Self-Organizing Architectural design based on Morphogenetic Programming.

In this paper, we present our research into self-organizing building algorithms. This idea of self-organization of animal/plants behaviour interests researchers to explore the mechanisms required for this emergent phenomena and try to apply them in other domains. We were able to implement a typical construction algorithm in a 3D simulation environment and reproduce the results of previous research in the area. LSystems, morphogenetic programming and wasp nest building are explained in order to understand self-organizing models. We proposed Grammatical swarm as a good tool to optimize building structures.

Evaluation of student learning outcomes in fourth year engineering mechatronics through design based learning curriculum

This paper focuses on evaluation of student learning outcomes in fourth year engineering mechatronics through design based learning curriculum. The purpose of all engineering degrees is to provide strong grounding with principles of engineering science and technology. By learning engineering methods and approaches in an academic environment, graduates can enter the world of work and tackle real world problems with innovation and creativity. In many cases, academic staff are responsible for driving and setting high expectations in their classrooms. Sometimes staff are expected to teach subjects outside their expertise. This research paper is concerned with evaluating student learning outcomes through feedback sought from students on design-based learning approach.

Collaborative reflective experience and practice in education explored through self-study and arts-based research

Eight teacher educators used self-study methodology to engage in reflective practice to overcome their isolation as individual teachers and researchers, and to facilitate professional development. Their research question asked: How can we continue to develop our teaching practice to ensure we are high quality, contemporary teacher educators? They contributed collaboratively in one overarching research project as well as through several focussed projects that explored issues in their individual teaching practices including: sustainability, creativity, curriculum design, pedagogy, assessment, and the learning experiences for students. This paper explores the outcomes from collaborative inquiry that five of the eight educator/researchers engaged in during a research-writing retreat. It documents their experience using arts-based strategies in which drawings were created about their experiences of engaging in a collaborative project and smaller focussed self-study projects. Analysis involved inquiring into each other’s drawings through recorded conversation. The metaphoric representations found through analysing the drawings provided insight into participants’ teaching practices and identities as teacher educators. Six months later when the participants had developed their projects further and used other artsbased methods to understand these experiences, they reflected on the key issues for their teaching practices that had arisen from undertaking this Collaborative Reflective Experience and Practice in Education research. Arts-based inquiries and reflective analysis over six months, constitute this paper. The experiences and analyses are shared to show how creating and sharing metaphoric meaning of visual representations is useful in self-study research to drill down into the real issues. Importantly, this in-depth sharing provides authentic interdisciplinary links when individual educators share their own approaches to teaching in their disciplined area. Findings suggest that gaining new insights into each other’s discipline-based approaches to teacher education through these methods, revealed different responses to pedagogical challenges and allowed for new possibilities for understanding the landscape of teacher education.

Wrong way, go back! Negotiating success in industry-based research

Literature addressing methodological issues in organisational research is extensive and multidisciplinary, encompassing debates about methodological choices, data-collection techniques, epistemological approaches and statistical procedures. However, little scholarship has tackled an important aspect of organisational research that precedes decisions about data collection and analysis – access to the organisations themselves, including the people, processes and documents within them. This chapter looks at organisational access through the experiences of three research fellows in the course of their work with their respective industry partners. In doing so, it reveals many of the challenges and changing opportunities associated with access to organisations, which are rarely explicitly addressed, but often assumed, in traditional methods texts and journal publications. Although the level of access granted varied somewhat across the projects at different points in time and according to different organisational contexts, we shared a number of core and consistent experiences in attempting to collect data and implement strategies.

Location-based games : transforming everyday environments into dynamic learning spaces

Location based games (LBGs) provide an opportunity to look at how new technologies can support a reciprocal relationship between formal classroom learning and learning that can potentially occur in other everyday environments. Fundamentally many games are intensely engaging due to the resulting social interactions and technical challenges they provide to individual and group players. By introducing the use of mobile devices we can transport these characteristics of games into everyday spaces. LBGs are understood as a broad genre incorporating ideas and tools that provide many unique opportunities for us to to reveal, create and even subvert various social, cultural, technical, and scientific interpretations of place, in particular places where learning is sometimes problematic.--------- A team of Queensland game developers have learnt a great deal through designing a range of LBGs such as SCOOT for various user groups and places. While these LBGs were primarily designed as social events, we found that the players recognised and valued the game as an opportunity to learn about their environment, it's history, cultural significance, inhabitants, services etc. Since identifying the strong pedagogical outcomes of LBGs, the team has created a set of authoring tools for people to design and host their own LBGs. A particular version of this is known as MiLK the mobile learning kit for schools.---------- This presentation will include examples of how LBGs have been used to improve the teaching and learning outcomes in various contexts. Participants will be introduced to MiLK and invited to trial it in their own classrooms with students.

Supervising practice based research

Practice based research appears to have emerged within several Higher Education agendas including the professional doctorates and the teacher as researcher. One way of thinking about this methodological approach is to consider its research paradigm – a practice based epistemology, and from this perspective to consider what special application to research supervision the paradigm invites. Within a “supervision as pedagogy” agenda these applications can be considered as pedagogies. This paper has been written in the style of practice based research, drawing on the author’s own experiences of supervising students undertaking practice based research. It adopts a position that research supervision is pedagogy and draws on the model of ‘Productive Pedagogies” to articulate strategies to help novice research students develop a research proposal.

