE approach places much of the responsibility for managing the digital library work flow into the hands of students, as well as academics and librarians. Student responsibilities include the application of metadata, as well as conventional information literacy competencies such as ascertaining information resource provenance, investigating intellectual property rights and/or digital rights management implications, before depositing digital resources within the library. This has obviously laid bare numerous research issues relating to future digital library and VLE design, student information literacy, the use of ICT in education and design, and related pedagogical issues, all of which are worthy of further investigation within the UK HE community and will be elucidated in this paper. More importantly, this paper will argue that such a model signifies a definite impasse in the evolution of e-learning models and questions the degree to which current information literacy models are effective in specific e-learning contexts. The paper will conclude by further recognising that greater student information literacy skills are necessary to unlock the potential of such radical approaches to e-learning and digital library creation

On the Presence of Green and Sustainable Software Engineering in Higher Education Curricula

Nowadays, software is pervasive in our everyday lives. Its sustainability and environmental impact have become major factors to be considered in the development of software systems. Millennials-the newer generation of university students-are particularly keen to learn about and contribute to a more sustainable and green society. The need for training on green and sustainable topics in software engineering has been reflected in a number of recent studies. The goal of this paper is to get a first understanding of what is the current state of teaching sustainability in the software engineering community, what are the motivations behind the current state of teaching, and what can be done to improve it. To this end, we report the findings from a targeted survey of 33 academics on the presence of green and sustainable software engineering in higher education. The major findings from the collected data suggest that sustainability is under-represented in the curricula, while the current focus of teaching is on energy efficiency delivered through a fact-based approach. The reasons vary from lack of awareness, teaching material and suitable technologies, to the high effort required to teach sustainability. Finally, we provide recommendations for educators willing to teach sustainability in software engineering that can help to suit millennial students needs.Comment: The paper will be presented at the 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering Curricula for Millennials (SECM2017

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Art as a laboratory – Guy Ben-Ary’s work

Szykowna Sylwia, Art as a laboratory – Guy Ben-Ary’s work. “Images” vol. XXV, no. 34. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 115–124. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.34.07. The present paper deals with the work of an Israeli artist, Guy Ben-Ary. His work is a prime example of artistic practice in the field of bio art. Bio art provokes critical thinking about the place and role of people in today’s world. The main purpose of the article is to describe changes in contemporary artistic practices within the framework of art as a laboratory, the aim of which is to study reality.  Szykowna Sylwia, Art as a laboratory – Guy Ben-Ary’s work. “Images” vol. XXV, no. 34. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 115–124. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.34.07. The present paper deals with the work of an Israeli artist, Guy Ben-Ary. His work is a prime example of artistic practice in the field of bio art. Bio art provokes critical thinking about the place and role of people in today’s world. The main purpose of the article is to describe changes in contemporary artistic practices within the framework of art as a laboratory, the aim of which is to study reality

FORGE: An eLearning Framework for Remote Laboratory Experimentation on FIRE Testbed Infrastructure

The Forging Online Education through FIRE (FORGE) initiative provides educators and learners in higher education with access to world-class FIRE testbed infrastructure. FORGE supports experimentally driven research in an eLearning environment by complementing traditional classroom and online courses with interactive remote laboratory experiments. The project has achieved its objectives by defining and implementing a framework called FORGEBox. This framework offers the methodology, environment, tools and resources to support the creation of HTML-based online educational material capable accessing virtualized and physical FIRE testbed infrastruc- ture easily. FORGEBox also captures valuable quantitative and qualitative learning analytic information using questionnaires and Learning Analytics that can help optimise and support student learning. To date, FORGE has produced courses covering a wide range of networking and communication domains. These are freely available from FORGEBox.eu and have resulted in over 24,000 experiments undertaken by more than 1,800 students across 10 countries worldwide. This work has shown that the use of remote high- performance testbed facilities for hands-on remote experimentation can have a valuable impact on the learning experience for both educators and learners. Additionally, certain challenges in developing FIRE-based courseware have been identified, which has led to a set of recommendations in order to support the use of FIRE facilities for teaching and learning purposes

DIDET: Digital libraries for distributed, innovative design education and teamwork. Final project report

The central goal of the DIDET Project was to enhance student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, in which they directly experience different cultural contexts and access a variety of digital information sources via a range of appropriate technology. To achieve this overall project goal, the project delivered on the following objectives: 1. Teach engineering information retrieval, manipulation, and archiving skills to students studying on engineering degree programs. 2. Measure the use of those skills in design projects in all years of an undergraduate degree program. 3. Measure the learning performance in engineering design courses affected by the provision of access to information that would have been otherwise difficult to access. 4. Measure student learning performance in different cultural contexts that influence the use of alternative sources of information and varying forms of Information and Communications Technology. 5. Develop and provide workshops for staff development. 6. Use the measurement results to annually redesign course content and the digital libraries technology. The overall DIDET Project approach was to develop, implement, use and evaluate a testbed to improve the teaching and learning of students partaking in global team based design projects. The use of digital libraries and virtual design studios was used to fundamentally change the way design engineering is taught at the collaborating institutions. This was done by implementing a digital library at the partner institutions to improve learning in the field of Design Engineering and by developing a Global Team Design Project run as part of assessed classes at Strathclyde, Stanford and Olin. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the class teaching model and the LauLima system developed at Strathclyde to support teaching and learning. Major findings include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical and cultural issues for successful elearning implementations. A need for strong leadership has been identified, particularly to exploit the benefits of cross-discipline team working. One major project output still being developed is a DIDET Project Framework for Distributed Innovative Design, Education and Teamwork to encapsulate all project findings and outputs. The project achieved its goal of embedding major change to the teaching of Design Engineering and Strathclyde's new Global Design class has been both successful and popular with students

The development and evaluation of computer generated material for 43.220 Information and Communications : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Technology - Information Engineering at Massey University

The information age is upon us. Technological advances, particularly in communications, have facilitated the conveyance of accurate and updatable information in vast quantities. Educational institutions have recognized the potential of such technology to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations. Institutions that depend almost entirely on technological knowledge transfer already exist and those who are not investigating how it may best be used in their university are likely to be left behind [1]. The impact of technology on education has been the subject of much speculation [2,3,4]. What is becoming apparent is that views of education are changing from that of 'option' to 'commodity' [5]. This has lead to an increasing demand for a varied education and an even greater burden for educators, given that there has been little change in the modes of delivery [1]. Therefore, in education, it has been argued that "more must be accomplished with less. Automation through the successful application of powerful new technologies is undoubtedly one of the key enablers" [6, p. 59). The Department of Production Technology at Massey University has been investigating how current technologies may best be utilized to facilitate multicampus teaching. Massey University, with its main campus at Palmerston North, now has a new campus situated approximately 600 kilometres north at Albany where the Department of Production Technology intends to offer one of its courses in the near future. Instead of duplicating many facilities, resources and staff at Albany an alternative is to have the courses remotely delivered. This has lead to the establishment of two systems whose objectives are to increase flexibility in delivery modes without decreasing the quality of education delivered