Tag Archives: Research

Research related to my PhD.

Thesis Submission and Acknowledgements

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Today I submitted my PhD thesis for examination. The accomplishment won’t sink in until a few more days, but I feel good about it nontheless. It has taken me close to 4 years to complete, which breaks down to about three and a half years of research and development, plus six months of thesis writing. I have produced a thesis dissertation, two journal papers, a book chapter, six conference papers, and several thousand lines of code.

The thesis dissertation marks the end of a long and eventful journey for which there are many people that I would like to acknowledge for their support along the way. Above all I would like to acknowledge the tremendous sacrifices that my parents made to ensure that I had an excellent education. For this and much more, I am forever in their debt. It is to them that I dedicate this dissertation.

I am indebted to Rafael Calvo, my supervisor, for guidance on this research topic, and on research and life in general. Thank you also for ensuring my continuous funding for the first three years of my studies. I am also grateful to Lina Markauskaite from the CoCo Lab at the Faculty of Education for providing sage advice on the design and analysis of the survey-based questionnaires used to collect data for this dissertation. Thank you both.

I am very grateful to Ron Johnston and John Currie for allowing me to trial Dotfolio within their course ENGG1803 Professional Practice. Without their support I would not have had the opportunity to evaluate my software within the largest engineering course at the University of Sydney. Thank you to all the students in ENGG1803 who voluntarily and anonymously evaluated the software.

This research also benefited tremendously from the many friends at the University of Sydney. Special thanks to Juan Jos’e Garcia Adeva, Ernie Ghiglione, David Peterson, Adam Ullman, Saul Carroll, Mark Gordon, and Cibby Pulikkaseril for countless hours spent discussing fruitful ideas over cups of coffee at the campus caf’e and schooners of beer at the Rose. Thanks also goes to Aiman Turani, Daniel Zhang, Sabrina Zhang, and Sergio Freschi from the Web Engineering Group (WEG) for contributing valuable ideas and discussion in our WEG meetings.

I would also like to acknowledge and thank the entire OpenACS developer community. Their feedback and advice has been instrumental in shaping the software for this project.

Finally, I would like to thank my partner Kim Tran for her endless love and encouragement throughout this entire journey. Without whom I would have struggled to find the inspiration and motivation needed to complete this dissertation.

Remember to backup your thesis!

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I am at the stage where I am proof-reading and making minor revisions to my phd thesis. I have also submitted my thesis to my supervisor for feedback and criticism. This means at least one more round of changes after receiving the thesis back from my supervisor, presumably with red ink all over it!

At this point I have become obsessed with backups. I would hate for my thesis to be lost due to hard disk failure, etc. Don’t laugh, it has happened twice to people in my research group.

I am thankful to have used latex for my thesis, as it saves the content in a text file. This saves you from worrying about corrupted binary files if you are foolish enough to write your thesis using MS Word. My thesis writing environment comprises of TexShop (sometimes TextMate) in conjunction with BibDesk (bibliography manager) on OS X. I also use OmniGraffle for drawing my diagrams. These are some of the most productive tools I’ve used for generating my thesis.

Another advantage for using latex is that you use any text editor to edit the content for years to come, and you can also use a version control system – such as CVS or Subversion – to track changes. Using a version control system is also useful for working on your thesis on different computers. This kind of acts as a distributed backup strategy, as I now have checked out working directories on three computers, and the main repository residing on a server is backed up on to tape. Furthermore, I use StrongSpace for additional rsync backups of my thesis and all supporting files.

Spending time and money on a bulletproof backup strategy for your thesis is highly recommended. Otherwise if your computer dies and you weren’t backing up, then you have pretty much wasted the last three or four years of your life doing a PhD.

Light at the end of the tunnel

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Finally, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with my thesis. It has taken close to 6 months to write my phd thesis. Which works out to be about one chapter per month. For those that are doing a phd I would recommend that you start writing your thesis as early as possible! It will save so many headaches later on. It also helps to publish a lot early on in your candidature too.

I have a complete draft now and will work towards cutting the fat and refining each chapter over a number of iterations. I believe I am still on track to submitting my thesis by the end of January or early February. It all depends on when my superviser is able to review it and provide feedback. After which further modifications will need to be applied.

It has been a long and painful journey, much like conquering your Mt Everest of challenges. But when I get to the top of my Mt Everest I can finally look back at what I’ve managed to accomplish in the last four years, and find satisfaction in all the experiences that I’ve had along the way.

Factor Analysis with SPSS

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I just completed a factor analysis with SPSS using this guide. The factor analysis was conducted on a survey that was completed by first year engineering students that completed a semester using Dotfolio. The analysis was roughly done, and I’m not sure if I did it right as I had extracted 10 factors, when really I was looking for something closer to 3 or 4. In fact if I use the scree plot I can reduce it to 4 factors, however if I select initial eigenvalues that have a total greater than 1, then I end up with 10 factors.

Nevertheless, on preliminary inspection it appears that one factor is “Interest in a topic” and another factor is “Taking a shallow approach to learning”, and a third is “E-Portfolios are too much work”. I haven’t interpreted the remaining factors just yet. However, what I am interested in finding out is whether or not students that take a shallow approach to learning perceive e-portfolios to be a useful tool in their learning experience. I suspect that they don’t, which is a good thing, because prior research suggests that e-portfolios encourage deeper learning, which may indicate why they require a lot of work to maintain. Which also appears to be a factor as to why students do not wish to use e-portfolios in other engineering units of study. Anyway the factor analysis was kind of cool, and the results look promising. Just as well, because I needed the factor analysis to complete the last chapter of my thesis.

