stoktu.pdf

Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction

This paper presents work-in progress on the development of a didactic model aimed at improving the quality of design through the use of metadata, and its introduction into an architectural BSc curriculum. This work forms part of an educational project, named "InfoBase: a multimedia learning environment to support group work and discourse," which aims to employ ICT means to support educational processes in which students are encouraged to learn from one another and work together, at their own initiative. The paper is conceived as a 'road' paper, describing our system-theoretic considerations that form the basis for the planning of InfoBase, the didactics and the KeySet tool which we employed in order to make a living InfoBase from an, in principle, dead database and the modifications we have made after a first evaluation of our ideas and their implementation.

2005

We present the results from the evaluation of the use of KeySet in the architectural BSc curriculum at Delft University of Technology. KeySet is a metadata system that provides data with a unique key consisting of a combination of keywords according to four dimensions. These dimensions constitute the qualities that data possess at different levels. In KeySet, assigning keywords to data is considered a form of claiming these qualities that the data possess.

Metadata derive their action from their association to data and from the relationship they maintain with this data. An interpretation of this action is that the metadata lays claim to the data collection to which it is associated, where the claim is successful if the data collection gains quality as a result of it. We assume that the design process manifests itself in this way: the designer lays claim to data in such a way that this data gains quality. Claims form part of a complex adaptive system in which agreement on the quality of claims is achieved through correspondence. Thus, qualities are defined within the social processes in the community that the designer operates in. At the same time, these qualities also influence the social processes. We distinguish four dimensions these qualities belong to: there are constructive, relational, objective and subjective quality claims. By teaching students how to express and utilise these qualities in their communication with peers, they can learn to become more effective in their use of information from various sources to support such communication. In this paper, we present intermediate results from an educational project that embeds a methodology for adding, utilising and managing metadata within an educational path with increasing responsibility for the student. We exemplify this implementation in a design analysis application that forms part of a design studio. 1 The InfoBase project " InfoBase: a multimedia learning environment to support group work and discourse " is an active, university-funded, educational project that aims to employ ICT means to support educational processes in which students are encouraged to learn from one another and work together, at their own initiative [INF 03; STO 02]. We distinguish four main activities necessary within this project. These are: • the expression of a didactic concept and its translation into learning processes and educational activities; • the design and development of a multimedia learning environment to support these processes and activities; • the embedding of these processes and activities in the educational program; and • the evaluation of this embedding towards the future development of the educational process.

2002

This paper presents work in-progress on the development of a didactic model aimed at improving the quality of design through the use of metadata, and its introduction into an architectural BSc curriculum. The paper is conceived as a 'road' paper, describing our system-theoretic considerations that form the basis for the planning of the InfoBase system, the didactics and the KeySet tool which we employed in order to make a living InfoBase from an, in principle, dead database and the modifications we have made after extensive scales evaluation of our ideas and their implementation. Particularly this paper focuses on the conceptual, technical, didactic and strategic aspects of KeySet. KeySet is a metadata system that serves to supply a design product (e.g., model, image, text, picture, animation) with a unique key consisting of four or more keywords. Conceptually, KeySet defines four dimensions corresponding to which keywords are assigned as metadata to a design product. Technically, KeySet encompasses an entry form and a search tool. The entry form is used to compose the key. With the aid of the search tool, all entered keywords and combinations of keywords can be retrieved in different ways for adaptation or reuse. Didactically, KeySet pushes students to deal with the paradox that a database is losing informative quality when it is cleared into a neat one. They learn that a certain measure of chaos lubricates the exchange of information and that, to be informative, a database has to cherish the differences that arise from the same assignment students get. Strategically, KeySet is a kind of discourse browser. KeySet encourages students to learn from one another and work together as young professionals by providing them the opportunity to compare their work and design solutions directly.

This study investigates how a shared workspace and digital repository might help student teams share information and resources while learning to design. An open-source groupware product called TikiWiki was configured so that teams could structure their design resources using wiki pages (like web pages) and share them using two search strategies -browsing the wiki pages or using keywords. The results showed that the structuring of information supported learning and that teams preferred to search the wiki structures rather than use keywords. The discussion focuses on students' search strategies and ways that metadata that might improve resource sharing across teams.

2002

 One of the defining principles of the web is that it should provide all people, regardless of physical or technological readiness, with access to information. This principle encouraged us to design hypermedia systems for some subjects of our areas at a Technical School of Computer Science, to try to introduce them to the web as an additional educative resource. The report try to share with other colleagues the steps we followed at the design time focusing not only in technological aspects that made the Web site became a better-looking place but also in other features such as: quality, disabled users, privacy and lawfulness which we were obliged to take into account with he aim of building a robust web-based educational environment to support knowledge-building activities underneath.

2013

1999

The actual research in educational software involves, in engineering, multidisciplinary teams. These teams create common languages in order to obtain products that can solve the problems that the teams are trying to solve. In this work we present developments we are using in our University and the things that these developments have solved. Our work is based on our and other experiences in the design of software for education. Software should solve problems that normally do not appear in the creation on enterprise, business or industrial software. This paper proposes a methodology and a tool for work. The development proposed and its theory permit creation of multimedia/hypermedia software to work in an independent or in a web based environment. Their theory completes a way to coordinate the different persons involved in the real development of that type of software.