Search

In this paper, we use our qualitative research notes and observations to portray a model for integrated STEM education and summarise primary school students' typical and recurring ways in which they engaged with each new robot. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to unpack key elements of the Australian Curriculum: Technologies in order to support teachers and pre- service teachers to implement these components, and second, to describe ways in which teachers can teach authentic integrated STEM education that also provides opportunities for students to develop and demonstrate 21st century competencies. Based on data collected from projects undertaken in a number of school sites over 18 months, we have developed and share a model for the gradual structured release of teacher control over student activity in STEM activities, and describe how this concept can be a basis for in-situ teacher professional learning. The affordances of robotics and visual programming as a context for integrated STEM education are discussed, and identified as promoting "head-heart-hands" learning.

Education policy increasingly takes place across borders and sectors, involving a variety of both human and nonhuman actors. This comparative policy paper traces the 'policy mobilities,' 'fast policy' processes and distributed 'policy assemblages' that have led to the introduction of new computer programming practices into schools and curricula in England, Sweden and Australia. Across the three contexts, government advisors and ministers, venture capital firms, think tanks and philanthropic foundations, non-profit organizations and commercial companies alike have promoted computer programming in schools according to a variety of purposes, aspirations, and commitments. This paper maps and traces the evolution of the organizational networks in each country in order to provide a comparative analysis of computing in schools as an exemplar of accelerated, transnationalizing policy mobility. The analysis demonstrates how computing in schools policy has been assembled through considerable effort to create alignments between diverse actors, the production and circulation of material objects, significant cross-border movement of ideas, people and devices, and the creation of strategic partnerships between government centres and commercial vendors. Computing in schools exemplifies how modern education policy and governance is accomplished through sprawling assemblages of actors, events, materials, money and technologies that move across social, governmental and geographical boundaries.

This article offers a case study of how platforms and predictive infrastructures are emerging in higher education. It examines a Learning Analytics Application Programming Interface (API) from a popular Learning Management System. The API is treated firstly as an artefact based on the computational abstraction of educational principles, and secondly as an empirical entry point to investigate the emergence of a Learning Analytics infrastructure in a large Australian university. Through in-depth ethnographic interviews and the interpretative analysis of software development workflows, the paper describes an API-mediated platformisation process involving a range of actors and systems: computational experts, algorithms, data-savvy administrative staff and large corporate actors inserting themselves through back-ends and various other dependencies. In the conclusion, the article argues that the platformisation of higher education is part of a broader project that mobilises programmability and computation to re-engineer educational institutions in the interest of efficiency and prediction. However, the social-scientific study of this project cannot ignore the practical and compromised dimension where human actors and technical systems interact and, in the process, generate meaning.

This paper details a digital technology solution to a problem that arose during a science lesson in an early years class. The teacher used the opportunity to enable the children to apply their knowledge and skills of a software application developed in a recent ICT class. Using the age-appropriate app, the students could communicate their learning about forces in a visual way using toy cars. They successfully designed a set of instructions to code a digital story using visual block programming. The children's creation of digital stories also communicated their understanding of science concepts relating force to motion.

Many recent technologies provide the ability to dynamically adjust the interface depending on the emerging cognitive and collaborative needs of the learning episode. This means that educators can adaptively re-design the learning environment during the lesson, rather than purely relying on preemptive learning design thinking. Based on a three-semester design-based research study this paper explores how adaptive learning design can be used to provide learning environments that enable more effective collaboration and representation of information. The analysis culminates in a framework for adaptive learning design of a web-conferencing environment that depends on the type of knowledge being represented and the nature of interaction anticipated. Heuristics for adaptive learning design in synchronous multimodal environments are presented, and the potential role of students as co-designers is also discussed.