I can see now how businesses would employ such techniques for market intelligence. I guess those pesky marketers that phone you up during dinner asking you to participate in a survey would run a factor analysis on the responses, compile everything into a report and sell them for a lot of money to large corporations with big marketing budgets.

E-Portfolios and Blogs: Online Tools for Giving Young Engineers a Voice

Abstract: Weblogs or blogs, as they are referred to by the Internet savvy, are gaining popularity as a medium for publishing content on the Web. They allow the author to voice their own opinion or ideas, and have the potential to reach a massive audience via the Web. On the other hand, e-portfolios are gaining recognition as a personal learning and development tool, where users can learn through reflection, and are able to showcase their work to demonstrate skills, competencies and capabilities. This paper presents an e-learning system that couples a blog with a learning e-portfolio. The system is called dotFOLIO and is currently being trialled in a first year engineering course taught at the University of Sydney. An evaluation of the system was conducted through a survey to gather the students’ initial perceptions of reflective learning and of using dotFOLIO for a learning activity that was previously paper-based. Preliminary results of this survey are presented.

Citation: Nicholas L. Carroll and Lina Markauskaite. “E-Portfolios and Blogs: Online Tools for Giving Young Engineers a Voice”. Seventh International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET 2006), July 2006. IEEE Computer Society.

Applying Plagiarism Detection to Engineering Education

Abstract: We describe a novel plagiarism detection system and its integration with an e-portfolio used in first year engineering teaching. The tool addresses an important issue arising from the decreasing barriers to information access. Academics know that information can support valuable learning experiences, but these experiences are diminished when students plagiarise by copying assignments and getting credit for work they have not done. While it is possible for academics to develop project-based activities to make it harder for students to plagiarise work from outside sources, some students will still copy work done by others within the same class, which can be especially difficult to detect within large cohorts. According to student feedback received while assessing an e-portfolio activity, we found that students were also concerned about plagiarism, and that they modify their approaches to learning based on this concern. We developed a plagiarism detection tool called Beagle, which uses an internal method (also known as collusion): whenever a student submits an assignment to the e-portfolio system, it is compared to those previously submitted by other students. Beagle measures the statistical similarity between students’ work using text mining methods. When a specific similarity threshold is reached, the work can be flagged as possible plagiarism or the system can automatically warn the student and request that they resubmit their work. In this paper we present the design of the system, a performance evaluation in terms of accuracy and execution time, and a description of its application integration capabilities through web services.

Citation: J. J. Garcia Adeva, Nicholas L. Carroll, and Rafael A. Calvo. “Applying Plagiarism Detection to Engineering Education”. Seventh International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET 2006), July 2006. IEEE Computer Society.

Curriculum Central and Curriculum Tracker

It has been a hard slog over the past couple of months working on Curriculum Central and Curriculum Tracker. Finally, I have committed both to the OpenACS CVS repository.

Curriculum Central is a system for managing outlines for Courses or Units of Study. The system is targeted at academics that have to revise their course outlines before a course can be offered. Quality assurance is built into the workflow process, which requires approval from a department or school coordinator before the information is published for students to read.

Curriculum Central was derived from the problem that students came across when trying to work out what courses they need to complete in order to finish their degree. Students want to know what courses are on offer, as well as any corresponding course requisites. This meant that the School or Department were required to publish a handbook containing a list of course offerings and their dependencies. Maintaining the information in this handbook was not transparent to academics, and therefore inconsistencies crept in. This resulted in misinformed students that were not able to graduate, as they had completed courses that were not core to the degree they were undertaking.

Curriculum Central offers a collaborative space for academics to coordinate the curriculum for degree offerings. The information can then be published for students to view. The system offers two view types: course listings; and course maps. The course listing is a page showing a list of courses that are either core or recommended for a degree stream. The course maps is a graphical representation of the same information. Clicking on a course box will show all prerequisite courses in the course maps view. This allows the student to work out what courses need to be completed before enrolling in a desired course.

Curriculum Central also allows the student to export a degree overview from the system as an XML document. The student can then import the XML document into Curriculum Tracker, which is an application designed specifically for students. Curriculum Tracker allows the student to tick off courses that they have completed. This provides students with an overview of their progress through their degree.

Furthermore, the course information has been designed to have Graduate Attributes integrated into it. Graduate Attributes are qualities that a student gains from completing a degree. All courses help contribute to these attributes, which include: Communication; Research and Inquiry; Ethical, Social and Professional Understanding; Information Literacy; and Personal and Intellectual Autonomy.

By completing a course, a student is able to develop their graduate attributes. Curriculum Tracker offers a chart for students to track their progress in developing their graduate attributes. The chart allows students to identify their weaker characteristics, which may influence their decision in selecting future courses to enrol in, so that they can build on these weaker characteristics. Therefore, Curriculum Tracker allows students to manage their own personal development through their degrees.

Curriculum Tracker is a standalone application, but can be integrated into dotFOLIO quite easily. In fact, Curriculum Tracker offers much more when it is integrated with dotFOLIO. Using dotFOLIO’s clipper feature, students are able to clip work completed for a course to the course outlines in Curriculum Tracker. This provides context for the work completed, as they are related directly with the course that the work was completed for.

I believe these additions will make dotFOLIO that much closer to what people envision electronic portfolios to be.