Nowadays, utility of information and communication technology (ICT) in education is a way to facilitate interaction and accessing information for learning in higher education. However, finding a set of structured e-resources to facilitate learning within specific courses is still a big challenge in most of the institutions and universities. This includes the problems and challenges for the thesis courses in both undergraduate (Bachelor) and graduate (Master) level in Sweden. To overcome or reduce the problems and enhance quality of outcomes in the thesis courses, the department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University has developed a Learning Support System, SciPro (Scientific Process), to support thesis process. This study aims at investigating learners’ perspectives on usefulness of structured e-resources in order to reduce challenges for finding information related to the thesis steps in SciPro. This is done based on an open online survey, carried out in 2012-2013 of students’ perspectives at DSV. The study found the actual problems and hence suggested a model as a way forward to sort the useful e-resources to support reducing the problems in the thesis process.
Many research studies have highlighted the low completion rate and slow progress in PhD education. Universities strive to improve throughput and quality in their PhD education programs. In this study, the perceived problems of PhD education are investigated from PhD students' points of view, and how an Information and Communication Technology Support System (ICTSS) may alleviate these problems. Data were collected through an online open questionnaire sent to the PhD students at the Department of (the institution's name has been removed during the double-blind review) with a 59% response rate. The results revealed a number of problems in the PhD education and highlighted how online technology can support PhD education and facilitate interaction and communication, affect the PhD students' satisfaction, and have positive impacts on PhD students' stress. A system was prototyped, in order to facilitate different types of online interaction through accessing a set of online and structured resources and specific communication channels. Although the number of informants was not large, the result of the study provided some rudimentary ideas that refer to interaction problems and how an online ICTSS may facilitate PhD education by providing distance and collaborative learning, and PhD students' self-managed communication.
Informatics is a relatively young field within science and engineering. Its research and development methodologies build on the scientific and design methodologies in the classical areas, often with new elements to it. We take an in-depth look at one of the less well-understood methodologies in informatics, namely experimentation. What does it mean to do experiments in informatics? Does it make sense to ‘import’ traditional principles of experimentation from classical disciplines into the field of computing and information processing? How should experiments be documented? These are some of the questions that are treated. The report argues for the key role of empirical research and experimentation in contemporary Informatics. Many IT systems, large and small, can only be designed sensibly with the help of experiments. We recommend that professionals and students alike are well-educated in the principles of sound experimentation in Informatics. We also recommend that experimentation protocols are used and standardized as part of the experimental method in Informatics.
One-to-one computing has been proposed as one solution for improving primary school education around the world. Ukombozi School is a public primary school in Mkimbizi village, Tanzania, and the school has performed outstandingly on the district, regional, and national levels. Ukombozi school has 100 XO-1 "children’s laptops", and, in collaboration with a local university, the school is using those computers for teaching pupils basic computer literacy. The school, however, has ambitious plans for the computers. This paper analyses the necessary steps for developing the current research and design collaboration into a fully-fledged living lab, which can be used to studying, further developing, and replicating Ukombozi School’s success.
One of the most debated areas of computer science education is how to arrange programming courses. One of the debates is concerned with the amount of guidance a learning environment should grant to the learner. This research study reports on development and testing of a model where students work on their homework under guidance, facilitated by active student-teacher collaboration, continuous feedback, and student support. While qualitative results, observations, and student feedback about the intervention were exclusively positive, controlled experiment showed no significant advantage over the control group. This paper reports the results of the experiment described above, and suggests ten hypotheses for further research.
One-to-one computing is an active and widely researched topic in educational technology. Its benefits include, for instance, easily updatable material base, anywhere-anytime learning, adaptability, and simulated experiments in science. The use of one-to-one computing in a developing country context has recently become an active research topic. However, the materialization of the educational benefits requires proper contextualization regarding the necessary pedagogical, organizational, institutional, and other types of adaptation. This paper presents preliminary results from an action research study in a primary school in rural Tanzania. In that study, the utilization of one- to-one computing in a combination with modern pedagogical approaches to teach ICT and health care topics was studied.