This paper reports on the findings of two qualitative exploratory studies that sought to investigate design features of help options in computer-based L2 listening materials. Informed by principles of participatory design, language learners, software designers, language teachers, and a computer programmer worked collaboratively in a series of design sessions. The participants first evaluated researcher-generated prototypes, designed prototypes for two language proficiencies (beginner and upper intermediate) and iterated designs on both paper and screen. Analysis of the reworked prototypes resulted in five features of help option design: type, location, sequence, click-through, and display. Analyses of the interaction data showed that consensually the participants favored help options that are easy to use, promote learner control, support guidance, and stimulate learning.

This paper draws from research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project "Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy", which is a collaboration between the University of New England, the University of Tasmania and the Australian Children's Television Foundation. This project is being conducted in over 20 schools around Australia. The data presented in this paper focuses on one such school, located in Tasmania. It explores one school's endeavour in the teaching and learning of multimodal narrative. Data includes interviews from students and multimodal analysis of student narratives. The paper showcases the kinds of semiotic choices the children are making for their stories, and includes excerpts from the interviews to illustrate how they are able to articulate justifications for their choices. In particular, it focuses on how children are establishing literary concepts such as genre, characterisation and point of view using all semiotic resources. In doing so, it considers the pedagogy behind the creations to explore how effectively it works as children create new kinds of texts which are innovative, critical, creative and "of quality". (Contains 8 figures, 3 tables, and 3 notes.)

The prime feature of the student's legal relationship with his or her university is that it is governed by contract law, and in all other aspects of life such a contract can be reviewed/investigated by the courts in the event of a dispute between the two parties to the contract. In the world of academe, however, the key aspect of the contract (the delivery of teaching and examining by the university) is beyond such investigation, even by a court (let alone, say, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator [OIA]). This is because the English courts (in line with courts around the world) apply judicial deference to the exercise of expert academic judgement--and hence this concept, as explored in this paper, is a "Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card" for universities. Will this privilege of academe continue? Is it threatened by the HRA/ECHR, by the expansion of public law judicial review, by the increased application of consumer law, by the growth of discrimination law? Or perhaps it will be challenged via the QAA and the Bologna Process "enforcing" (over?) precision in "learning outcomes"? This article attempts to give answers to these questions.

This paper builds on research into using multimedia and hypermedia as creative writing tools and reports on a study in using a hypermedia authoring program with middle-years students at an Australian secondary school. The study explored a classroom where collaborative work built on the technical facilities and expertise of young people. The paper presented here focuses on the authors' development of an assessment matrix for evaluating hypermedia stories. The aim is to provide an effective feedback mechanism on the hypermedia work and to give teachers guidelines for planning lessons, and for making summative as well as formative judgments. Four, equally important dimensions are identified as the key components of hypermedia: image, language, interactivity and structural design. Image relates to how the screen looks: the background and foreground, positioning, colour, animation and source of images (e.g. clipart, photographs, or the use of hand-drawing). Language involves written language as signs, or captions within the created hypermedia world, or as attached commentary. Language may also be audio-files containing conversations, commentary, or even chanting or singing. Interactivity refers to the way the viewer or the interactor comes into a relationship with the hypermedia. This involves the interactive nature of the screen, that is, what can be opened up and explored within each screen as well as how the viewer/interactor moves between screens. Structural Design relates to the way the story fits together image, language and interactivity, and the way one aspect relates to another in terms of complexity and cohesion. In order to systematically assess the qualitative variation across the range of students' hypermedia stories, each of the four aspects highlighted above was also considered in terms of the five-level "SOLO" taxonomy (structure of learning outcomes). This taxonomy includes the following five levels: (1) Pre-structural--where the response is really not relevant to the question; (2) Uni-structural--where an appropriate but minimalist response is given; (3) Multi-structural-- where several responses (or answers) are given and the responses are appropriate, but there is no relationship between the responses; (4) Relational--where all responses are related into a reasonably coherent argument; and (5) Extended abstract--where responses come together in an argument, which goes beyond any of the information previously given or hinted at. When the four dimensions mentioned above are mapped against the five qualitatively different levels of response, a series of taxonomies is produced, which gives a clear indication of the strengths within each story, as well as the variation in quality across all the stories. In so far as this method maps and explores qualitative variation within a specific phenomenon it can be seen as phenomenographic. In this paper, three of the hypermedia stories' matrices are explored and one story is assessed using the whole method.

