Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date:  Wednesday, 16 July 2003
Time:  4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]


Title:   Education vs. Culture: Fostering Collaborative Skills
         in a Technical Curriculum

Speaker: William Waite (University of Colorado)


Abstract:
  True collaboration is greatly hindered by a pervasive "engineering
  culture" that stresses individual performance. This culture is
  reinforced by school experience prior to entering the university,
  and also by the strategies taken in most university courses. This
  situation is decried by employers, who say that our graduates are
  less prepared in the area of teamwork than in math and science.
  Accreditation agencies argue that there should be fundamental changes
  in curricula to address the problem.

  We have experimented with interventions in normal courses in an effort
  to change the classroom culture to improve collaboration without
  altering technical content. Assessment of these experiments include
  both ethnographic observation and extensive student interviews. The
  results show that students are amazingly resistant to working
  collaboratively, and devise highly ingenious strategies to avoid it.
  Faculty interested in curriculum changes to support collaboration must
  be aware of these issues if they are to reach their goals.


Biography:
  Bill Waite has been a professor, both of CS and EE, at University of
  Colorado since the 60's. His principal contributions have been in
  compiler technology but has done research in many aspects of programming
  languages. He is also known as the long-suffering editor of ACM's
  Operating Systems Review. He has been a regular visitor to Oz since
  his Fulbright post-doc in 1965 and is currently visiting Macquarie
  University.


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars03/dept20030716