Appropriate technology for Aboriginal Enterprise Development

RADG has been developing appropriate health technology for use in remote communities in Australia. The greatest need for these technologies has been in Aboriginal communities. In developing appropriate technical artifacts, RADG has confronted two problems. Firstly we require good contact with remote communities for consultation and feedback. Secondly, part of making artifacts appropriate for under-developed countries or regions, is the need to include employment and self-determination as part of the benefits of a technology

Up close and pedagogical: Computing academics talk about teaching

This paper describes and enacts a process for bootstrapping a more systematic discussion of computing education within a school of computing at a researchintensive Australasian university. Thus far, the project has gone through three stages. In the first stage, some academics were interviewed about their approach to teaching. In the second stage, selected anonymous quotes from the interviews were presented and discussed by other interested members of the school at workshops. In the final stage, selected anonymous quotes from the interviews and workshops were placed on a web-based survey, to which interested members of the school responded. These forms of data will be used to drive further stages of debate within the school. The theoretical underpinnings of this project are Wenger's concept of a community of practice, phenomenography, and socially constructivism. The aim is not to instruct the academics in any "right way" to teach. Instead, the aim is to facilitate debate, where the teachers identify the problems, and in finding the solutions they construct their own "pedagogic reality". As facilitators of this process, the authors of this paper highlighted dialectically opposed views in quotes from the teachers, and then allow the teachers to synthesise those views into a more sophisticated view. Our ultimate project aim is to grow a teaching community that balances reified theories of teaching and learning with participation in a community of practice. © 2006, Australian Computer Society, Inc

How we tell our engineering stories

CONTEXT Engineering involves professionals and clients from diverse cultural and economic backgrounds and experiences. Professional engineering educators aim to make teaching materials engaging to help students make sense of knowledge from academic research, general theory and their own practice. Some of these aspects are hard to convey especially those from areas currently outside student experiences, including making decision in problem solving, and working in cross-cultural contexts. We use narratives to introduce students to new and challenging concepts, and in this paper discuss how and why such strategies engage students regardless of whether they have prior experience or knowledge. We demonstrate how we do so through an exploration of two frameworks: the Cynefin domains of knowledge; and teaching cross-cultural contexts through Indigenous storytelling. Narrative is already a key knowledge sharing strategy for Aboriginal people (Kennedy, 2016), and narratives enable explicit linking of theory and practice in practical and memorable ways while also making learning enjoyable. PURPOSE The narrative process extends conventional teaching methods and is well suited to the metacognitive domain. We illustrate how its use assists students to make sense of knowledge they are encountering and to acquire learning in an in-depth and personal manner, and how to structure such presentations. APPROACH The paper uses a recursive process employing a narrative form to explain how this teaching process works for improving student understanding of knowledge and knowledge management. Green and Brook (2000) introduced the theory of "transportation into a narrative world" based on immersion into a story as a mechanism of narrative influence. Green & Donahue (2011) then reported on the power of such narrative to change beliefs, including the effects of fictional or false stories on real-world attitudes. We apply their work in the Cynefin domains and show how different problem-solving processes may be enacted in each domain of knowledge. We then use Indigenous community story telling modes to illustrate how narratives can be developed to integrate theory with practical understanding in these narratives. RESULTS Experiencing such narratives provides accessible understanding of engineering theory and demonstrates how use of relevant narratives exemplifies both educational and engineering theory. The stories provide examples of the ability of narrative to explain and engage with students in complex learning domains. These narratives have been used in UTS Engineering in tacit knowledge sharing in class for over a year now and the method is receiving increasing support from staff and students. CONCLUSIONS An interactive method of teaching narrative engages students’ in creating visual imagery of components of a scenario. Using different voices, when creating the narrative, allows a variety of perspectives, and interactively engaging the student voice in class provides nuances suitable to students’ present perspectives and hence more likely to extend their awareness. The Indigenous narrative techniques were designed for such learning and the Cynefin model is a useful tool to distinguish stories into different domains of knowledge to provide a coherent learning example

