May 2005 - Volume 4 Issue 2
Papers
- John Colby - Attendance and Attainment: a comparative study
- John Traxler - Personal Digital Assistants - A Means of Supporting Students
- Dr Andrew Whitworth - "Who Wants To Learn Web Design Anyway?": Course Design For Student Diversity in an Ict Sub-Discipline
- Jocelyn Wishart - A Comparison of Preferred Learning Styles, Approaches and Methods between Information Science and Computing Science Undergraduates
- Thomas Lancaster and Fintan Culwin - Classification of Plagiarism Detection Engines
Editorial by Alan Poulter
University of Strathclyde
This issue contains five fascinating papers, all of which complement one another nicely, while at the same time covering a range of different topics relevant to the domain. Being a staunch 'classificationist' at heart, I feel that clarifying our thinking about types of plagiarism and their detection mechanisms is a sensible thing to do. The table in the paper by Lancaster and Culwin comparing 'metrics' (features) against plagiarism detection tools gives a rich picture of what tool does what. Wishart's paper on learning styles not only confirms long held beliefs about the different learning styles employed by information science and computer science students but also undercuts them. Somewhat worrying are her conclusions that fundamental learning modes (reading and listening) are commonly disliked. The Riordan and Traxler paper recounts a project which gave PDAs to students to see how they used them in their learning. Apart from being a convenient display aide for notes there seem to have been a sign ificant skill barrier to using them in a more sophisticated way (e.g. sharing schedules). Ironically, PDAs were felt to be passé when compared against the latest smart phones. There is an interesting marker here perhaps for a future project utilising devices (like phones) that students may already have. Finally Whitworth's paper makes fascinating reading as it revels in the breadth and diversity possible in teaching web design, a course with a potentially large audience that goes way outside of the information and computing domain. The type of web design course proposed potentially addresses issues raised in the other papers: it could be used to encourage creativity to offset plagiarism, it could enthuse reluctant readers and it could foster practical skills in the management of digital information.
