Alanah Kazlauskas

Podcasts are not for everyone

Twenty-first century students are expected to utilise emerging technologies such as lecture podcasts as learning tools. This research explored the uptake of podcasts by undergraduate students enrolled in two very different cognitively challenging subjects in the second year of the nursing programme and in the first year of a business programme. Regardless of the semester, the different content being studied and the statistically significant demographic differences between the nursing and business cohorts, striking behavioural similarities emerged. Students from both cohorts in each semester under investigation spent similar amounts of time studying regardless of gender, age, Internet access and time spent on paid work. The patterns of podcast usage by responding nursing and business students were not significantly different. Non-listeners in both cohorts did not differ significantly from podcast users (listeners) either demographically or with regard to personal access to computers, the Internet and MP3/4 players. Non-listeners utilised lecture notes, text resources and the learning management system in a similar way to listeners. The only significant difference was the longer hours spent in paid work by non-listeners. These findings reinforce the emerging concept that podcasts are not embraced by everyone. Despite the flexibility and mobile learning opportunities afforded by podcasts, significant numbers of students prefer to learn in face-to-face environments and by reading and/or listening in set study environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embedding Critical Thinking in IS Curricula

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 problemsolving 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 mini

Digital ecosystems: ICT's contribution to addressing climate change

One of the most pressing challenges facing humankind is climate change, but it is a wicked problem. While the complexity of this problem can be overwhelming there are means through which the problem can be understood and advances made towards a solution. This paper applies a holistic theoretical sense-making framework and an ecosystem approach to research and practice on ICT issues in the climate change problem. It demonstrates how end-user tools and Web 2.0 technologies, which are embedded in digital ecosystems that include the social context, can play a positive role in the global challenges of climate change.

What Were You Thinking? Empowering Tomorrow’s Professionals Today

Abstract As students undertake their tertiary studies and subsequently face the challenges of their increasingly competitive professions, it is essential to recognise the need to take a more active, early, formal and direct approach to the enhancement of their critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and communication skills. This paper reports on a course, Reasoning and Critical Thinking for Information Systems (IS) Professionals, which provides a discipline focus to the development of these skills and forms part of the core curriculum in the Bachelor of Information Systems degree at Australian Catholic University (ACU) National. The mechanisms introduced to engage students actively in the development of their individual metacognitive processes are discussed and conclusions as to the effectiveness of the methods are drawn. The paper goes on to provide a rich description of how the academic team involved in the curriculum development, presentation and assessment have used action research as the means of informing their pedagogical practices. The paper finishes by providing insights into how the skills addressed in this course, as well as the pedagogical practices that have evolved, may be used to inform other academics and courses offered in the degree program.