The aim of the current paper is to share the processes in revising the courseware of the course of "Engineering Management Science" coded as ENG4004, in the Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical, Mechatronics, Electrical and Electronic, Computer Systems, Instrumentation and Control), Bachelor of Engineering Technology (Mechanical, Building and Construction Management) programmes offered by the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), a regional Australian University with excellence in developing e-learning. The paper describes how the authors review the courseware of the course. The needs for the review are also explained. The assessments of the course were also studied and revised. The authors also estimated the costs involved in reviewing the course. At the same time, the paper also predicts the benefits that will be offered to students and the community including employers who are going to employ USQ graduates. It is finally concluded that the review is worthwhile and the actual costs to the university are minimal. (Contains 8 tables and 2 figures.)

It is important for students to develop critical thinking and other higher-order thinking skills during their tertiary studies. Along with the ability to think critically comes the need to develop students' meta-cognitive skills. These abilities work together to enable students to control, monitor, and regulate their own cognitive processes and improve their ability to comprehend and solve problems. This paper proposes the use of scaffolding as a method of helping students to develop their critical thinking and meta-cognitive skills within the IS curriculum. Scaffolding enables students to undertake tasks that they might not have been able to tackle without the scaffolding. It allows the learners to focus on the aspects of the task that they can manage, while still keeping an understanding of the task as a whole. As the scaffolding is gradually removed, the student should be able to work more independently and apply the new skills effectively. The paper shows how the scaffolding of the process of critical thinking can be used in the early stages of the IS curriculum to enable students to first learn, then gain confidence, in using the techniques that they need to apply independently in the latter stages of the curriculum. Some of the topics covered and where skills were developed included writing essays (in particular essays that include argument), critical and analytical thinking in programming, and the use of problem-solving techniques in systems analysis and design. In the section on critical and analytical thinking in programming, we show how we taught students to think logically and then how this was applied in programming. The task of testing algorithms was scaffolded to enable the students to learn how to evaluate a program and create test data. The paper then shows how the lecturer developed students' meta-cognitive skills by phrasing SQL questions that made the students conscious of their thinking and helped them to link what they were currently doing with their previous knowledge. The paper goes on to show how the conventional problem-solving techniques that are often taught to school children can be used in systems analysis and design. These techniques help the student to consider the whole picture and to understand the relationships between the different parts of the system and how it interacts with the rest of the world. Lastly, the paper describes how the students were taught to write and argue when writing an academic essay. The first assessment task was carefully scaffolded to help the students understand the need to put forward an argument, substantiate that argument and to minimize plagiarism. The scaffolding was once again removed to enable students to write without the help by their third year. (Contains 4 tables and 6 figures.)

The introduction of an open-ended MicroWorlds based assignment in a pre-service teaching degree produced interesting results. Students engaged with the task at very high levels and produced work of high quality; so much so that marking trends were reversed. This paper explores the design and implementation of the task and how for many students it allowed them the opportunity to shine. Students who performed poorly in written assignments achieved excellent marks and reported high levels of engagement and satisfaction. There was also an improvement in marks of students from non-English speaking backgrounds. The paper details the experiences of particular students and relates their experiences to issues of assessment models in multimedia and the establishment of constructivist learning environments using IT. Some students experienced considerable difficulty and frustration with this task; their experience is also discussed within the context of these issues. The projects themselves are analysed, along with interviews and observations in an attempt to illustrate the success (and failure for some) of this experience. The individual approaches to the task and the processes used in the creation of projects are also investigated. The paper also refers to the development of literacies, multimodality and to the continued development of effective (and affective) learning environments. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