In the past two decades computers have become a standard educational tool in the industrialized countries. Recently, equipping each student with a personal device (one-to-one computing, OLPC) has been enthusiastically advocated for developing countries, too. However, despite a number of pioneering research studies, broader analyses of pedagogical, technical, and organizational aspects of one-to-one computing in developing countries are largely missing. In this participatory action research in a rural Tanzanian primary school, we identified a number of pedagogical elements that were beneficial for teaching and utilizing ICT in the classroom. We pinpointed exploratory and self-regulated learning, group problem solving, and constructive principles as facilitators of learning within the one-to-one computing paradigm in this context. Our results show that the introduction of children's computers also triggered a number of changes in dynamics both within the school but also outside the school.
It has been shown that deep approaches to learning, intrinsic motivation, and self-regulated learning have strong positive effects on learning. How those pedagogical theories can be integrated in computing curricula is, however, still lacking empirically grounded analyses. This study integrated, in a robotics-based programming class, a method of learning-by-inventing, and studied its qualitative effects on students’ learning through 144 interviews. Five findings were related with learning theories: changes in students’ problem management cycle, problem-rich learning environment, conceptions of the nature of computing, extension of deep and surface approaches to problem solving and management, and the use of robotics to facilitate deep learning strategies. Our analysis suggests that a combination of an open learning environment, robotics as the learning tool, and learning-by-inventing provides a conducive environment for deep learning strategies, intrinsic motivation, and self-regulated learning, which are prerequisite conditions for creativity and inventing.
Programming education is a widely researched and intensely discussed topic. The literature proposes a broad variety of pedagogical viewpoints, practical approaches, learning theories, motivational vehicles, and other elements of the learning situation. However, little effort has been put on understanding cultural and contextual differences in pedagogy of programming. Pedagogical literature shows that educational design should account for differences in the ways of learning and teaching between industrialized and developing countries. However, the nature and implications of those differences are hitherto unclear. Using group interviews and quantitative surveys, we identified several crucial elements for contextualizing programming education. Our results reveal that students are facing many similar challenges to students in the west: they often lack deep level learning skills and problem-solving skills, which are required for learning computer programming, and, secondly, that from the students’ viewpoint the standard learning environment does not offer enough support for gaining the requisite development. With inadequate support students may resort to surface learning and may adopt extrinsic sources of motivation. Learning is also hindered by many contextually unique factors, such as unfamiliar pedagogical approaches, language problems, and cultural differences. Our analysis suggests that challenges can be minimized by increasing the number of practical exercises, by carefully selecting between guided and minimally guided environments, by rigorously monitoring student progress, and by providing students timely help, repetitive exercises, clear guidelines, and emotional support.
This paper focuses on understanding and develop- ing learning environments for computer science education. We present two models that we have successfully used in European and African contexts. The first model, Computer Science Learning Environments (CSLE), presents seven dimensions of computer science courses, which should be considered in learning environment design for computer science. The second model, Investigative Learning Environment (ILE), presents an action plan model, inspired by action research, for combining educational research and computer science teaching. In the empirical section we outline two case studies where these models were used to design and implement computer science learning environments in two different learning contexts. In the first case in University of Helsinki, Finland, we developed and studied a method of learning-by-inventing in a robotics programming course. That course was designed around problem discovery and inventing, and it employed LEGO (R) Mindstorms robots. In the second case in Tumaini University, Tanzania, we designed an environment for studying and improving introductory programming courses. Both models showed to be useful for designing, implementing, developing, and analyzing the courses in both learning contexts.
The link between student engagement and academic performance has been widely examined. However, most of these studies have focused on ascertaining the existence of such a relationship on the summative assessment level. By comparing students’ experience points in an online course and students’ scores on online knowledge surveys (KS), this study examined the relationship between student engagement and performance on online KS on the formative assessment level. Knowledge surveys were developed and formatively administered in four sections of an online Integration of ICT in Education course. Using Moodle Feedback Module, knowledge surveys were designed based on three key elements: learning objectives, the course content, and the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives. Using rated multiple choice KS questions, the correlation between students’ scores on KSs and students’ experience points was calculated using SPSS. The results show that students’ confidence levels in ability to answer KS questions increased in some of the course sections and decreased in others. The student engagement in online course was positively—but weakly—related to student performance on online KS and the strength of this relationship increased as the course unfolded. Our conclusion is that student engagement in online courses would not be an accurate predictor of student performance on online Knowledge surveys right at the beginning of an instructional process.
