Computing at school: an emergent community of practice for a re-emergent subject

The Computing at School (CAS) working group was formed in 2009 as a grassroots organisation with members drawn from schools, higher education and the computing industry. Their concern was the drop in applications for undergraduate computing courses and a dearth of specialists entering related professions. This paper studies the development of the organisation with respect to models of communities of practice. The methodology is a retrospective reflexive study based analysis of e-mail transactions to review the association’s activities and relationships with other stakeholders in computing education. Through this, the formation of a new professional community of practice is tracked and its characteristics established

Computing students learning outcomes in learning by developing action model.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of research aimed at finding out the learning outcomes of computing students with a study module implementation based on the Learning by Developing (LbD) Action Model used in Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Laurea). The aim of the study is to find out how the students' competence develops during the study module and what are they general experience of learning according to the LbD. The LbD Action Model has been developed in Laurea by closely examining teaching and learning across a number of Universities of Applied Sciences. The LbD has been used in Laurea since 2004, and it has been shown to be a successful way of teaching within higher educational contexts. Studies on LbD based learning in Laurea have been conducted amongst students in social sciences and health care, but not among students within computing related disciplines. The LbD Action Model is intended to learn new ways of working and renew working life, and therefore a study module, which involved customers and their real-world projects, was chosen as the subject of research. Computing students have been chosen as the research topic also because studies that only examine the experiences of computing students in teaching according to the LbD Action Model have not been conducted before. An important area of the study, besides the student’s own learning experiences, is how their problem-solving skills and other competencies developing in the LbD projects that have been implemented in cooperation with the working life. The study also examines the lecturers' experiences of using the LbD and its suitability for computing studies, as well as the experiences of the clients involved in the study module on using the LbD in real customer projects. The research strategy chosen for the study is action research, which is a discipline-based research conducted by a teacher, the purpose of which is to obtain information and, on the basis of the information received, to change his or her practice in the future. In this process, participants systematically and carefully review their own teaching practices using research methods. Action research is well-suited to educational research and can involve just a single teacher, a group of teachers with a common problem, or the entire school faculty. The first cycle of study will be carried out in Laurea in Finland but the next two cycles of the study will be carried out within similar study modules at the Robert Gordon University (RGU) in the UK. This will allow the researcher to determine whether LbD can be successful in other institutions, and to further analyse the implications and drawbacks of such an implementation. The first cycle research data has been collected from students at Laurea through a survey and learning diaries across a full semester in the 2019-20 academic session. Thematic interviews were used as a method for collecting research data from experts, lecturers and clients. The next phase of the study will be carried out in the 2020-21 autumn when the LbD Action Model which will piloted at RGU in UK. The purpose of this research is to further develop the LbD and examine whether it can be implemented successfully in RGU. The aim of this study is also to identify further development for the LbD to ensure it maintains an international perspective for future needs

DATUM in Action

This collaborative research data management planning project (hereafter the RDMP project) sought to help a collaborative group of researchers working on an EU FP7 staff exchange project (hereafter the EU project) to define and implement good research data management practice by developing an appropriate DMP and supporting systems and evaluating their initial implementation. The aim was to "improve practice on the ground" through more effective and appropriate systems, tools/solutions and guidance in managing research data. The EU project (MATSIQEL - (Models for Ageing and Technological Solutions For Improving and Enhancing the Quality of Life), funded under the Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme, is accumulating expertise for the mathematical and computer modelling of ageing processes with the aim of developing models which can be implemented in technological solutions (e.g. monitors, telecare, recreational games) for improving and enhancing quality of life.1 Marie Curie projects do not fund research per se, so the EU project has no resources to fund commercial tools for research data management. Lead by Professor Maia Angelova, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences (SCEIS) at Northumbria University, it comprises six work packages involving researchers at Northumbria and in Australia, Bulgaria, Germany, Mexico and South Africa. The RDMP project focused on one of its work packages (WP4 Technological Solutions and Implementation) with some reference to another work package lead by the same person at Northumbria University (WP5 Quality of Life). The RDMP project‟s innovation was less about the choice of platform/system, as it began with existing standard office technology, and more about how this can be effectively deployed in a collaborative scenario to provide a fit-for-purpose solution with useful and usable support and guidance. It built on the success of the Datum for Health project by taking it a stage further, moving from a solely health discipline to an interdisciplinary context of health, social care and mathematical/computer modelling, and from a Postgraduate Research Student context to an academic researcher context, with potential to reach beyond the University boundaries. In addition, since the EU project is re-using data from elsewhere as well as creating its own data; a wide range of RDM issues were addressed. The RDMP project assessed the transferability of the DATUM materials and the tailored DATUM DMP

