Transcript Diaporama - EducTice

Web Technologies and
Tertiary IT Education: A
Case Study
Yogesh Deshpande
School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics
University og Western Sydney
Emerging Web Technologies, Facing
the Future of Education
Scoping
New Web Technologies?
 HTML, HTTP
 Apache, IIS, …
 perl, Java, JavaScript, ASP (ASP.NET), VBScript, PHP …
 XML, XHTML, CSS, standards, …
 Semantic Web, Linked Data, Web of data,
 wikis, blogs, tweets, YouTube, …
 packages, frameworks, content management systems, …
future of education
 teach Web technologies?
 use Web technologies?
 ICT and non-ICT agendas
 curricular issues
 pedagogy
 assessment practices
 …
A little reflection
 Is our experience worth sharing?
 is it valid for others?
 for new developments?
 for current and future students?
A little reflection (2)
 vast areas
 our own limited environment
 limited, specific target
 undergraduate and graduate students in ICT
 small group of people
 academic bemusement/resistance/ridicule
 “Web is only an example of distributed system”
 “HTML is not even a programming language”
eight propositions
 as approximations of what we have
learnt by doing
and
 hopefully, to generate discussion
a caveat
 the terminology may not be exact
 the statements may be obvious
 they will probably need to be amended
1. Sociology of the Emerging Web
Technologies
 The potential benefits and drawbacks of the emerging
Web technologies are unlikely to become easily
apparent to people and organizations. People bring
different foci, at times radically so, rooted in their
disciplines and roles within organizations, which affect
the take-up of the technologies.
2. Need for Innovative Applications
 Innovative applications exploring the potential benefits
of the new technologies are crucial in persuading
others to adopt or facilitate the adoption of such
technologies. As well, the support has to be generated
from the top level of the organizational hierarchy.
3. Users are ahead of teachers
 In the new technological world, where millions of users
take to some emerging technology, and also desert it,
and where the technologies themselves take time to
mature, adoption by organisations is necessarily going
to lag behind the users.
4. Content creation
 The net generation creates content for itself, for
immediate use, and in small chunks. To take advantage
of their spending time online, in terms of teaching and
learning, the appropriateness of delivery modes and
the size of learning modules delivered are open
questions.
5. ad-hoc initiatives
 In the academic world, it has been generally left to
individuals to ‘pick up’ and ‘learn/master’ new
technologies, techniques and other developments.
(This laissez faire policy is too arbitrary and ad hoc. It is
unlikely to match in speed the way the net generation
picks up the emerging technologies.)
6. Maturity of new Web technologies
 It is an open question as to when and which
technologies should be regarded as sufficiently mature
for their inclusion in appropriate curricula.
7. Student expectations
 Students are likely to expect different ways of content
delivery, in tandem with their own use of technology.
Academic staff will need to be pro-active in using
different technologies for content delivery.
8. Assessment strategies
 Assessments cannot be about rote learning or only
whatever has been covered during the regular teaching
sessions. Students are likely to remain ahead of the
academic staff in using the emerging Web technologies.
New teaching strategies are needed to turn their
collective expertise as users into a systematic body of
knowledge and practice which engage the students.
Partial review of relevant literature
based on 2010 and 2011 conferences
(SIGCSE and ITiCSE)
statistics
 approximately 300-350 full papers
 38 on Web technologies in CS education
 Broad classification in three categories
 tools (9 papers)
 technologies (9 papers)
 curriculeum and pedagogies (20 papers)
tools
 tool creation
 experience in use of tools
Observations
 tools are appropriate for the current environment
 they can be short-lived or lack support
 learning curves impede in quick adoption
 (relevant proposition – 1, 2 ,3 and 5)
technologies
 on new technologies: wikis, blogs, Facebook, YouTube,
Web 2.0, recommender systems, Google technologies
and others that facilitate collaborative work
 observations
 individual experiences with specific focus
 (relevant propositions – 4, 6, 7 and 8)
pedagogy and curricula (20
papers)
 observations
 “anyone with a phd should be able to teach any subject”!
 tools and technologies are helpers, so not in focus
 administrative hurdles in creating new curricula are taken
for granted
 aimed at providing answers to propositions 4, 6, 7 and 8)
 Propositions 1,2 and 3 neglected
Thank you!
 Questions, discussions