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There is an on-going identifiable paradigm shift in educational practice through the development of 'e-learning' methods and there are profound consequences of this for the way in which education research is carried out. In a previous seminar I have developed a basic SocioCybernetic approach to educational systems that helps explain this shift and I have also looked at the consequence of this changing educational world on epistemology, talking in terms of epistemological anarchy. This seminar will explore how these changes must influence the way in which education research is carried out.

Given that most current education research thinking has its origins in the blackboard and chalk era, we need to look at the effects of an 'e-learning paradigm' on how we do research. Even methodologies that appear to be recent, such as ethnomethodologies, have their origins in the 1960’s and 70’s. Much current epistemological and pedagogical thinking is based upon Bruner’s work from the 1960’s (and maybe Vistkovsky’s from the 1930’s) and this influences the way in which research is conceptualised.

Most aspects of education research are in need of review: research design, data collection (qualitative and quantitative), data modeling and evaluation of educational activities. For example, any attempt to define the way in which an educational program has influenced student knowledge acquisition has, within the SocioCybernetic world, to take into account the influence of knowledge acquisition from ill-defined sources. Similarly it has to take into account the changing structure of student collaboration. At the design level, the researcher has to redefine sampling parameters as student expectations are changing.

Selby is the CERG Research Fellow, and has been since 1999. He is a psychologist with wide teaching and consulting experience both in Australia and in the UK and S.E. Asia. His involvement in education has ranged from teaching in TAFE, through lecturing in various university faculties, to workshops on everything from career development to research methods.

Selby's array of interests include photography, restoring cameras and Chinese brush painting. He is also Webmaster and general factotum for the Akademos Tertiary Education Cooperative (http://www.akademos.org.au).

Active learning techniques, including collaborative programming and problem-solving environments, have been widely adopted by many computer science educators. A related approach is the Triesman model, which was originally developed for the first-year calculus course and involved intensive workshops where students collaborate in small groups to solve problems. The Treisman model has been adopted for computer science courses at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Regression analysis indicates that students who participate in the workshops for the algorithms perform better (0.561 grade points on a 4.0-scale) than those who do not, even after accounting for prior academic performance.

This talk will focus on how to adapt the Triesman techniques to the computer science undergraduate curriculum for student recruitment, retention, and success.

Learning to program is one of the key requirements in computer science education. However, novice programmers often find it a difficult task to master. There probably isn’t any single solution to solve this problem, but it is still important to develop and research new means and techniques to further improve the learning experience and outcome. In this seminar, a visualisation tool (ViLLE) and simulation exercise system (TRAKLA2) will be presented and discussed in terms of the benefits to student learning.

ViLLE, a dynamic program visualisaton tool developed at University of Turku, Finland, is presented. ViLLE is a language-independent visualization tool aiming at providing a more abstract view of programming, and it can be utilized both in lectures and for independent learning. It has a built-in syntax editor, with which the user can add new languages to the tool or modify the syntax of the built-in languages, including e.g. Java, C++ etc. The visualizations can be viewed in any of the (user or pre-) defined languages. To emphasize the language independency, ViLLE has a parallel view in which the execution of a program and the program code itself can be viewed simultaneously in two languages. While the execution progresses, the user can observe program outputs and changes in variable values with possibility to ask pop-up questions from the user with automated assessment capabillities.

TRAKLA2 is a visual algorithm simulation exercise system with resubmission possibilities that has been developed at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. Students simulate how algorithms work on a conceptual level solving exercises using graphical manipulation of visualizations of data structures on the screen. The systems allows the student’s solution to be compared to the correct model solution easily and provides summative feedback to student.