There is a growing demand for advice about effective, time efficient ways of using ICT to support student learning in higher education. This paper uses one such area of activity--networked learning--as a context in which to outline a novel approach to educational design. The paper makes two main contributions. It provides a high level view of the educational design problem space. It then introduces the patterns based approach to educational design. While other professional communities, particularly in software engineering, have been developing patterns based approaches to sharing and re-using design experience, this paper goes back to the original conceptions of participatory design that informed Christopher Alexander's early work on patterns and pattern languages. In particular, it makes connections between the technicalities of design and the central place of values. A patterns based approach can help with encoding, sharing and using knowledge for educational design. But it is also a powerful way of connecting educational values and vision to the details of the tasks, tools and resources we offer our students. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)

Academics teaching software development courses are experimenting with teaching methods aiming to improve students' learning experience and learning outcomes. Since Agile software development is gaining popularity in industry due to positive effects on managing projects, academics implement similar Agile approaches in student-centered learning environments. In this paper, we discuss teaching introductory programming based on Scrum. Our learning environment, supported by the Doubtfire learning management system, fosters perceived autonomy and perceived competence by providing tools and opportunities for self-regulated learners to adjust their learning strategies. Evaluation of the learning environment revealed that students want to be in control of their learning.

This paper outlines the architecture for an online assessment management system implemented at the University of Southern Queensland. The system assists teams of academics in the management and marking of electronically submitted student assignments in large-scale classes. The system designed to provide a flexible yet structured method for providing feedback to students also offers semi-automatic file handling and grade recording. The system, Classmate, allows a team of markers to access and mark student assignments through a web interface designed to parallel paper-based marking systems. An online authoring tool replaces the red pen on paper analogy. A pilot study conducted on the use of Classmate has found the system to be of use in providing students with consistent feedback, allowing traditional assignment interactions and reducing trivial and repetitive assignment marking tasks. (Contains 7 figures.)

This paper reports recent work in developing of structures and processes that support university teachers and instructional designers incorporating learning objects into higher education focused learning designs. The aim of the project is to develop a framework to guide the design and implementation of high quality learning experiences. This framework is premised on the proposition that learning objects are resources that can be incorporated within a learning design. The learning design serves as the pedagogical model that drives the development. The first phase of the project required an analysis of metadata schemas by which learning objects could be described, to facilitate discovery, retrieval and inclusion in a learning design. In particular, the pedagogical descriptors within the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard were examined to determine their suitability for use in this project. The findings indicated that enhancement of the educational descriptors was required. To address this, a learning object metadata application profile specific to Australian higher education has been developed. This paper describes the process by which the metadata application profile was developed within the context of the overall project.

Purpose: This paper narrates a case study on design thinking-based education work in an industrial design honours program. Student projects were developed in a multi-disciplinary setting across a Computing and Engineering faculty that allowed promoting technologically and user-driven innovation strategies. Design/methodology/approach: A renewed culture and environment for industrial design (ID) students emphasised seeking functionality and fidelity, user and society value over beauty and form factors alone. The pedagogical approach sought to determine the new industrial products reality with an increasing contribution by design thinking, and its associated methodologies that are currently advancing typical ID. Findings: In conclusion, the authors propose a number of reflections as recommendations, which may be useful for educational institutions contemplating similar curriculum makeovers to their design degrees. Originality/value: Our research provides valuable lessons to other design courses that wish to invigorate their curriculum with technical and design thinking-based advances.

In this paper, an example is offered of a problem-solving task for senior secondary school students which was given in the context of a story. As the story unfolds, the task requires progressively more complex forms of linear programming to be applied. Coding in MATLAB is used throughout the task in such a way that it supports the increasing complexity of the task, and performs routine procedural work for the students, thereby allowing them to focus on the mathematical concepts. The task is presented to the students in MATLAB code. Using the live editor facility in MATLAB, the code is made to resemble a worksheet. This approach makes technology widely used in universities and industry accessible and relevant to secondary school mathematics students.

