Pekka Makkonen

Applying constructivist approach to educational business games: Case REALGAME

Business organizations and their employees face ever-increasing complexity and accelerating changes. This brings along the need for training models that can transmit knowledge and skills needed in this kind of environment. Business process understanding is especially required. This article evaluates business games in the light of constructivism, a view of learning emphasizing the need to anchor training to everyday activities and concrete contexts, and introduces a new computer-based business game. The purpose of this construction is to give the business game participants a realistic view of business processes and thus enhance participant business process perception. The primary aim of the construction is to present business processes to game participants by providing a natural representation of the real world and a case-based learning environment that fosters reflective practice. Although this article does not explicitly describe a geographically distributed game case, it introduces a game construction based on Internet transmission protocol that can also be used in a distributed manner. But as such, the article argues for the use of techniques that support continuously processed and Internet-based gaming simulations.

Teaching knowledge management by combining wikis and screen capture videos

Purpose – This paper aims to report on the design and creation of a knowledge management course aimed at facilitating student creation and use of social interactive learning tools for enhanced learning.Design/methodology/approach – The era of social media and web 2.0 has enabled a bottom‐up collaborative approach and new ways to publish work on the web, promoted by tools such as YouTube video service. In this spirit a knowledge management course was designed aiming to facilitate university students to compose videos on different difficult concepts in the theory part of the course by searching for explanations on the web and by creating a Windows Media Player video focusing on the self‐defined problems. The videos created by the students were published on a wiki (Wetpaint) and the students were encouraged to actively share knowledge and learn from one another by familiarising themselves with the videos of the other students. In order to utilise cognitive and social constructivism, as well as problem‐based ...

Does collaborative hypertext support better engagement in learning of the basics in informatics

Hypertext is a powerful cognitive tool supporting knowledge construction. We organized two courses about the basics in informatics using collaborative hypertext (experimental groups) based on the hyperbooks built by the students participating in the courses. Simultaneously, we ran two courses without collaborative hypertext (control groups). The study found that collaborative hypertext affects motivation equally regarding most themes of the basics in informatics.The result reflects the need for traditional uncomputerized learning methods in the basics of informatics or the need to concentrate on improving the truthfulness of hypertext-based learning. However, some students may benefit from collaborative hypertext under all circumstances.

Social media adoption in higher education: a case study involving IT/IS students

This paper discusses the adoption and use of social media in Higher Education (HE). The aim of the research reported in this paper was to identify the main factors and problem areas in the adoption and use of social media in HE. Our study included a survey involving students of Information Technology and Information Systems in Greece and in Finland. In order to verify the findings from the survey, a follow-up survey was also undertaken. The unified technology adoption approach was identified to be a suitable underlying theory for this study. The analysis of viewpoints of students was needed in order to understand converging and diverging viewpoints. The results showed that infrastructure is the most important issue in the planning of learning/teaching activities based on social media, followed by the role of social influence. Based on the analysis, guidelines for planning social-media-based learning activities are proposed. Indications of further work complete the paper.

Do Videowikis on the Web Support Better (Constructivist) Learning in the Basics of Information Systems Science

This paper describes the combination of a wiki and screen capture videos as a complementary addition to conventional lectures in an information management and information systems development course. Our basis was collaborative problem-based learning with the problems defined by students. The idea was that students were expected to find concepts or issues from four lecture themes which are not well-defined or clarified for them. The students worked in small groups of two or three students or they completed the coursework individually. First, the students selected the theme which was most unclear for them. Second, the students selected the problematic things from this area and created the presentations associated with these issues. Our intention was that in this way we could run collaborative learning under the principles of the Jigsaw method. In our variant of this technique the students create presentations on different themes and the students teach each other by using these video presentations. The study found that videowiki-based coursework affects both external and internal motivation equally in most cases. This reflects that from the perspective of constructivism the videowiki-based assignment is equally effective compared to learning without this setting. However, the development of knowledge concerning different course themes was positive in group of students who completed this videowiki assignment and the females benefited slightly more from this coursework.