Leading as designing: how educational developers in leadership and management studies can use architectural design to facilitate student learning about delivering innovation

This paper describes a qualitative observational study of how a work based learning masters leadership development programme for middle managers in health and social care in the UK introduced students to key aspects of delivering innovation, through a formative assignment on contemporary architectural design. Action learning and activity theoretical approaches were used to enable students to explore common principles of leading the delivery of innovation. Between 2001 and 2013 a total of 89 students in 7 cohorts completed the assignment. Evaluation lent support for the view that the assignment provided a powerful learning experience for many. Several students found the creativity, determination and dedication of architects, designers and structural engineers inspirational in their ability to translate a creative idea into a completed artefact, deploy resources and negotiate complex demands of stakeholders. Others expressed varying levels of self-empowerment as regards their capacity for fostering an equivalent creativity in self and others. Theoretical approaches in addition to activity theory, including Engeström’s concepts of stabilisation knowledge and possibility knowledge, are discussed to explain these differing outcomes and to clarify the challenges and opportunities for educational developers seeking to utilise cross-disciplinary, creative approaches in curriculum design.

International volunteers at a Costa Rican organic farm : sheepish volunteers, proud tourists and unwitting developers

This thesis analyzes the practices and experiences of two groups of Canadian volunteers who visited the organic fanning and "alternative development" project ofFinca la Flor (FLF) in central Costa Rica. Using both participant observation and in-depth interviews with volunteers and other people involved with FLF, I examine volunteers' understandings of their involvement with the fann. I argue that three discursive fonnations are instrumental in shaping this particular volunteering encounter. Specifically, interpretation of these Canadian volunteers' experiences inspires the argument that the emerging practice of international volunteering (or voluntourism) exists at the intersection of discourses of development, volunteering and tourism, all of which both reflect and maintain problematic North-South relationships. The analysis shows that in spite ofFLF's construction as an (alternative / sustainable) international-development project, and in spite of volunteers' initial conceptualization of their trip as "volunteering," volunteers tend to act and describe their time at FLF in ways that look more like tourism than like volunteer labor or international development. Likewise, although FLF claims to principally be focused on alternative development, and merely to open up this authentic development space to volunteers for their participation, the organization in both practice and discourse seems primarily to construct a tourist experience and cater to the needs of foreigners as tourists. Discourses of development and volunteering do infonn the practices offann personnel and volunteers at FLF, but they become subordinated to the more dominant discourse of tourism as the volunteers' and fann management's ideals of development and volunteering capitulate to become focused on satisfying volunteers' (perceived or "real") touristic desires. The FLF participants I studied may have entered the encounter as volunteers, but they departed the site having been tourists.

Teachers as course developers.

Este estudio muestra cómo los mismos profesores de lengua diseñan y aplican sus propios cursos. El autor proporciona un esquema ó estructura para los procesos de desarrollo de los cursos, que, por otra parte, cualquier profesor puede utilizar en la planificación de los suyos. A través de los relatos de seis profesores que han desarrollado con éxito sus cursos en distintos lugares del mundo, vemos cómo ellos han utilizado se han apartado de este marco estructurado para afrontar los retos de su situación particular. Cada relato va seguido de un análisis, unas tareas y unas preguntas para el debate, así como de una bibliografía anotada.

Teachers as researchers and teachers as software developers: how use-case analysis helps build better educational software

A series of government initiatives has raised both the profile of ICT in the curriculum and the expectation that high quality teaching and learning resources will be accessible across electronic networks. In order for e-learning resources such as websites to have the maximum educational impact, teachers need to be involved in their design and development. Use-case analysis provides a means of defining user requirements and other constraints in such a way that software developers can produce e-learning resources which reflect teachers' professional knowledge and support their classroom practice. It has some features in common with the participatory action research used to develop other aspects of classroom practice. Two case-studies are presented: one involves the development of an on-line resource centred on transcripts of original historical documents; the other describes how 'Learning how to Learn', a major, distributed research project funded under the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme is using use-case analysis to develop web resources and services.

Sharing and reuse of web developers experience

Development of commercial web systems is laborious, lengthy and costly. This is partly due to the fact that the methods of their development can hardly cope with the complexity of provided services. Such services may need to be distributed and collaborative, require sophisticated software architecture, be rich in form, content and interactivity, and have a wide range of potentially casual users. While web development methodologies are slowly emerging from research methodologies, their adoption is far from wide-spread. To improve this situation, the authors propose an approach based on the observed practices of professional web developers, who openly share and reuse their web development experience, while guarding their development workproducts. To this end, we suggest to enhance web development methods, by collecting problem-solving experience of web developers, packaging it into a reusable form, and providing a navigable decision structure assisting developers in identifying proven expert solutions suitable for a given problem context.

Professional development for professional developers: who's learning about e-learning from whom?

This paper examines the critically reflective approach of a group of academic support staff in the design, development and evaluation of an e-learning resource. The resource was a showcase of examples of electronic learning and teaching approaches developed at Monash University titled Designing Electronic Learning and Teaching Approaches (DELTA). This paper does not focus on the resource itself, but rather on the critically reflective approach used, which drew on the features of participatory action research and was extended to include a participatory component in the evaluation of the site so that the outcomes of this process could be formally accommodated in data collection. The paper explores this critically reflective approach as a model for e-learning developers to monitor and progress their own professional development, engaging in collaborative dialogue to enhance their professional practice.

Culturally adaptive learning objects : challenges for educators and developers

In this paper the authors argue that the major problem facing local
courseware developers is that of representing cultural artefacts in their
courseware. They also discuss an emerging learning-object model that can be
adopted to address this problem by providing a systematic way to approach
implementing and representing cultural artefacts in courseware.

How Developers Copy

Copy-paste programming is dangerous as it may lead to hidden dependencies between different parts of the system. Modifying clones is not always straight forward, because we might not know all the places that need modification. This is even more of a problem when several developers need to know about how to change the clones. In this paper, we correlate the code clones with the time of the modification and with the developer that performed the modification to detect patterns of how developers copy from one another. We develop a visualization, named Clone Evolution View, to represent the evolution of the duplicated code. We show the relevance of our approach on several large case studies and we distill our experience in forms of interesting copy patterns.