A design science research roadmap

This paper proposes and synthesizes from previous design science(DS) methodological literature a structured and detailed DS Roadmap for the conduct of DS research. The Roadmap is a general guide for researchers to carry out DS research by suggesting reasonably detailed activities.Though highly tentative, it is believed the Roadmap usefully inter-relates many otherwise seemingly disparate, overlapping or conflicting concepts. It is hoped the DS Roadmap will aid in the planning, execution and communication of DS research,while also attracting constructive criticism, improvements and extensions. A key distinction of the Roadmap from other DS research methods is its breadth of coverage of DS research aspects and activities; its detail and scope. We demonstrate and evaluate the Roadmap by presenting two case studies in terms of the DS Roadmap.

A review of dashboards in performance management : implications for design and research

Dashboards are expected to improve decision making by amplifying cognition and capitalizing on human perceptual capabilities. Hence, interest in dashboards has increased recently, which is also evident from the proliferation of dashboard solution providers in the market. Despite dashboards' popularity, little is known about the extent of their effectiveness, i.e. what types of dashboards work best for different users or tasks. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive multidisciplinary literature review with an aim to identify the critical issues organizations might need to consider when implementing dashboards. Dashboards are likely to succeed and solve the problems of presentation format and information load when certain visualization principles and features are present (e.g. high data-ink ratio and drill down features).Werecommend that dashboards come with some level of flexibility, i.e. allowing users to switch between alternative presentation formats. Also some theory driven guidance through popups and warnings can help users to select an appropriate presentation format. Given the dearth of research on dashboards, we conclude the paper with a research agenda that could guide future studies in this area.

Ethical review in creative industries and other practice-based research

The processes used in Australian universities for reviewing the ethics of research projects are based on the traditions of research and practice from the medical and health sciences. The national guidelines for ethical conduct in research are heavily based on presumptions that the researcher–participant relationship is similar to a doctor–patient relationship. The National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council and Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee have made a laudable effort to fix this problem by releasing the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research in 2007, to replace the 1999 National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans. The new statement better encompasses the needs of the humanities, social sciences and creative industries. However, this paper argues that the revised National Statement and ethical review processes within universities still do not fully encompass the definitions of ‘research’ and the requirements, traditions, codes of practice and standards of the humanities, social sciences and creative industries. The paper argues that scholars within these disciplines often lack the language to articulate their modes of practice and risk management strategies to university-level ethics committees. As a consequence, scholars from these disciplines may find their research is delayed or stymied. The paper focuses on creative industries researchers, and explores the issues that they face in managing the ethical review process, particularly when engaging in practice-based research. Although the focus is on the creative industries, the issues are relevant to most fields in the humanities and social sciences.

Towards participatory action design research : adapting action research and design science research methods for urban informatics

This paper proposes a new research method, Participatory Action Design Research (PADR), for studies in the Urban Informatics domain. PADR supports Urban Informatics research in developing new technological means (e.g. using mobile and ubiquitous computing) to resolve contemporary issues or support everyday life in urban environments. The paper discusses the nature, aims and inherent methodological needs of Urban Informatics research, and proposes PADR as a method to address these needs. Situated in a socio-technical context, Urban Informatics requires a close dialogue between social and design-oriented fields of research as well as their methods. PADR combines Action Research and Design Science Research, both of which are used in Information Systems, another field with a strong socio-technical emphasis, and further adapts them to the cross-disciplinary needs and research context of Urban Informatics.

Design science research and the core of information systems

Design Science Research (DSR) has emerged as an important approach in Information Systems (IS) research, evidenced by the plethora of recent related articles in recognized IS outlets. Nonetheless, discussion continues on the value of DSR for IS and how to conduct strong DSR, with further discussion necessary to better position DSR as a mature and stable research paradigm appropriate for IS. This paper contributes to address this need, by providing a comprehensive conceptual and argumentative positioning of DSR relative to the core of IS. This paper seeks to argue the relevance of DSR as a paradigm that addresses the core of IS discipline well. Here we use the framework defined by Wand and Weber, to position what the core of IS is.

Validating the design science research roadmap : through the lens of "the idealised model for theory development"

Design Science Research (DSR) has emerged as an important approach in Information Systems (IS) research. However, DSR is still in its genesis and has yet to achieve consensus on even the fundamentals, such as what methodology / approach to use for DSR. While there has been much effort to establish DSR methodologies, a complete, holistic and validated approach for the conduct of DSR to guide IS researcher (especially novice researchers) is yet to be established. Alturki et al. (2011) present a DSR ‘Roadmap’, making the claim that it is a complete and comprehensive guide for conducting DSR. This paper aims to further assess this Roadmap, by positioning it against the ‘Idealized Model for Theory Development’ (IM4TD) (Fischer & Gregor 2011). The IM4TD highlights the role of discovery and justification and forms of reasoning to progress in theory development. Fischer and Gregor (2011) have applied IM4TD’s hypothetico-deductive method to analyze DSR methodologies, which is adopted in this study to deductively validate the Alturki et al. (2011) Roadmap. The results suggest that the Roadmap adheres to the IM4TD, is reasonably complete, overcomes most shortcomings identified in other DSR methodologies and also highlights valuable refinements that should be considered within the IM4TD.