An Interactive Zoo Guide: A Case Study of Collaborative Learning

Real Industry Projects and team work can have a great impact on student learning but providing these activities requires significant commitment from academics. It requires several years planning implementing to create a collaborative learning environment that mimics the real world ICT (Information and Communication Technology) industry workplace. In this project, staff from all the three faculties, namely the Faculty of Health, Engineering and Science, Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development, and Faculty of Business and Law in higher education work together to establish a detailed project management plan and to develop the unit guidelines for participating students. The proposed project brings together students from business, multimedia and computer science degrees studying their three project-based units within each faculty to work on a relatively large IT project with our industry partner, Melbourne Zoo. This paper presents one multimedia software project accomplished by one of the multi-discipline student project teams. The project was called 'Interactive ZooOz Guide' and developed on a GPS-enabled PDA device in 2007. The developed program allows its users to navigate through the Zoo via an interactive map and provides multimedia information of animals on hotspots at the 'Big Cats' section of the Zoo so that it enriches user experience at the Zoo. A recent development in zoo applications is also reviewed. This paper is also intended to encourage academia to break boundaries to enhance students' learning beyond classroom.Comment: 11 Page

Engaging Students in Open Source Software for Learning Professional Skills in Academia

The digital world makes human life more comfortable. This digital world has been created by the software. It seems to be that availability of this software in academia is not up to the mark. To enhance the role of software in academics there is a need to use open source software. The Open source software is popular as it provides the source code to the end user. Here the source code is available for user to change or modification for improvement from its original design. Most of the time, it is free of charge with the help of General Public License (GNU). This paper is a study of basic information of OSS, various development models for OSS, the use of OSS in the area of academics to improve the education system. This paper also discusses on previous work of the current scenario

Using Free/Libre Open Source Software Projects as E-learning Tools

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects can be considered as learning environments in which heterogeneous communities get together to exchange knowledge through discussion and put it into practice through actual contributions to software development, revision and testing. This has encouraged tertiary educators to attempt the inclusion of participation in FLOSS projects as part of the requirements of Software Engineering courses, and pilot studies have been conducted to test the effectiveness of such an attempt. This paper discusses two pilot studies with reference to several studies concerning the role of learning in FLOSS projects and shows how using FLOSS projects as E-learning tools has a potential to increase the quality of the software product