Inspired by the current scholarship that indicates that, if used well, formative assessment and feedback can advance student’s learning, this paper explores the practices of feedback in formative assessment in Rwandan higher education, specifically at the University of Rwanda. The study used aqualitative approach with the aim of gaining lecturers’ and students’ perspectives on formative assessment and feedback; and exploring different ways formative assessment and feedback were practiced. Using data collected through interviews, student focus group discussions, and document analysis; the paper shows that formative assessment and feedback were understood in the context of binding prescription within the boundaries of limited description in academic regulations. Feedback was in most cases reduced to marks, and lecturers – who portrayed themselves as information providers, mastery checkers, and performance appraisers - were in full charge of all formative assessment efforts. The paper also shows that lack of clarity and feed forward instructionsin too-much-delayed lecturers’ written feedback led students to just receive feedback and not use it to enhance their performance. Building on this study’s findings and on the existing literature, the paper suggests three important moves whereby a collaborative research-based approach that will bring together different stakeholders will help to move away from a single-sided approach to a multifaceted approach in both perception and practice of formative assessment and feedback at the University of Rwanda.
Storytelling is one of the earliest forms of knowledge transfer, and parents often use it for teaching their children values and knowledge. Formal schooling, however, is less inclined to use storytelling as a vehicle for knowledge transfer, and even less as a vehicle for modern self-directed, student-centered, and constructionist pedagogy. Research literature reports experiences on student-centered storytelling in schools, but there is little information about such learning environments using modern information technology. Using a case study approach, we collected qualitative data from a workshop that tested a number of constructionist pedagogical approaches and one-to-one computing technology in a hypercontextualized storytelling workshop. In that workshop, which took place in a Tanzanian primary school, pupils used their XO-1 laptops as digital media tools for expressing their dreams and solutions to overcoming challenges in life. Results of this study suggest that digital storytelling offers additional advantages when compared to traditional storytelling. Designers need to follow six principles for a successful digital storytelling workshop: commitment, contextual grounding, previous exposure to the context, involvement of local experts, atmosphere of trust, and realistic flexible planning.
Although experiments have been a core element of the scientific method since the 1600s, experiments per se only caught philosophers' interest in the 1980s. Since the 1980s dozens of philosophical analyses of experiments have been presented, based mostly on physics and biology. A number of philosophers of science have called for bottom-up, "naturalistic" investigations of experiments in various disciplines, especially fields other than physics. This paper presents an epistemological analysis of experiments in computing fields in terms of epistemological characteristics, research milieux, and epistemological features of results. Our analysis of experiments, based on how the term is operationalized in computer science papers, opens new critical viewpoints to the role of experiments in computing, as well as complementary viewpoints to the concept of experiment in the philosophy of science.
Literature shows that there are a number of different frameworks for managing international development co-operation (IDC) projects. Those frameworks have their own strengths and weaknesses and they vary from being highly abstract to relatively practical. However, none of the frameworks provide help in situations where IT professionals are incapable to identify potential project risks when entering a new project milieu. The situation is common in the context of IDC projects. For this purpose, Kemppainen, Tedre, Parvianen, and Sutinen (2012) designed a taxonomy-based risk identification tool. The tool addresses potential risks by 55 quantified yes/no-questions. The quantification specifies the significance of each issue to project success. The tool is aimed at guiding IT professionals, planners, donors, field staff, and other stakeholders to identify and mitigate potential threats that may materialize in an unfamiliar project context. The tool’s questions were designed based on the literature analysis, their classification into five groups was derived from Tedre et al. (2011), and their taxonomy based scoring was derived from the researchers’ own data. Hence, the tool lacked wider empirical evidence. This study validated the tool based on empirical data of a sample of 83 IT experts and IT department leaders from a number of organizations, institutes, universities and international development co-operation projects in Tanzania. The mode value of the Likert-scale questionnaire answers were used to adjust the question-scoring scheme, and reliability analysis were conducted for testing internal consistency of the question groups’ questions. Systematic reorganization of the questions with reliability analysis and content considerations led to three distinct question groups instead of the five original ones. In addition, two of the original questions were combined together due to their similarity. Hence, the validated risk identification tool contains three question groups, namely; Institutional, Societal, and Technical characteristics, including totally 54 quantified questions. Those three question groups determine the risk level of the prospective project.
