Posts filed under 'Education'
At ICWE 2010, Martin Gaedke organised a panel on “How to Successfully Teach Web Engineering?“. The panelists where Fabio Casati, Yogesh Deshpande and myself. See the following pictures of the panel:
More photos are available at http://icwe2010.webengineering.org/Conference/photos.aspx.
After a short introduction, we mainly discussed the following two questions: (1) if you would have a chance to study “Web Engineering” today, where would you do that? (2) If you were in a position to hire Web Engineers, where would you require your students from and what profile would you expect?
My personal message I take home from this panel: perhaps we are trying to much too educate “miracle-students”. From my experience at Salzburg Research I know that Web Engineering, i.e., the systematic development of Web applications, is a truly interdisciplinary task. But it is not the people/researchers as single individuals that are of interdisciplinary nature, it is the teams that are interdisciplinary: so I guess we must not aim at establishing curricula that teach everything from Web technologies, via Web science, design, information architecture, etc. That will be too much for one (single) curriculum and also, it will be unfocused and there students would have a hard time to get a job. What we need is a set of complimentary curricula, e.g., technical engineers, information architects, etc.
August 8th, 2010
This summer we are hosting a total of 9 students doing internships. The programme is supported by the ministries bmvit and bmukk and is called “generation innovation“.
The themes the students covered includes
- Usability
- Tag Clouds
- Flash Overlays
- geotaging on the iPhone
- Open Street Map Clients
- Rich-Client-Applications
We got some very good feedback by the students. Firstly, the got a completely different view of research and IT; they were exposed to a way of working with a high degree of self-responsibility (which was appreciated very much); and finally, they had fun.
Personally, I believe that the way of opening up research labs to young people means that they get to know what research in practise is; and the researchers themselves are confronted with new (and fresh) ideas and this is of benefit to both sides.
There is a German video available at Salzburg.com.
August 5th, 2009
Josephine Hofmann of Fraunhofer IAO in Stuttgart and myself just edited an HMD special issue eGovernment. I think the interesting aspects are that
- eGovernment is meanwhile really high up on the political agenda (i2010, national initiatives, etc.)
- hand in hand with the increasing integration of eGovernment applications goes an increase in complexity: besides technical interoperability issues there are various cultural issues (in the EU of 27 countries also with varying standards concerning encryption, etc)
- finally, eGovernment is not just about a more efficient state (or the management thereof). It really is about a new type of interaction between citizens and state. With respect to this we must not forget that still 30% of the population are not online (and due to facts such as age, etc. most probably will never be online).
March 14th, 2009
These days, Manfred Bortenschlager of Salzburg Research successfully passed his viva. His thesis is entitled “CorA - A Coordination Architecture for Collaboration in Pervasive Environments” and it deals with a middleware infrastructure that supports collaboration in pervasive computing environments.
Congratulations!
December 12th, 2008
By law, the Austrian ministries have to publish yearly a status report on research, technology and innovation. I find it interesting that they cite a study on PhD development in Austria (Pechar et al. 2008). One of the great figures can be found on p. 88: reasons why students decide to pursue a PhD. Number is pure interest. I think this is excellent news!
The latest report can be found at http://www.bmwf.gv.at/uploads/tx_bmwfcontent/ftb_2008.pdf. Page 88 gives the following figure:
June 20th, 2008
I happened to be member of the jury of the ITS project award. The idea of the award is to motivate high-school students to engage in science and technical development and secondly, to demonstrate the high quality of these kind of projects. The jury was composed of R. Hittmair (BCCS), U. Hofmann (FH Urstein), R. Meisl (Land Salzburg), M. Wallinger (Siemens Salzburg), B. Wieder (Palfinger) and S. Reich (Salzburg Research).
Nominees were
- BHAK Grazerbach: Archment – Archeology Management
- BHAK Wien 10: xpense Haushaltsbudget-Rechner
- HTL Braunau: Universal Web Control
- HTL Hallein: CAE – Computer Aided Education
- HTL Ottakring: MPZ MusicBuddy
- HTL Rennweg: “MMORPG”
- HTL Saalfelden: Motorisierte Knieschiene
- HTL Salzburg: VTTG – Voith Tension & Thickness Gauge
- HTL Wels: Modernisierung eines Kernspintomographen
- Karlsgymnasium Bad Reichenhall: Pathfinding
The winner is HTL Saalfelden, motorisierte Knieschniene. This is a device that is low(er) cost and lower weight for rehabilitation of knee injuries.
All presentations were top class!!! Many had videos to demonstrate usage scenarios (some of them even with a fancy storyboard – “Archeology Management”), all presenters were truly professional. Some of the projects had web-sites (“xpense“), some folders (“MPZ – MusicBody”), … the software demonstrated (live!) was of high quality; some even made it into products (such as “Universal Web Control”).
June 3rd, 2008
… an event organised by Sun Microsystems at FH St. Pölten for the Austrian Java Community: Java Deus. Themes are Java 7, JavaFX, Solaris, Netbeans, Open ESB, Glassfish, MySQL, DTrace, SunSPOTS, …. See http://at.sun.com/sunnews/events/2008/jun/javadeus08/.
May 2nd, 2008
In addition to the Paris Lodron University (founded 1622), the Mozarteum – University of Music, Theatre and Visual Arts (founded in 1841), the (medical) Paracelsus University (founded in 2002), Salzburg now has a fourth University: the private business University in Seekirchen, see http://www.my-campus-seekirchen.com/ (founded 2008).
The accreditation was done by the Austrian “Akkreditierungsrat”. At their site, you can find a list of all private universities in Austria, see http://www.akkreditierungsrat.at/cont/en/privatuni.aspx, 12 at the moment. The respective laws for accreditation have been established in 1999. This demonstrates that the sector of private universities in Austria is a “young one”.
Universities have almost a thousand years of tradition: Bologna was founded in 1088. In an edited book on “The Future of the University”, Maria Kelo argues that the Roman Catholic Church, the Icelandic Parliament and Universities are amongst the oldest institutions still “in operation. This would be an indication that universities are well suited for changes and adaptation (otherwise they could not be in existence any more).
April 21st, 2008
A new study programme for a doctoral degree between the Technical University of Timisoara, Fachhochschule Salzburg and Salzburg Research has been established. The idea is to have a three year ECTS conformant PhD curriculum that not only guarantees knowledge about the scientific methods in your respective domain but also know-know about industrial innovation processes, the community, etc. The initiation of the programme was driven by needs from industry – and by Prof. Ulrich Hofmann.
The initial summer school and the curriculum development have been financially supported by Forschung Austria.
The press release can be found here.
April 14th, 2008
This dialogue is an initiative by BM Dr. Hahn (see http://www.forschungsdialog.at/). The Salzburg event was on interdisciplinary research and had a focus on humanities and social sciences. Some key phrases
- research problems do not follow disciplines, i.e., they are inherently interdisciplinary
- it is extremely challenging to teach interdisciplinary research/research methods
- evaluation of interdisciplinary research is not solved; so is measurement of the scientific quality in the humanities.
An excellent discussion with over a 100 participants.
April 11th, 2008
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