One prominent approach in the exploration of the variations in project team performance has been to study two components of the aggregate personalities of the team members: conscientiousness and agreeableness. A second line of research, known as self-categorisation theory, argues that identifying as team members and the team's performance norms should substantially influence the team's performance. This paper explores the influence of both these perspectives in university software engineering project teams. Eighty students worked to complete a piece of software in small project teams during 2007 or 2008. To reduce limitations in statistical analysis, Monte Carlo simulation techniques were employed to extrapolate from the results of the original sample to a larger simulated sample (2043 cases, within 319 teams). The results emphasise the importance of taking into account personality (particularly conscientiousness), and both team identification and the team's norm of performance, in order to cultivate higher levels of performance in student software engineering project teams.

Programming is a subject that many beginning students find difficult. The PHP Intelligent Tutoring System (PHP ITS) has been designed with the aim of making it easier for novices to learn the PHP language in order to develop dynamic web pages. Programming requires practice. This makes it necessary to include practical exercises in any ITS that supports students learning to program. The PHP ITS works by providing exercises for students to solve and then providing feedback based on their solutions. The major challenge here is to be able to identify many semantically equivalent solutions to a single exercise. The PHP ITS achieves this by using theories of Artificial Intelligence (AI) including first-order predicate logic and classical and hierarchical planning to model the subject matter taught by the system. This paper highlights the approach taken by the PHP ITS to analyse students' programs that include a number of program constructs that are used by beginners of web development. The PHP ITS was built using this model and evaluated in a unit at the Queensland University of Technology. The results showed that it was capable of correctly analysing over 96% of the solutions to exercises supplied by students.

This paper reports on a series of introductory programming workshops, initially targeting female high school students, which utilised Lego Mindstorms robots. Cognitive load theory (CLT) was applied to the instructional design of the workshops, and a controlled experiment was also conducted investigating aspects of the interface. Results indicated that a truncated interface led to better learning by novice programmers as measured by test performance by participants, as well as enhanced shifts in self-efficacy and lowered perception of difficulty. There was also a transfer effect to another programming environment (Alice). It is argued that the results indicate that for novice programmers, the mere presence on-screen of additional (redundant) entities acts as a form of tacit distraction, thus impeding learning. The utility of CLT to analyse, design and deliver aspects of computer programming environments and instructional materials is discussed.

This paper describes a course in programmable logic design and computer architecture as it is taught at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The course is designed around a major design project and has two supplemental assessment tasks that are also described. The context of the Computer Engineering degree program within which the course is taught is presented, and some student outcomes are discussed. (Contains 2 tables, 4 figures and 1 footnote.)

Contributing student pedagogy (CSP) builds upon social constructivist and community-based learning principles to create engaging and productive learning experiences. What makes CSP different from other, related, learning approaches is that it involves students both learning from and also explicitly valuing the contributions of other students. The creation of such a learning community builds upon established educational psychology that encourages deep learning, reflection and engagement. Our school has recently completed a review and update of its curriculum, incorporating student content-creation and collaboration into the design of key courses across the curriculum. Our experiences, based on several years of experimentation and development, support CSP-based curriculum design to reinforce the value of the student perspective, the clear description of their own transformative pathway to knowledge and the importance of establishing student-to-student networks in which students are active and willing participants. In this paper, we discuss the tools and approaches that we have employed to guide, support and structure student collaboration across a range of courses and year levels. By providing an account of our intentions, our approaches and tools, we hope to provide useful and transferrable knowledge that can be readily used by other academics who are considering this approach. (Contains 6 tables and 5 figures.)

In various research areas, the availability of open datasets is considered as key for research and application purposes. These datasets are used as benchmarks to develop new algorithms and to compare them to other algorithms in given settings. Finding such available datasets for experimentation can be a challenging task in technology enhanced learning, as there are various sources of data that have not been identified and documented exhaustively. In this paper, we provide such an analysis of datasets that can be used for research on learning and knowledge analytics. First, we present a framework for the analysis of educational datasets. Then, we analyze existing datasets along the dimensions of this framework and outline future challenges for the collection and sharing of educational datasets. (Contains 3 tables and 7 figures.)