Various stakeholders in international development co-operation projects have presented frameworks for managing those projects. Each framework has different strengths and weaknesses, and they vary from highly abstract to relatively practical. However, none of those frameworks pays attention to situations where professionals are unable to identify possible risk sources due to insufficient information about the project milieu. Yet, such situations are common in international development co-operation projects where information technology (IT) is involved, and where IT professionals have to operate in an unfamiliar project milieu. This article presents a risk identification tool that is aimed at assisting IT professionals and organizations to identify sources of challenges in international development co-operation projects, and to design appropriate countermeasures for overcoming risks before the project enters the implementation phase. Our tool does not replace project management frameworks or software, but when utilized appropriately, it guides preparation of IT professionals to face possible threats that originate from an unfamiliar project context, especially in international development co-operation.
Information technology (IT) professionals face markedly different kinds of challenges in developing countries from the ones in developed countries. Based on the research literature and our fourteen years of fieldwork in Iringa, Tanzania, we have identified eight groups of technical characteristics of IT work that significantly affect the work of IT service management professionals in that particular developing country context. Those groups are climate conditions on the site, physical security on the site, characteristics of premises, characteristics of rooms, quality of electricity, local area network, peripherals, and ICT users. Even though the characteristics of IT work in developing countries are a challenge for any IT professional, they all can be overcome with appropriate education and preparation. However, scarcity of capable IT professionals who can effectively manage IT systems is an issue in East Africa. Although the situation is widely acknowledged, there are no reports of educational initiatives to address this issue. We show that without a broad understanding of environmental effects, physical security, power-related issues, and characteristics of premises for ICT equipment, IT professionals cannot maintain ICT services of organizations on a sufficient level. Our identified solutions to practical challenges lead us to conclude that IT service management education must include some topics from the fields of electrical engineering and civil engineering in the IT curriculum. Those topics prepare students to overcome context-specific challenges in their future working milieu. Besides technical topics, organizational support for IT work plays a central role in the self-sustainability of ICT services. Hence, IT professionals should be able to advocate other members of an organization. Advocacy work demands good management and communication skills and strong commitment to IT professionalism. Education for IT service management has to recognize these issues and emphasis, in its curriculum design, the role of management and leadership skills in a culturally sensitive way.
The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in international development co-operation (IDC) is tightly linked with international political agenda. Currently, international development co-operation emphasizes three concepts: sustainable development, international human rights, and millennium development goals. This article presents to IT professionals six non-technical aspects for improving ICT oriented IDC projects. Firstly, those ICT projects should be aligned with internationally agreed political agenda. Secondly, they should cohere with internationally agreed development goals. Thirdly, their design should recognize the political and legal context of the host country. Fourthly, their design and implementation have to follow donor guidelines derived from commonly agreed good practices of IDC project management and design---even when the contextual design tools of ICT for development (ICT4D) research are of limited use with the structured design approaches of IDC. Fifthly, ICT oriented IDC projects should have appropriate indicators for their formative and summative evaluation. Sixthly, IT professionals should stay up-to-date with constantly developing ICT and evolving IDC. The presented non-technical aspects of IDC projects are derived from the central concepts and consensuses of IDC as well as from an analysis of the relevant literature, and the six aspects are reflected on our fourteen years of field work in IDC projects in the least developed countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that IT professionals are more competent for IDC projects when their technical expertise is complemented with the presented aspects.
Technology transfer from developed countries to developing ones is not a straightforward process. This is due to the expertise required for utilizing technology. Literature shows that education and transfer of expertise are necessary for technology transfer, but implementation of locally relevant education is a demanding process. Development of IT students’ expertise requires adequate ICT facilities, but the effects of organizational support, human capacity, and the relevance of curriculum to the local context are crucial factors in IT service management education. This paper is based on fourteen years of experience in a Tanzanian university, and it shows the importance of the topics above for IT education in general. This paper also presents a two-tier approach to education of IT service management professionals: In that approach specific contextual factors of IT education complement generic perspectives of IT support.