Using complex events to represent domain concepts in graphs

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015. We have developed an event based visualisation model for analysing patterns between news story data and stock prices. Visual analytics systems generally show a direct mapping from data to visualisation. We show that by inserting an intermediate step, which models an expert manipulating data, we can provide unique results that display patterns within the data being investigated and assist less expert users

Building digital entrepreneurial platform through local community activity and digital skills in aboriginal Australia

© 2018 Pradhan, Beetson & Kutay. This research is situated in the Ngemba community which includes the township known as Brewarrina. It is located approximately 900 kms north west of Sydney and classified ‘Very Remote Australia’. Brewarrina’s recorded Aboriginal population in 2016 was 71.09% contrasted with the total Indigenous Australian population being 2.8%. The Australian Government have identified Brewarrina in the ‘Digital Divide’ category. Closing the gap on socio-economic disadvantage and the digital divide is directly related to economic development and national priorities include Aboriginal peoples’ employment as an identified target under the banner of the 'Close the Gap' initiative. The Australian government stated the national broadband network (NBN) initiative and ICTs would assist in achieving such priorities. Despite such strategies and initiatives, direct action has yet to be realised. This raises opportunities for targeted networking interactions within and beyond community, offering innovative approaches to countering these priorities. This research will implement and verify an innovative model that facilitates community digital entrepreneurship. The model proposes several practical applications, including community members' ability to promote community entrepreneurship and community members’ skills development

Doctoral symposium: Visualising complex event hierarchies using relevant domain ontologies

© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). With the growth of data available for analysis, people in many sectors are looking for tools to assist them in collating and visualising patterns in that data. We have developed an event based visualisation system which provides an interactive interface for experts to filter and analyse data. We show that by thinking in terms of events, event hierarchies, and domain ontologies, that we can provide unique results that display patterns within the data being investigated. The proposed system uses a combination of Complex Event Processing (CEP) concepts and domain knowledge via RDF based ontologies. In this case we combine an event model and domain model based on the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) and conduct experiments on financial data. Our experiments show that, by thinking in terms of event hierarchies, and pre-existing domain ontologies, that certain new relationships between events are more easily discovered

Towards Project Portfolio Management for Sustainable Outcomes in the Construction Industry

It is imperative that organisations improve their sustainability and there is a global push to reduce the environmental impact from project activities. This is especially true in construction, yet there is no ex1stmg framework to guide decision making and project portfolio management (PPM) for sustainable construction. This paper discusses the application of project portfolio management to the area of sustainable development in the construction industry. Using the understanding gained from existing PPM practices in a range of industries and the current approaches to risk and sustainability management in the construction industry, we propose a new maturity model for PPM. The maturity model aims to guide the introduction of sustainability factors into multi-project resource scheduling and risk analysis in the coustruction industry, and can be used to make the contribution to sustainability from an overall portfolio more sustainable than the sum of the contribution from individual projects, 1

Observations on appropriate technology application in indigenous community using system dynamics modelling

It is possible to develop a well-sustained society by balancing social, technical, and environmental concerns at the community level. Indigenous governance methods provide enormous prospects for developing well-sustained societies. A limitation is the knowledge gap and lack of interest from dominant cultures. With the application of appropriate technology in development, it is possible for Indigenous communities to adjust technology to their uses and transfer their accumulated knowledge to the development of infrastructure and mechanisms for production incorporating cultural value. Activating such talents within the Indigenous community is important for enabling them to achieve their ideal future. Using participatory design methods, Indigenous people can be brought into the development planning to understand the key variables that limit and influence technology development. System dynamic modelling can be adapted to simulate these new attributes and develop plans and objectives based on outcomes from the model. An example is shown around a case study for community development in Papua, Indonesia. This research is to establish a long-term development plan for all stakeholders, while preserving the value of the Indigenous culture. An analysis of Indigenous social behavioral patterns toward development provides an idea of social-constructive values, which will allow Indigenous community to develop self-sustainable and independent communities