Based on a three-semester design research study, this paper argues the need to redesign online learning environments to better support the representation and sharing of factual, procedural, and conceptual knowledge in order for students to develop their design capabilities. A web-conferencing environment is redesigned so that the modalities facilitate more socio-constructivist pedagogies whereby students co-construct knowledge and share their design thinking. The design-based research methodology explicates how redesign not only allowed more effective student representation and sharing of the different levels of knowledge required for abstraction to occur, but also enabled better teacher assessment and, hence, remediation. On the basis of the emerging findings of the study a set of principles for designing web-conferencing (or other online) environments to support creative design learning is proposed. (Contains 3 figures.)

This paper highlights key themes which emerged from schoolgirls' responses to focus group questions regarding perceptions of Information Communication Technology (ICT) subjects in the Queensland senior secondary curriculum, primarily, Information Processing Technology (IPT) and Information Technology Systems (ITS). The 2006 focus group interviews comprised one component of a 3-year research project seeking to identify factors that deter females from ICT education and career pathways. Focus group data reveal that one barrier to selection of advanced ICT options was girls' experience of junior secondary school ICT subjects which had been typically delivered by teachers with limited expertise and constituted by mundane, repetitive tasks. Further, while Non Takers of senior ICT subjects acknowledged the pervasiveness of ICTs in the workplace, they were disinterested in a specialized ICT career path. Hence, rather than undertake advanced offerings of little relevance to career aspirations, Non Takers perceived that they could continue to hone their skills on a needs basis and, indeed, were routinely and purposefully using computers in their home settings. A lack of understanding of the different foci of IPT (i.e. programming and databases) and ITS (i.e. multimedia and web design) was evident among Non Takers, with many singularly associating senior ICT subjects with programming and other highly technical skills. Both Non Takers and Takers (who in the context of the focus groups were largely Takers of ITS) expressed an aversion to programming. It was the creative aspects of ITS which had attracted Takers to the subject and they were, in fact, enjoying its authentic, problem-based design tasks. Many Non Takers responded positively to interviewers' descriptions of ITS; the subject's broader appeal is evidenced in growing enrollments since its 2000 introduction in the senior curriculum. Findings indicate that schoolgirls' participation in ICT pathways may be well promoted through subjects that position and call for students to engage with ICTs as "enablers" in diverse, meaningful and creative human contexts. (Contains 5 tables.)

There exists a wealth of computing education literature devoted to interventions designed to overcome novices' difficulties in learning to write computer programs. However, various studies have shown that the majority of students at the end of a semester of instruction are still unable to write a simple computer program, despite the best efforts of their teachers (Lister et al., 2004; McCracken et al., 2001; Soloway, Bonar, & Ehrlich, 1983). In an effort to address this problem, a workshop titled Building Research in Australasian Computing Education (BRACE) was convened in 2004. BRACE brought together academics interested in learning and applying the techniques and methodologies of action research to the problem of poor student code-writing performance. At this workshop, and at those that followed, participants agreed to use end-of-semester assessments to try to pinpoint the key steps and difficulties beginners faced in learning introductory programming. Subsequently the group, which has come to be known as the BRACElet project, has continued to meet twice a year in an effort to better understanding of how students learn and grasp various programming concepts. Over the past five years, the BRACElet project has fostered a multi-institutional community of practice amongst academics who teach novice computer programming. For participants, the BRACElet project provides the benefits of external moderation, quality assurance, and bench-marking of examinations. At a BRACElet meeting, attendees decide upon a small common set of question types for use within their own local examinations; it is the subsequent analysis and discussion of locally collected data from various institutions that comprises the BRACElet project's iterative series of action research. By examining across institutions common difficulties students may have on various question types, such as reading, tracing, and coding, the BRACElet project attempts to build theory on how learners acquire programming knowledge. In 2008, academics from Victoria University joined the BRACElet group. After modifying our end of semester examination to contain the BRACElet core question types, the examination was run and data was collected across the cohort of 32 students. The analysis treated student performance on code writing questions as the dependent variable and looked at the relationship between code writing questions and non-code writing questions. Overall, our study found that the combination of tracing and explaining questions, more so than each skill independently correlates highly to code writing skills supporting the BRACElet notion of a hierarchical development of skills in learning to program. From Australasian beginnings, the BRACElet project has continued to attract new collaborators to become a large multi-national, multi-institutional research community that has published over 20 papers, with 28 academics as authors, from 20 tertiary institutions across 7 countries. By joining the BRACElet collective, we have been nurtured in making informed decisions about our own assessment practices and our local research has made a small contribution to the dialogue about understanding how novices learn to program. (Contains 3 figures.)