Social media has in the recent years become a part of people’s daily lives, and with it has come a new way to communicate and interact. The functions of social media in formal and non-formal learning are well studied, but much less attention has been paid to their role in informal learning. In South Africa the dominant social networking service is Facebook, which crosses many digital divides in the country. This study explored, through semi-structured interviews, the use patterns of Facebook among young, low-educated South Africans adults, and analyzed, using grounded theory, the potential of those use patterns for informal learning. The results show that the social interactions on Facebook support informal learning and personal development. Facebook puts the individual and the social interactions in focus without the constraints of time, objectives, or curricula. Young adults are daily exposed to various kind of information on Facebook, while maintaining control over their own Facebook activities. Self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation promote continuous discovery of new knowledge, yet sometimes the educational benefits are undermined by a lack of critical attitude towards information in social networks.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is increasingly used in Tanzanian education. Knowing how to operate ICT alone is incomplete without knowing how to use it as a tool for organization, communication, research, and problem-solving. In recognition of this challenge, information literacy (IL) has been identified as a key attribute to students as they progress through their learning paths. Based on a mixed methods strategy, using questionnaires and focus group discussions, this study measured the level of IL skills among University of Dar es Salaam’s (UDSM) postgraduate students, to gain insights into the students’ perceptions and experiences with information problems. A total of 102 students from four institutions answered the online questionnaire and 22 students participated in six focus group discussions. The questionnaire scores of the students were poor in the majority of IL categories, suggesting ineffectiveness of the current IL training in imparting IL knowledge and skills. The study ends by discussing recommendations to improve current IL practices at the university.
This report presents the findings, conclusions and recommendations of an Evaluation of Swedish government research cooperation with Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique. The purpose of this evaluation is to analyse, assess, generate knowledge, and provide lessons from the Swedish government funded research cooperation with Mozambique, with a main focus on the period 2011-2016. The evaluation results will also inform the design and improvement of performance of future support to Mozambique 2017-2022.
On the policy level, Tanzania has strongly committed to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) supported education on all levels of education. National policy documents give ICT a high priority in development of the country's educational system. Curricula have been revamped to accommodate for increased role of ICT in the society and education. Also educational institutions have explicated high expectations of ICT in the process of "massification of education." Several research studies, however, have showed little change in the classrooms. Surveys and case studies have showed that on the way from policy documents to strategy level and implementation level, something gets missing. The lack of ICT in education is clear in primary and secondary school, which is unsurprising, given that majority of schools also lack electricity and basic facilities, including proper classrooms, tables, and books. This study sets out to investigate, using thematic interviews of secondary school teachers in Tanzania, what processes and support structures do teachers consider to be lacking in terms of ICT supported education. Informants from teacher training colleges were also involved in order to bring out viewpoints from teacher training. The results confirmed a large number of earlier results, divided to six categories: school policy, implementation and administration on the school level, access to ICT, leadership and management, school culture, and teacher training. A number of new factors were also pinpointed: teachers' lack of awareness of government policies and documentation on several levels, lack of pedagogical readiness for e-learning and blended learning, and cultural concerns. Concerning what should come first, there was a chicken-and-egg-problem: it makes little sense to invest in rapidly aging ICT infrastructure and facilities if there is no human capacity to make use of those investments, and it makes little sense to invest in human capacity if the- e is no technological infrastructure to put quickly aging technical know-how into immediate use.
Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) is in the process of modernising its teaching and learning approaches. As one of the pedagogical reform projects, student-centred learning (SCL) in combination with Web 2.0 tools was introduced as a pilot in the course ‘ICT in Environmental Education’ in the Faculty of Education. This study explored—using action research strategy—to what extent the new pedagogical approach contributed to students’ competency development. Twenty-nine students were involved in the course. Eight semi-structured interviews with students were combined with sixteen classroom observations to see how students used the Learning Management System (LMS) and Web 2.0 tools over eight weeks. Content analysis was used for interviews and information produced by students. The results showed that collaboratively e-learning supported the development of students’ information management and problem-solving skills and their use of metacognitive strategies for self-regulated learning. Information and Communication Technology (ICT)–supported, problem-based learning contributed to greater intrinsic motivation. However, not all students were ready to adopt an active role. At the start, they saw teaching as a one-way knowledge transfer. This article recommends that e-learning initiatives in Mozambique always go together with an ICT-based literacy course and training in 21st-century learning skills.
