The BIM and LIM programs at University of South Australia

"Teachers teach that knowledge waits" - Bob Dylan

I am now program director of the business information management and the library and information management programs at the University of South Australia.

The BIM program

The business information management suite of postgraduate programs have been developed to meet the needs of the 21st Century and are offered, together with associated applied research, to educate technically skilled:

• administrators


• archivists


• information system designers


• internet/intranet coordinators


• knowledge and information officers


• librarians


• records managers

Click here to see the current program outlines from Graduate Certificate through Graduate Diploma to a fill MSc by coursework or research.

The LIM program

Newly qualified librarians in the 21st century need to be familiar with standards and technologies for information management and also require mature capabilities to collaborate across allied professions, such as archives, information systems and records management, as well as the diverse cultures of business and public service. Ideally they will also bring experience from the workplace. Moreover, understandings of change and innovation management, human resource management, organizational learning and project management are becoming ‘table stakes’ for all knowledge workers. Hence, postgraduate education for librarians must augment the core curricula necessary for ALIA accreditation with key knowledge from multiple disciplines and also encourage networking and teamwork with fellow professionals. Further, due to the rate of change in processes and technologies, it should foster skills for lifelong learning and continuing professional development. The problem is that providing such a range of knowledge and experience is beyond the capability of a single institution. So, the collaborative capability that we seek to foster needs to be a fundamental part of designing, delivering and improving such educational offerings.

Collecting and managing information is increasingly vital in all areas of modern life: from small businesses and multinational organisations, to schools, universities, libraries and museums. Among the many professions that deal with information - record managers, archivists, librarians and information officers - the need for a new type of information manager has emerged!

The library and information management programs are designed to provide replacements for the current, Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA)-accredited programs currently offered by the School of Communication .

All courses will be available totally online, part-time or full-time depending on your circumstances. The choice is yours! To make the programs even more exciting some of the teaching staff are actual industry based lecturers who can bring real-world experiences to your studies.

The new programs provide a continuing path of learning from the Graduate Certificate in BIM (Library Management specialisation) through to a Graduate Diploma or Masters qualification in Library and Information Management.

There is an increase in interest for both the Business Information Management and the Library and Information Management programs from industry sectors. Employers and employees wanting to be retrained to meet industry requirements along with career minded employees.

The Extended Mind

"Keep on playing those mind games together ..." - John Lennon

My old mate Matthew Knight recently turned me on to some interesting work by Philosopher Andy Clark (who taught us both back in the day) and David Chalmers. The extended mind is a radical extension to situated cognition that sprang from Clark’s research into cognition (Clark, 1989) and Chalmers’ (1996) research into consciousness. It postulates an “active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes” (Clark and Chalmers, 2003, p 7) to the extent that “if, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. Cognitive processes ain't (all) in the head!” (ibid, p 10).

References

• Chalmers (1996), The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.


• Clark, A. (1989), Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing. Boston, M.A.: MIT Press.


• Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. J. (2003), The Extended Mind, Analysis, 58, pp 10-23.

Susan Bull and Open Learner Models: Special Issues of IJAIE

"Turn the pages you didn't open ..." - Gene Clark

I shared an office with Susan Bull at the University of Brighton in the late 1990s. Susan, who has now moved to the University of Birmingham, is one of the most imaginative and hard working people I ever met and she has produced umpteen trillion papers on Learner Modeling and in particular Open Learner Models. I wish I had thought of open learner models myself but at least I was lucky enough to co-author a couple of papers with Susan (Bull & Shurville, 1999a, 1999b).

So what are open learner models? Over to Susan and her co-authors ...

• "The learner model is central to an adaptive educational system, as it is the model of the learner’s understanding (and possibly also other attributes such as their goals, motivation, learning preferences, etc.), that enables a system to adapt to the individual user’s current learning requirements. Traditionally, the learner model has been closed to the learner since its primary purpose, as indicated above, has been to allow a system to adapt to the individual’s needs. For several decades now, the Artificial Intelligence in Education community has been developing methods for modelling learners, and dealing with the dynamics and potential inaccuracy of learner models. One promising approach to improving the accuracy of the learner model is to open the contents of the model to the learner it represents, to allow them to suggest additional information, or to propose corrections to entries, thereby helping to maintain the accuracy of a system’s model of the user’s knowledge and other attributes relevant to the specific educational context. A second benefit of this interactive approach to learner modelling is that the learner model now plays a new role – not only can the learner contribute information to help increase the accuracy and therefore the utility of their learner model for adaptation purposes, but the model can also become a learning resource for the student in its own right. Such an open learner model (i.e. a learner model accessible to the learner modelled) offers the learner a perspective on their understanding that is not usually available to them, which can facilitate reflection on their knowledge and on the learning process more generally, as students must carefully consider their knowledge state before suggesting changes to their model. Furthermore, even non-interactive open learner models (that is, learner models that are inspectable but not changeable by the user) have the potential to prompt learner reflection and metacognition in a similar manner, as they confront the learner with information about their understanding which is likely to provoke some kind of cognitive reaction from them." (Bull, Dimitrova, and McCalla, 2007).
  

That more or less says it all. My only comment is that open learner models herald a way for artificial intellgence in education to embrace constructivist and student-centred approaches. To my mind reflection and metacognition have to outshine passive grazing of knowledge. It would be trendy to mention that open learner models have potential in personal learning environments and connections to learner-generated contexts. As Lyn Pemberton used to tease, I'm so a la mode that I'm going to do it anyway.

Susan has just co-edited a pair of special issues of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education that introduce the state of play and current research issues in open student models. I recommend that anyone with an interest in AI and education should read the first and second parts of the introduction (Bull, Dimitrova & McCalla, G, 2007; Dimitrova, McCalla & Bull, 2007). Susan's has a paper in the issue with Judy Kay of the University of Sydney 'Student Models that Invite the Learner In: The SMILI
:-) Learner Modelling Framework' , which takes us toward a common framework to compare and contrast open learner models. Phil Agre argues that research in AI goes through neat and scruffy phases and both are necessary to make progress. It is good to see the emergence of a neat framework to tie the field of open learner models together. Now people can get on with some wild and scruffy research!

With further progress in mind, I notice from her home page that Susan has some PhD opportunities available and is particularly interested in supervising PhD students interested in open learner modelling, adaptive learning environments, mobile learning or computer-assisted language learning. If you are setting out in educational technology then having Susan as a supervisor would be a grand way to start. I certainly learned a lot sharing that office.

References

• Bull, S., Dimitrova, V. & McCalla, G. (2007). Open Learner Models: Research Questions (Preface to Special Issue of the IJAIED Part 1), International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 17(2), 83-87.
• Dimitrova, V., McCalla, G. & Bull, S. (2007). Open Learner Models: Future Research Directions (Preface to Special Issue of the IJAIED Part 2), International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 17(3), 217-226.
• Bull, S. & Kay, J. (2007). Student Models that Invite the Learner In: The SMILI Open Learner Modelling Framework, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 17(2), 89-120.
• Bull, S. & Shurville, S. (1999a). Cooperative Writer Modeling: Facilitating Reader-Based Writing with Scrawl. In Morales, R., Pain, H., Bull, S. and Kay, J. (eds), Proceedings of Workshop on Open, Interactive and Other Overt Approaches to Learner Modeling, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education 1999, pp 1-8.
• Bull S. & Shurville S. (1999b). Online Reader, Writer and Student Models to Support the Writing Process. In Kay J. (ed.) The Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on User Modeling 1999, Banff, Canada, pp 295–297.