With universities having difficulty attracting students to study information technology (IT), the scores needed for entry into IT degrees have dropped markedly. IT schools are thus having to cope by adjusting their introductory courses to ensure that students will still learn what is expected but without negatively impacting on pass rates. This paper considers short objective tests, designed by other researchers, to examine whether students who have passed an introductory course have achieved an understanding of fundamental concepts in programming. The Dehnadi test, which was originally designed to be taken before a programming course to predict who would be successful, proved to be useful in showing that many students who had passed an introductory programming course had little or no understanding of fundamental concepts. The test was useful if the number of correct responses was considered. Implications of students passing an introductory course but being unable to respond correctly on a multiple choice test of the most fundamental concepts of programming are considered. (Contains 4 tables.)

Students now have at their disposal a range of Web 2.0 authoring forms such as audio and video podcasting, blogging, social bookmarking, social networking, virtual world activities and wiki writing. Many university educators are interested in enabling students to demonstrate their learning by creating content in these forms. However, the design and conduct of assessment for such student-created content is not straightforward. Based upon a review of current literature and examples in the public domain, this paper identifies key challenges for academic assessment that arise from students' use of Web 2.0 authoring forms. We describe and analyse selected cases where academics have set assessable student Web 2.0 activities in a range of fields of study, noting especially the inter-relationship of learning objectives, assessment tasks and marking criteria. We make recommendations for practice, research and understanding to strengthen educational quality and academic integrity in the use of Web 2.0 authoring forms for assessable student learning. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper contributes to an understanding of the variation in approaches that information system analysts/designers use to do analysis and design. A qualitative, phenomenographic research method was used. Four categories were constituted from the data: an "ad hoc" strategy with the intention of solving the problem as quickly as possible; a strategy of producing atomistic analysis and design artefacts with the intention of proving analysis/design has taken place; a strategy of adhering to a method with the intention of producing a better solution; and a strategy of adapting and scaling a method with the intent to define the problem accurately while sharing a vision of the project. The contribution to education made by these results is discussed. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper reports on the findings from a quantitative research study into the use of a software tool that was built to support a part-complete solution method (PCSM) for the learning of computer programming. The use of part-complete solutions to programming problems is one of the methods that can be used to reduce the cognitive load that students experience during their learning. The tool that was built is a code restructuring tool known as CORT. It permits the display of a part-complete solution to a programming task together with a set of possible lines of code that can be used to "fill-in" the solution. Students can then easily manipulate the programming lines within CORT and then test their solutions within a traditional development environment such as Microsoft's Visual Studio. An inquiry into CORT's effect on student learning outcomes took place over a period of 14 weeks at an Australian university. Two student groups participated in an introductory programming unit, one of which utilized the CORT system whilst the other acted as a control group. Data were collected on student background, time taken to complete programming tasks, the amount of help that students required, and student learning outcomes. The data were analysed using a statistical package, and it was found that there was no significant difference in the relative levels of achievement between students in the two groups. However the results did indicate that students in the CORT group spent significantly less time and required significantly less help than the students in the control group. This suggests that if the CORT students had spent extra time on further programming tasks such that their overall time had been equal to that of the non-CORT students, then they may have achieved higher learning outcomes. Also the fact that the CORT students required less help than the control group suggests that the use of CORT might be beneficial to students studying programming in external mode where access to tutor help is more problematic. The data were also analysed to determine if there were any differences with respect to student achievement between the sub-groups of: previous achievement level; age; computer literacy level; previous programming experience; and gender. The analysis revealed that the CORT students who were either younger, only moderately computer literate, or without any previous programming experience, performed at a lower level than their non-CORT counterparts in reading and comprehending computer programs. This might be because these sub-groups have ill-developed mental models of program execution and therefore have greater difficulty comprehending code. It suggests that such students completed their programs relatively quickly with CORT, with less experimentation, and that this hindered their mental model development. (Contains 25 tables and 6 figures.)