E-learning has become one of the primary ways of delivering education around the globe. In Somalia, which is a country torn within and from the global community by a prolonged civil war, University of Hargeisa has in collaboration with Dalarna University in Sweden adopted, for the first time, e-learning. This study explores barriers and facilitators to e-learning usage, experienced by students in Somalia’s higher education, using the University of Hargeisa as case study. Interviews were conducted with students to explore how University of Hargeisa’s novice users perceived elearning, and what factors positively and negatively affected their e-learning experiences. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model was used as a framework for interpreting the results. The findings show that, in general, the students have a very positive attitude towards e-learning, and they perceived that e-learning enhanced their educational experience. The communication aspect was found to be especially important for Somali students, as it facilitated a feeling of belonging to the global community of students and scholars and alleviated the war-torn country’s isolation. However, some socio-cultural aspects of students’ communities negatively affected their e-learning experience. This study ends with recommendations based on the empirical findings to promote the use and enhance the experience of e-learning in post conflict Somali educational institutions.
In the past two decades computers have become a standard educational tool in the industrialized countries. Recently, equipping each student with a personal device (one- to-one computing, OLPC) has been enthusiastically advocated for developing countries, too. However, despite a number of pioneering research studies, broader analyses of pedagogical, technical, and organizational aspects of one-to-one computing in developing countries are largely missing. In this participatory action research in a rural Tanzanian primary school, we identified a number of pedagogical elements that were beneficial for teaching and utilizing ICT in the classroom. We pinpointed exploratory and self-regulated learning, group problem solving, and constructive principles as facilitators of learning within the one-to-one computing paradigm in this context. Our results show that the introduction of children’s computers also triggered a number of changes in dynamics both within the school but also outside the school.
Aim: Learning analytics (LA) is an emerging discipline that aims at analyzing students' online data in order to improve the learning process and optimize learning environments. It has yet un-explored potential in the field of medical education, which can be particularly helpful in the early prediction and identification of under-achieving students. The aim of this study was to identify quantitative markers collected from students' online activities that may correlate with students' final performance and to investigate the possibility of predicting the potential risk of a student failing or dropping out of a course.Methods: This study included 133 students enrolled in a blended medical course where they were free to use the learning management system at their will. We extracted their online activity data using database queries and Moodle plugins. Data included logins, views, forums, time, formative assessment, and communications at different points of time. Five engagement indicators were also calculated which would reflect self-regulation and engagement. Students who scored below 5% over the passing mark were considered to be potentially at risk of under-achieving.Results: At the end of the course, we were able to predict the final grade with 63.5% accuracy, and identify 53.9% of at-risk students. Using a binary logistic model improved prediction to 80.8%. Using data recorded until the mid-course, prediction accuracy was 42.3%. The most important predictors were factors reflecting engagement of the students and the consistency of using the online resources.Conclusions: The analysis of students' online activities in a blended medical education course by means of LA techniques can help early predict underachieving students, and can be used as an early warning sign for timely intervention.
The utilization of one-to-one computing (each students is equipped with a personal device) has slowly started to become available into educational contexts in developing countries. One crucial challenge in relation to the understanding and developing of one-to-one computing related learning and teaching practices in developing educational contexts is the lack of context-situated educational research on the topic. This study participated in addressing the lacks in educational research by exploring the pedagogical strategies utilized in three rural schools in Colombia. The results consist of rich descriptions of teachers’ pedagogical approaches. The results show high empowerment in teachers’ efforts in developing and contextualizing one-to-one related pedagogical approaches into their teaching. Many of the teachers’ approaches were found to be well aligned with a number of constructivist and student-centered pedagogical approaches. This study adds important new educational results to the ongoing scientific discussion about education with one-to- one computing.
A number of theoretical and technical innovations in the 1930s and 1940s led to a new era of computing, and computing started to develop as an independent academic discipline. Some pioneers of computing emphasized the theoretical elements of science, advocating a mathematical view of computing as a discipline. Others distanced computing from natural sciences and championed for academic legitimacy of sciences of the artificial. At the time when experimental computer science debates emerged, many meta-studies compared research in computing with natural sciences and engineering, condemning computing as methodologically deficient. But in the new century, the success of computing in many scientific applications made computing, in the minds of many, a "paradigm" for other sciences: Computing can learn from nature, or it might be the best tool for studying natural phenomena, or it might actually be what nature does. This talk describes the journey of computing from a nascent young field struggling for legitimacy to the views that computing might not be only "a" science but "the" science.
