Contemporary learning environments: designing e-learning for education in the professions

Designing e-learning environments for quality professional education is a challenge for education designers, as the continuing practice of simply moving courses online can be surprisingly disabling. We argue that as universities strive to educate for excellence in professional practice, design approaches for the e-learning components must be conceptualized in a broader view of a contemporary learning environment involving integrated virtual and physical dimensions. These are comprehensively considered in an integrated way to facilitate learning experiences providing an emphasis on grounded practice. Our paper considers learning environments in the service of a broader understanding of a professional "practicum." In providing the more flexible, immediate and evolving virtual experiences, e-learning as a feature must take account of a range of education design considerations we model in a framework of elements. These are outlined, and broader issues are illuminated through a comparative case analysis of educational technology developments at Deakin University in the two professional fields of teaching and journalism. The Education Studies Online (ESO) project and the HOTcopy newsroom simulation project exemplify elements of the approach recommended in addressing the challenges of quality professional education. We highlight the generative role of the education designer in adopting an integrative and strategic stance, when creating such environments. Implications for the selection and use of various e-learning resources and corporate e-learning systems become evident as we highlight the dangers of a returning "instructional industrialism" as we risk allowing courses to "move online", rather than moving towards proposed features of contemporary learning environments.

Modeling dialogue with mixed initiative in design space exploration

Exploration with a generative formalism must necessarily account for the nature of interaction between humans and the design space explorer. Established accounts of design interaction are made complicated by two propositions in Woodbury and Burrow's Keynote on design space exploration. First, the emphasis on the primacy of the design space as an ordered collection of partial designs (version, alternatives, extensions). Few studies exist in the design interaction literature on working with multiple threads simultaneously. Second, the need to situate, aid, and amplify human design intentions using computational tools. Although specific research and practice tools on amplification (sketching, generation, variation) have had success, there is a lack of generic, flexible, interoperable, and extensible representation to support amplification. This paper addresses the above, working with design threads and computer-assisted design amplification through a theoretical model of dialogue based on Grice's model of rational conversation. Using the concept of mixed initiative, the paper presents a visual notation for representing dialogue between designer and design space formalism through abstract examples of exploration tasks and dialogue integration.

Enhancing the creative process for learning in primary technology education

When undertaking design and technology activities, children are provided with opportunities to create solutions to problems in new and innovative ways. The mental processes involved in the generation of new ideas may be enhanced when children’s attention is not focussed and is allowed to wander in a relaxed and uncompetitive environment. Research indicates that the two mental states, generative and non-generative, cannot exist simultaneously. This paper reports on a research project which investigated the impact on children’s thinking when a period of non-focussed thinking became part of the technology process. The results support the previous proposition that a child’s non-generative/analytical mental state needs to give way to a generative state so that a child can be more fully creative. Moreover, from this study that documented children’s ideas during their involvement in a design and technology activity, teachers are urged to provide an incubation period as part of the technological process in the classroom, so that children’s creativity can be fostered.

An approach to search and exploration through mixed-initiative

Generative design environments need support for human intervention as well as sound computational formalisms. A systematic approach to integrating the two, formal generation and the exploratory, is lacking. In this paper, we posit the possibility of a design support system that combines formal search with user driven exploration. Our approach is to cast the interaction between the user and the generative formalism as agent collaboration in a mixed-initiative environment. We describe the role of interaction and agency in an experimental mixed-initiative design support system, FOLDS and demonstrate its application.

Architect as composer: engaging architecture students with music in the design studio

This paper explores the engagement of architectural students with music in a second year design studio, through a Game and two design projects. A ‘Game’, in the context of this research, is a low-risk learning activity derived from the model established in the CUTSD ‘Reflective Making’ project. The Game required students to complete one of three tasks; to compose and record a piece of electronic music; to research the works of a composer within a digital presentation or to design a prototype musical instrument. This was used as a generative device to inform the design of a Music Room: a space for the contemplation and composition of music. A third stage of the project involved the actual construction of 8 Music Rooms, a high-risk, high-reward activity that requires physical resolution of an established relationship between music and architecture.

This paper will focus on the engagement of architecture students with the Game and related design projects. Student perceptions of the project are used to inform an evaluation of the project as an authentic learning experience and as a valuable component of their architectural education.

Identifying opportunities and promoting discourse by modeling future development initiatives

Based on the development of case study research into the proposed rapid expansion of the Deakin University waterfront campus, this paper presents a computational approach to identifying and modelling future development initiatives within the urban context. The aim of the model is to augment cross-discipline discourse by generating an array of permutations that extend the range of potential design scenarios beyond the Iimits of an ad-hoc, piece-meal or discipline specific approach.

Families, cultural resources and the digital divide: ICTs and educational (dis)advantage in the e-society

By concentrating on cases of family engagement with information communication technologies at a very local level, this paper tries to illustrate that issues related to 'access' and social disadvantage require extremely sophisticated and textured accounts of the multiple ways in which interrelated critical elements and various social, economic and cultural dimensions of disadvantage come into play in different contexts. Indeed, to draw a simple dichotomy between the technology haves and have-nots in local settings is not particularly generative. It may be the case that, even when people from disadvantaged backgrounds manage to gain access to technology, they remain relatively disadvantaged.