Operational performance in the low-voltage distribution network (LVDN) can be undermined by its inherent unbalances, which may become worse as the penetration of rooftop solar continuously increases. To address this issue, load balancing via phase-reconfiguration devices (PRDs), which can change phase positions of residential customers as required, provides a cost-efficient option. However, most reported approaches to control PRDs require that demands of all residential customers are available, which are not viable for many LVDNs without smart meters or advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) installed. To bridging the gap in this field, this paper proposes a novel method to control PRDs purely based on measurable data from PRDs, and its controller. Based on limited information, sensitivity analysis in the network with PRDs is studied, followed by the optimization model that comprehensively considers operational requirements in the network. Moreover, slack variables are introduced to the model, and penalized in the objective function to assure either a strategy that is secure or with minimized violations can always be provided. The model is a challenging mixed-integer non-convex programming (MINCP) problem, which is reformulated as an efficient solvable mixed-integer second-order cone programming (MISOCP) based on exact reformulations or accurate linear approximations. Simulations based on two modified IEEE systems, and a real system in Australia demonstrate that an efficient strategy can be provided to mitigate unbalances in the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As rooftop solar PVs installed by residential customers penetrate in low voltage distribution network (LVDN), some issues, e.g. over/under voltage and unbalances, which may undermine the network's operational performance, need to be adequately addressed. To mitigate unbalances in LVDN, phase-switching devices (PSDs) and static var compensator (SVC) are two equipment that is cost-effective and efficient. However, most existing research on operating PSDs is based on inflexible heuristic algorithms or without considering the network formulation, which may lead to strategies that violate operational requirements. Moreover, few pieces of literature have been reported on mitigating unbalances in LVDN via SVC and PSDs together. This paper formulates the decision-making process as a mixed-integer non-convex programming (MINCP) problem after developing an SVC model for dispatch purpose. Compared with existing work, the proposed method aims at minimizing current unbalance based on their phasor values and takes the network's operational requirements into account. To efficiently solve the challenging problem, the MINCP is reformulated as a mixed-integer second order-cone programming (MISOCP) problem based on either exact reformulations or accurate approximations, making it possible to employ efficient off-the-shelf solvers. Simulations based on two modified IEEE systems and a practical Australian LVDN demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed method in mitigating unbalances in LVDN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A GPS-denied unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) (Agent B) is localized through inertial navigation system alignment with the aid of a nearby GPS-equipped UAV (Agent A), which broadcasts its position at several time instants. Agent B measures the signals' direction of arrival with respect to Agent B's inertial navigation frame. Semidefinite programming and the orthogonal Procrustes algorithm are employed, and accuracy is improved through maximum likelihood estimation. The method is validated using flight data and simulations. A three-agent extension is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing cost/price ratios in sugarcane production and the pressure to remain internationally competitive have forced Australian sugar mills to try to use their infrastructure more efficiently. Generating rosters for sugarcane harvesters manually is difficult because the mills have a large number of harvesters and tight capacities in the transportation facilities. The Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Sugar Production conducted a participatory research process with five mills in the Australian sugar industry to develop models to optimize harvester rosters. Embedded in the research process and underpinned by action learning was the development of a novel integer-programming model, its validation, and its implementation. The participatory research overcame barriers to implementation of the rosters produced by the model and allowed the five participating mills to realize benefits in terms of more efficient transport operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]