A keynote talk given at European Computer Science Summit 2012, Workshop on the Role and Relevance of Experimentation in Informatics
All major computing curricula recommendations mention methodological skills and knowledge as an important learning objective in undergraduate and graduate education. None of those curricula recommendations, however, include a meth- odology course for students. One reason for that lack might be the stunning diversity of computing fields and the unique methods each branch of computing uses in their research. A methodology course in computing has to make a choice be- tween three options: a narrow but deep specialization in some techniques and methods, a broad but superficial covering of a large number of methods, and a higher-level view on the principles of methodology and research design. This paper adopts the high-level approach, and presents a course description for a methodology course that aims at providing students understanding of how the elements of a research study link together.
A panel talk given at European Computer Science Summit 2012.
The identity of computing has been fiercely debated throughout its short history. Why is it still so hard to define computing as an academic discipline? Is computing a scientific, mathematical, or engineering discipline? By describing the mathematical, engineering, and scientific traditions of computing, The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline presents a rich picture of computing from the viewpoints of the field’s champions. The book helps readers understand the debates about computing as a discipline. It explains the context of computing’s central debates and portrays a broad perspective of the discipline. The book first looks at computing as a formal, theoretical discipline that is in many ways similar to mathematics, yet different in crucial ways. It traces a number of discussions about the theoretical nature of computing from the field’s intellectual origins in mathematical logic to modern views of the role of theory in computing. The book then explores the debates about computing as an engineering discipline, from the central technical innovations to the birth of the modern technical paradigm of computing to computing’s arrival as a new technical profession to software engineering gradually becoming an academic discipline. It presents arguments for and against the view of computing as engineering within the context of software production and analyzes the clash between the theoretical and practical mindsets. The book concludes with the view of computing as a science in its own right—not just as a tool for other sciences. It covers the early identity debates of computing, various views of computing as a science, and some famous characterizations of the discipline. It also addresses the experimental computer science debate, the view of computing as a natural science, and the algorithmization of sciences.
Research methodology is a quintessential component of science, but methods differ greatly between sciences. In computing, methods are borrowed from many fields, which causes difficulties to methodology education in computing. In our methodology courses in computing, we have observed a number of core and threshold concepts that affect students’ success. This essay describes a work in progress towards under- standing those core and threshold concepts in methodology education in computing, classified along two dimensions. We classify methodological concepts in terms of standard elements of research design in students’ projects in computing, and in terms of their centrality and difficulty. We present examples of three types of troublesome knowledge concerning methodology: the strangeness and complexity of methodological concepts, misimpressions from everyday experience, and reasonable but mistaken expectations.
Tens of tons of mobile phone batteries and other mobile technology are imported in Tanzania every year. It is, however, still unclear what happens to mobile devices in the end of their life cycle. This study combined qualitative and quantitative methods to explore what happens to mobile batteries after their useful lifespan. The study found that one third of the respondents threw away their used mobile phone batteries, while most other respondents re-used batteries or kept them at home. There was very little indication of recycling activities, and knowledge about used mobile device recollection was uncommon. This study found little or no connection between environmental awareness and age, education, gender, or other demographic variables: habits of waste disposal remained the same across demographics.
Following a number of technological and theoretical breakthroughs in the 1930s, researchers in the nascent field of automatic computing started to develop a disciplinary identity independent from computing's progenitor fields, mainly electrical engineering and mathematical logic. As the technology matured in the next four decades, computing emerged as a field of great value to all of science and engineering. Computing's identity as an academic discipline was the subject of many spirited debates about areas of study, methods, curricula, and relations with other fields. Debates over the name of the field and its relations with older academic departments occupied many hours and journal pages. Yet, over time computing revolutionized practices, then principles, of science and engineering. Almost every field - not just science and engineering, but also humanities - embraced computing and developed its own computational branch. Computing triumphed over all the doubts and became the most important player in science today.
Computational thinking (CT) is a popular phrase that refers to a collection of computational ideas and habits of mind that people in computing disciplines acquire through their work in designing programs, software, simulations, and computations performed by machinery. Recently a computational thinking for K–12 movement has spawned initiatives across the education sector, and educational reforms are under way in many countries. However, modern CT initiatives should be well aware of the broad and deep history of computational thinking, or risk repeating already refuted claims, past mistakes, and already solved problems, or losing some of the richest and most ambitious ideas in CT. This paper presents an overview of three important historical currents from which CT has developed: evolution of computing’s disciplinary ways of thinking and practicing, educational research and efforts in computing, and emergence of computational science and digitalization of society. The paper examines a number of threats to CT initiatives: lack of ambition, dogmatism, knowing versus doing, exaggerated claims, narrow views of computing, overemphasis on formulation, and lost sight of computational models.