Valuing creativity in technology education

When he was only twelve, Peter Jackson (director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy) cut fur strips from his mother's stole, and using wire he made a 20 cm model of King Kong. After a long incubation period for his ideas, he devised a modem version of the film King Kong. Research shows that the generation of new ideas (generative mental state) cannot exist at the same time as the non-generative/analytical mental state. This research has implications for technology educators who value creativity. We explored how an incubation period of non-focused thinking affected children's creative ideas for their technological products. Five teachers and 117 children from primary schools in a Victorian regional city and a semirural village participated in the study. The teachers factored in an incubation period that allowed time for the children's attention to wander in a relaxed and uncompetitive environment. We analyzed transcripts of teacher interviews and the children's written evaluations and drawings. We found a correlation between the incubation of ideas and the degree of creativity exhibited by the children. This key finding suggests that teachers of technology should take the incubation period into account in order to enhance creativity in the children's technology designs.

`Out on the borderlands`: Time, generation and personal agency in women`s lives

What tools can we use in attempting to understand the recurring patterns of some girls’ early school leaving and consequent exclusion from well-paid employment? From which disciplinary fields can we take them? Using Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘scholastic point of view’ - the inherent intellectual bias of a discipline, in his case sociology - as a springboard, we suggest that if one turns to different ‘fields’, approaches might be found which point towards differing perspectives. This article brings Bourdieu into dialogue with the work of feminist historians and their conceptual tools. Carolyn Steedman’s notion of the politics of envy and Sally Alexander’s appropriation from psychoanalysis of the idea of repetition offer generative ways of exploring the ‘unthought categories of thought which delimit the thinkable and predetermine the thought’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 40). In their focus on gender, they have much in common with feminist sociologists’ responses to Bourdieu’s work, suggesting that a gendered ‘perspective’ offers a way of avoiding the ‘singular viewpoint’ inherent in any one discipline.

For goodness sake! Postlogographically de-(dis)positioning education research

How are education researchers and their research now positioned? Where are education research and researchers now positioned in the public/private debate? What is the position of practitioner research in these circumstances? My paper introduces 'post logography' as a researching trope for perturbing structuralist analytic methods towards interpreting post structuralising complexities that challenge the 'positioning' of education/research/researchers.

I discuss interpreting researching with and in (with-in) educating as intertwining ways, for turning the analytical objectivity that 'positions' subjective 'facts' as essentialised 'goods', towards exploring generative states of 'goodness'.

Education and its research are typically cast as separate constructs (like teaching and outcomes) for defining the subjectification of educational objects as valuable 'goods' - especially those with private economic value.

I argue that researched educational 'goods' are mostly teaching and outcomes focussed, and mainly privately positioned, whereas researching with-in educating for 'goodness' concerns a public disposition of exploring-learning-generativity for social knowing-acting.

I am theorising that through postlogographically de-positioning the predominance of 'facts' as private 'goods', and thereby recognising interpretive states concerning and generating 'goodness', the reductive polarisation of education/research, public/private, theorist/practitioner turns towards understanding complex continua for exploring-learning-generativity, which introduce new horizons of significance for social knowing-acting.

Towards a framework for exploring children's analytical thinking and creativity in technology

Technology education provides children with opportunities to be creative as they engage in problem solving and make products that address human needs. When thinking creatively, children generate new ideas through remote associations and brainstorming and this type of thinking is enhanced when attention is allowed to wander in a relaxed and uncompetitive environment. Research shows that the two mental states (generative and nongenerative/analytical) cannot exist simultaneously (Howard-Jones 2002). It follows that at some point in the technological process a child’s generative mental state needs to give way to a nongenerative, analytical state so that the child can focus on analysing information. This research project aims to investigate the impact of analytical thinking on creativity in the context of technology education in young children.

On recovering the surface geometry of temple superstructures

The application of computational techniques to the analysis of heritage artifacts enables scholars to bring together diverse fragments of surviving evidence, construe "best-fit" strategies and unearth implicit or hidden relationships. This paper reports a hybrid approach for recovering the surface geometry of temples. The approach combines physical measurements, architectural photogrammetry and generative rules to create a parametric model of the surface. The computing of surface geometry is broken into three parts, a global model governing the overall form of the superstructure, local models governing the geometry of individual motifs and finally the global and local models are combined into a single geometry. In this paper, the technique for recovering surface geometry is applied to a tenth century stone superstructure: the temple of Ranakdevi at Wadhwan in Western India. The global model of the superstructure and the local model of one individual motif are presented.

The generation of superstructure geometry in latina temples : a hybrid approach

The Nagara tradition of temple building created a rich corpus of Latina (single-spired) temples spread across Northern India between the fifth and thirteenth centuries. Computing methods offer a distinct methodology for reconstructing the genesis and evolution of geometry in this tradition over time. This paper reports a hybrid technique, comprising three distinct computations for recovering and explaining the geometry of temples. The application of the technique enables scholars to bring together fragments of evidence, construe "best-fit" strategies and unearth implicit or hidden relationships. The advantage of this approach is that changes in assumptions and testing of geometric alternatives can be easily simulated from multiple sources of information, such as texts, sacred diagrams and individual temples.

The biotechnology and marketing interface : functional integration using mechanistic and holographic responses to environmental turbulence

This paper serves to specify and ground research into interfunctional integration in a wider theoretical context with particular reference to the interaction between technology and marketing in the biotechnology sphere. The general and specific problem areas are specified as those of interfunctional relations and the dyadic relationship between marketing and biotechnical managerial functions in particular. The contextual/organisational generative mechanisms that are likely to keep interfunctional relations at the centre of scholarly attention for some time are explored from the perspective of cybernetic theory. The law of requisite variety states that in an effective open system environmental variety is matched by internal structural variety. As organisations are faced with ever more turbulent, and complex environments, this must be matched by an increased internal complexity within the organisation. The two modes of response, namely holographic and mechanistic, both highlight the need to further our understanding of interfunctional differences. Having established the problem and its genesis, a specific research agenda is outlined as the exploration of the interfunctional differences from a decision-making perspective.