Does gender matter in online learning?

It is generally noted that computing is gendered, with women opting out of IT. Will the impact of online learning change this? Some researchers claim that women are disadvantaged in online courses. Others argue that we need a ‘women‐friendly cyber‐classroom’. Yet our experience is that the women achieve better results than the men; it is loner males that are disadvantaged by distance learning. We argue that online courses need to be people‐friendly so that no learners are disadvantaged

Multinational perspectives on information technology from academia and industry

As the term \u27information technology\u27 has many meanings for various stakeholders and continues to evolve, this work presents a comprehensive approach for developing curriculum guidelines for rigorous, high quality, bachelor\u27s degree programs in information technology (IT) to prepare successful graduates for a future global technological society. The aim is to address three research questions in the context of IT concerning (1) the educational frameworks relevant for academics and students of IT, (2) the pathways into IT programs, and (3) graduates\u27 preparation for meeting future technologies. The analysis of current trends comes from survey data of IT faculty members and professional IT industry leaders. With these analyses, the IT Model Curricula of CC2005, IT2008, IT2017, extensive literature review, and the multinational insights of the authors into the status of IT, this paper presents a comprehensive overview and discussion of future directions of global IT education toward 2025

Submission to the Commons Select Committee on Education

Computing is a rigorous, intellectually rich discipline alongside Maths, Science, or History. Like those subjects, Computing explores foundational principles and ideas, rather than training students in skills that date quickly. In an increasingly digital, knowledge-based age, Computing is fundamental both to full citizenship, and to our economic health as a nation. Yet, incredibly, Computing is virtually absent from UK schools. Instead, secondary schools in England currently teach ICT. The original concept behind ICT was to teach students how to use software to solve real-world problems. That would have been a tremendous achievement had it succeeded. However, what has actually happened in far too many schools is that ICT focuses solely upon IT literacy, and supporting teaching and learning in other curriculum contexts. ICT is not the discipline of understanding and knowledge of computers and the way they work.The creation of the EBac provides the perfect opportunity to send a clear signal to schools and pupils of the importance of Computing. Our key recommendation is that Computing (unlike ICT) should “count” towards the English Baccalaureate.On behalf of Computing at School:Dr. John WoollardProf. Simon Peyton-JonesDr. Bill Mitchel

Collaborative e-science architecture for Reaction Kinetics research community

This paper presents a novel collaborative e-science architecture (CeSA) to address two challenging issues in e-science that arise from the management of heterogeneous distributed environments: (i) how to provide individual scientists an integrated environment to collaborate with each other in distributed, loosely coupled research communities where each member might be using a disparate range of tools; and (ii) how to provide easy access to a range of computationally intensive resources from a desktop. The Reaction Kinetics research community was used to capture the requirements and in the evaluation of the proposed architecture. The result demonstrated the feasibility of the approach and the potential benefits of the CeSA

Enabling e-Research in combustion research community

Abstract This paper proposes an application of the Collaborative e-Science Architecture (CeSA) to enable e-Research in combustion research community. A major problem of the community is that data required for constructing modelling might already exist but scattered and improperly evaluated. That makes the collection of data for constructing models difficult and time-consuming. The decentralised P2P collaborative environment of the CeSA is well suited to solve this distributed problem. It opens up access to scattered data and turns them to valuable resources. Other issues of the community addressed here are the needs for computational resources, storages and interoperability amongst different data formats can also be addressed by the use of Grid environment in the CeSA