In many research fields---notably social sciences but also in those fields where design, experiment-based science, and social sciences are mixed---researchers must often describe their epistemological and ontological commitments in research reports. The research literature describes those commitments in various ways, often grouped under research paradigms such as positivism, post-positivism, and constructivism, and described as "world views." This paper presents the bare bones of the ontological and epistemological questions in scientific practice. Ontologically speaking, subject matters can be mind-dependent or mind-independent. Epistemologically speaking, elements of research may be more or less open to interpretation. This paper introduces a simplified approach to standard research terminology for computing and engineering students by offering a rough-and-ready way for resolving ontological and epistemological questions.
It has been shown that national, regional, and local needs must be taken into account in successful IT (information technology) education. Educational programs need to be contextualized to utilize particular strengths of their context of deployment, and they need to meet particular educational, social, and workforce strategic objectives. Based on those premises, Tumaini University in Iringa, Tanzania, started a contextualized IT program in 2007. To date, two cohorts of students have graduated, and the program has somewhat stabilized. This joint paper reports participant observation over a time-span of four and a half years, as analyzed by the IT program’s four previous heads of department, ICT director of the college, and the college’s director for research and postgraduate studies. The paper identifies 8 major success factors and 40 SWOT analysis items for IT education development. Our analysis makes 18 pedagogical, administrative, curricular, technical, sociocultural, and financial recommendations for development of IT education in the Tanzanian context.
Experiments play a central role in science. The role of experiments in computing is, however, unclear. Questions about the relevance of experiments in computing attracted little attention until the 1980s. As the discipline then saw a push towards experimental computer science, a variety of technically, theoretically, and empirically oriented views on experiments emerged. As a consequence of those debates, today's computing fields use experiments and experiment terminology in a variety of ways. This paper analyzes experimentation debates in computing. It presents five ways in which debaters have conceptualized experiments in computing: feasibility experiment, trial experiment, field experiment, comparison experiment, and controlled experiment. This paper has three aims: to clarify experiment terminology in computing; to contribute to disciplinary self-understanding of computing; and, due to computing's centrality in other fields, to promote understanding of experiments in modern science in general.
Methodology education is one of the less studied and discussed areas of computing education. Underplaying methodological education starts from computing curricula, which discuss methodology to different degrees, depending on the branch of computing. In computer science education research, programming courses have been analyzed through and through, but methodology courses in computing are largely devoid of course descriptions, analytic studies, and experimental studies. This paper presents the learning objectives, contents, and arrangements for a fully online graduate level course on methodology and research design in computing. The course was run twice in a relatively large school of computing (5700 students) and it included students from a neighboring institution of the same size. Students' (N=136) learning was analyzed from multiple viewpoints. Their final work was analyzed qualitatively by course facilitators as well as scored on a 90-point scale. Their coursework was qualitatively reviewed and graded by their peers and facilitators. The effect of students' learning approaches to course results was analyzed using Biggs' R-SPQ-2F questionnaire. Student feedback was collected using a slightly modified course feedback questionnaire of the university. This paper presents the course arrangements, course results, and analysis of students' learning.
The proliferation of information and communication technology has brought up a wide variety of ethical questions that have not before been a concern in Tanzania. When the possibilities of technology are new, one rarely even notices the deep ethical questions arising from its use or misuse. In the popular media the typical ethical questions are concerned with criminal uses of technology, or with immediately perceivable surface phenomena, such as spread of offensive or illegal material. ICT ethics, however, is a much broader topic, and ICT professionals must have a good understanding of the issues involved as well as the practical implications of those issues. This paper discusses from a Tanzanian viewpoint, firstly, the central questions of ethics that ICT professionals must be aware of. Secondly, this paper presents the pedagogical vehicles for educating Tanzanian students about those questions. Thirdly, this paper presents the course design and content for an e-learning course that was designed to bring the abstract ethical questions into life in a Tanzanian e-learning course.