David A. Banks

Collaborative Learning as a Vehicle for Learning about Collaboration

This paper explores the development and delivery of a Masters course titled ‘Collaboration and ECommerce’. The course examines a variety of issues relating to E-Commerce with the major focus being upon collaborative aspects of web-related business activities. The aim of the course is to lead students to engage in actual collaborative processes and so to provide them with practical experience to support the theoretical aspects of the subject. The paper outlines the issues behind the design of the learning structure that was used to promote both intra-group and inter-group collaborative action. Although the course is currently run in face-to-face mode with no web support it had to be designed in such a way that the learning structures and processes would translate to a web-enabled form for future operation.

Reflections on Interpretivist Teaching with Positivist Students

This paper reflects upon the teaching of two final year undergraduate subjects, Information Systems Policy and E Commerce, in a Management Information Systems degree program that is located in a School of Accounting and Information Systems. Both of the subjects were taught from an ‘interpretive’ standpoint, an approach that some students found to be challenging given that they were more familiar with the highly structured and positivist approach used in most of their previous subjects. Student feedback gained from informal conversations with the lecturer, an electronic meeting and through paper questionnaires as part of the normal formal evaluation process, is used to explore some of their reactions to a ‘soft’ approach and to provide a basis for consideration of future delivery patterns for the subjects.

Reflecting on an Adventure-Based Data Communications Assignment: The 'Cryptic Quest'

Introduction This reflective paper was triggered by a conversation with a colleague who currently teaches data communications and networks. The discussion ranged across innovative ways to help students learn what they can perceive as a fairly dry, technical and potentially boring part of the subject area. The author described an assignment he had developed some years ago (around 1987) and some time after the conversation he realised that he had meant to reflect upon and document the design and development work but had never managed to find the time. Even though the paper is based upon work that was carried out almost twenty years ago it is felt that the issues relating to the design and management of adventure style assignments are still valid. This paper is built upon the records of that assignment and around a re-visitation of the literature that originally informed its development. The advent of the Internet raises both opportunities and challenges for the development of a modern incarnation of this assignment. The paper starts by outlining the broad educational influences that informed the author and then outlines the issues that informed the development of the assignment described later in the paper. This is followed by an explanation of the full story (The Cryptic Quest) that formed the theme for the assignment. It then presents some student comments and leads into a reflection on the use of such learning vehicles in general and also identifies opportunities afforded by the Web for the development of a contemporary version of the assignment. The paper closes with some personal views of the potential difficulty of using this type of approach in the prevailing educational environment. The Assignment: Educational Context and Drivers The assignment described in this paper was developed at a UK university for use with a group of fifty, full-time final year BA (Honours) Business Information System undergraduate students who were studying a Data Communications Networking course. Much of the material covered in the course was relatively easy to present in the form of lectures and seminars. The lectures were often interactive with, for example, students being brought physically into play to explore the International Standards Organisation (ISO) communication layers. In this session a number of volunteers came to the front of the lecture theatre and collaboratively transformed a given piece of data in accordance with the ISO protocols as the data travelled along the human network. This type of activity alerted students to my non-standard approach and prepared them for what they initially considered to be a weird assignment. The topic of encryption had previously proved to be somewhat difficult to cover in an interesting and engaging way. Although it was a relatively minor aspect of the overall syllabus it clearly intrigued many students but was typically perceived as being rather complex, dry and mathematical. This perception was aggravated by the topic forming only a small section of a broader subject area that was presented in a traditional lecture format. The author felt that a useful way to learn about this topic would be to provide the students with an opportunity to work individually with an assignment exploring a practical application of codes and ciphers. Although the focus of the activity was to help the students gain an understanding of encryption, an equally important aim was to help them to develop or enhance their individual problem solving skills in a reasonably authentic exercise. The motivation for the learning approach adopted was largely influenced by the work of Bruner (1960), who suggested that gaining an understanding of the basic ideas of a field involves more than simply memorising general principles and should lead to the development of an attitude toward learning and inquiry, toward guessing and hunches, toward the possibility of solving problems on ones own . …