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

Latin American perspectives to internationalize undergraduate information technology education

The computing education community expects modern curricular guidelines for information technology (IT) undergraduate degree programs by 2017. The authors of this work focus on eliciting and analyzing Latin American academic and industry perspectives on IT undergraduate education. The objective is to ensure that the IT curricular framework in the IT2017 report articulates the relationship between academic preparation and the work environment of IT graduates in light of current technological and educational trends in Latin America and elsewhere. Activities focus on soliciting and analyzing survey data collected from institutions and consortia in IT education and IT professional and educational societies in Latin America; these activities also include garnering the expertise of the authors. Findings show that IT degree programs are making progress in bridging the academic-industry gap, but more work remains

NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition

What is on the five-year horizon for academic and research libraries? Which trends and technology developments will drive transformation? What are the critical challenges and how can we strategize solutions? These questions regarding technology adoption and educational change steered the discussions of 77 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition, in partnership with the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Chur, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), ETH Library, and the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six developments in technology profiled in this report are poised to impact library strategies, operations, and services with regards to learning, creative inquiry, research, and information management. The three sections of this report constitute a reference and technology planning guide for librarians, library leaders, library staff, policymakers, and technologists

Code and its image: the functions of text and visualisation in a code-based design studio

Traditionally, design learning in the architecture studio has taken place through a combination of individual work and joint projects. The introduction of code-based design practices in the design studio has altered this balance, introducing new models of joint authorship and new ways for individuals to contribute to co-authored projects. This paper presents a case study describing four design studios in a higher education setting that used code as a tool for generating architectural geometry. The format of the studios encouraged the students to reflect critically on their role as authors and to creatively address the multiple opportunities for shared authorship available with code-based production. The research question addressed in this study involved the role of code-based practices in altering the model of architectural education in the design studio, in particular the role of visual representations of a code-based design process in the production of shared knowledge

Guide of best practices for cooperation between academia and industry based on success cases

Recommendations of good practices included in each chapter are briefly explain and record in cards showing examples of specific known cases where particular recommendation has been put in practice and also visual information about expected impact of the recommendation on the enhancement of University & Industry Cooperation, difficulty, costs, as well as personnel needs for its implementation and, estimated time for executing each practice. Agents necessary for its implementation are also indicated, in order provide easy access to companies, research groups and other innovation stakeholders a potential tailored action plan of implementation for designing a path of collaboration between the Industry and the scientific world

Capturing architectural thought

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-51).This paper reflects the research conducted for the Design Technology Group at the Architectural Department at MIT under the participation of Charles Dalsass and the supervision of William Porter. The research evaluates electronic tools which support the formation of ideas in a collective design process. The tools focus on how to capture, analyze, and visualize concepts that develop from an individual or collaborative thought process. This work builds upon the user programming method developed by William Pena and its further development by Henn Architects in Munich. William Pena's work introduces a shared knowledge base to enhance the user programming process. This shared knowledge base consists of cards pinned up on a board. The cards contain comments made during a meeting that can be viewed by all participants. In this project, we investigate an electronic version of the previously described shared knowledge base. The electronic version provides advanced capabilities for remote collaboration, ease of storage, and manipulation of ideas. This builds the basis for follow-up explorations on how to relate, organize, visualize, and personalize the data contained in the knowledge base. Next, some corresponding methods will be developed to observe and visualize the concept formation process. The project will also discuss new ways to track the development process, the multiple use of the knowledge base for alternative purposes, and the synchronous and asynchronous manipulation of the knowledge base by remote participants. This study precedes the development of a computational solution, and therefore the last section of this paper will discuss the user interface and functionality of the proposed application. Although this research is centered around the architectural concept formation process, its content can be applied to various professions.by Paul E. Keel.M.S