th International Workshop on Construction Information ... · Raimar Scherer, Dresden University of...

4th International Workshop on Construction Information Technology in Education

Edited by:

Karsten Menzel

July 18, 2005 Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Disclaimer All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and re-cording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publish-ers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the informa-tion contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability in whole or in part for any errors or omissions that may be made. The reader should verify the applicability of the information to par-ticular situations and check the references prior to any reliance thereupon. Since the information contained in the book is multidisciplinary, international and professional in nature, the reader is urged to consult with an appropriate licensed professional prior to taking any action or making any interpretation that is within the realm of a licensed professional practice.

Editorial Karsten Menzel Published by: Institute for Construction Informatics, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany ISBN: 3-86005-479-1, CIB Publication No.: 303 Print: addprint AG, Am Spitzberg 8a, 01728 Bannewitz / Possendorf

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Numerous persons engaged time and efforts to make these proceedings and the workshop possible; first and foremost the authors of the papers and the participants of the workshop. The members of the Scientific Committee worked very hard to review abstracts and to ensure time schedules. Last but not least, the team of the Group of N-Dimensional Information System in AEC at the Institute for Construction Informatics pro-vided dedicated help and support. The Editor ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Karsten Menzel, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Danijel Rebolj, University of Maribor, Slovenia

Bernd Zastrau, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Robert Amor, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Ghassan Aouad, Salford University, UK

Reza Beheshti, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Fatima Farinha, University of Algarve, Portugal

Thomas Froese, University of British Columbia, Canada

James Garrett, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Peter Grübl, University of Darmstadt, Germany

Barbara Hauptenbuchner, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Dietmar Hosser, Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany

Bimal Kumar, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

Ardeshir Mahdavi, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Karsten Menzel, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Tomas Olofsson, Lulea University, Sweden

Danijel Rebolj, University of Maribor, Slovenia

Yacine Rezgui, Informatics Research Institute, University of Salford, UK

Raimar Scherer, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Andrej Tibaut, University of Maribor, Slovenia

Ziga Turk, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Conference Organisation

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Editorial 1 K. Menzel

About the Workshop 3 K. Menzel, D. Rebolj, B. Zastrau

KEY NOTE LECTURES

Information Management for Construction 7 T.M. Froese

An inquiry into the "effort space" for computational building design analysis 17 A. Mahdavi

Is there any Intelligent Classroom 25 K. Menzel, V. Hartkopf

SESSION PAPERS

Computer science and IT in Civil Engineering curricula 35 D. Rebolj, A. Tibaut

Development of computer assisted learning tool for earthquake engineering 43 R. Klinc, Z. Turk, M. Fischinger

OWS-Further Education in Civil Engineering 49 P. Grübl, S. Köhler, B. Schmidt, N. Schnittker

Expectations and challenges brought by ICT in AEC education 57 L. Caneparo

Development and Usability of Hypermedia Educational Objects For Construction Engineering Education 67 S. Scheer, B. Carmem Lúcia Graboski da Gama

Group-Oriented Learning of Object-Oriented Software Methods in Construction Engineering: A Case for GeoCafe 73 S. Alda, A.B. Cremers, M. Won

Basic Engineering Knowledge 81 B. Hauptenbuchner, M. Berg

APPENDIX

Index of Authors 85

International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB) 86

1 NEW ENGINEERING COMPETENCIES

First of all an “in-depth” analysis of what compe-tencies are needed to ensure that civil engineers and architects can cope with the changes in the global economy and the local societies is needed. One im-portant aspect is the discussion about balancing out the so-called “soft” qualifications and the traditional engineering qualifications.

This discussion impacts the education in the area of applied computer science for civil engineers and architects (Bauinformatik). Are information and communication technology a basic engineering competency or just a tool? For the grandchildren of Konrad Zuse, the great inventor of the first computer in Germany, the response is clear: It is a basic engi-neering competency.

But how far shall we go? According to the opin-ion of the editor, in a globalized “service society” engineers and architects must understand their prod-ucts, the inherent interdependencies and thus the in-formation flow and the communication processes among the different professions and specialists. We have to understand networked systems, we must be able to model complex content according to the ob-ject-oriented paradigm, and we have to be able to implant interfaces among the different actors.

2 CHANGING THE PARADIGM

To achieve the goal of delivering complex, holis-tic, interdisciplinary education scenarios we have to newly specify the conditions needed at higher aca-demic institutions to support a shift in the paradigm within our programs and methods.

There is a need to analyze whether overcrowded curricula prevent our students from “in-depth” learn-ing or if differentiated offers of modular courses contribute to the preservation of regional knowledge and support personalized learning scenarios.

It is necessary to discover and specify new roles for the teachers and the students in new teaching scenarios.

Last but not least, teachers have to continuously improve their ability for self-evaluation. In co-operation with our “clients” (students) and with our management (university administration) we have to develop approaches for staff-development. How to teach the teacher might be one of the more challeng-ing questions in the early 21st century.

The proceedings and presentations are aimed at initiating discussions, explaining selected methods and tools for teaching, and introducing evaluation criteria proving the usefulness of methods and tools for better learning and for activating students.

Editorial

Karsten Menzel Dresden University of Technology, Germany

ABSTRACT: Economic conditions and business processes have changed dramatically over the last decade. Globalization is no longer a buzzword but reality. The more countries participate in the economic growth, the more important becomes the need for a sustainable development. Future architects and civil engineers will have great responsibilities in contributing, moderating, and possibly guiding this development process.

At first view, the contribution of civil engineers and architects to that process might be the development of a sustainable infrastructure. However, the focus of our professions needs to be extended. Besides the design and the construction of new buildings and infrastructure systems, both professions must contribute to the maintenance, improvement, and preservation of existing buildings and infrastructure systems. Our work prod-ucts must address the different needs such as the decreasing numbers of inhabitants in Western Europe, North America, and Japan and the increasing need for modern transportation, supply, production and living in the “new economies” of South East Asia, the Indian sub-continent, or Africa.

These requirements will definitely change the professional profiles of civil engineers and architects. In-formation and Communication Technologies can contribute to mastering this change by delivering holistic, integrated, and personalized teaching-learning environments.

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1 SESSION 1: Do new professional profiles require different ways of teaching?

To answer this question, one must have a clear understanding of whether there are new professional profiles. The key-note by Professor Thomas Froese (University of British Columbia, Canada) addresses this topic from a civil engineering perspective and introduces the new professional profile of a chief in-formation manager in construction.

Danijel Rebolj and Andrej Tibaut (University of

Maribor, Slovenia) have developed some responses in their paper by analyzing current curricula in “Construction Information Technology”. Are we teaching the right things? This might be the motivat-ing question of their paper.

Robert Klinc, Ziga Turk and M. Fischinger from

the University of Ljubljana will present a new tool to support teaching some of the “ever-present” top-ics in civil engineering.

One of their statements is that the way of teach-

ing must change because the audience now has dif-ferent expectations. More sophisticated technologies

can make “old” subjects more attractive and better understandable. Thus, new technologies contribute to an improved quality of teaching.

Grübl and his co-authors from the University of

Darmstadt will present the results of one of the pro-jects supported by the Federal Government of Ger-many over the last three years. The teaching envi-ronment developed for improved content management and presentation is now being extended and shall (additionally) address the need for life-long learning.

One indirect message of this paper might be that

we not only need to respond to new profiles but also to the “slowly changing demands” of the already es-tablished and well proven professional profiles.

2 SESSION 2: What is expected - what can be delivered?

Ardeshir Mahdavi (Vienna University of Tech-nology, Austria) analyzes one of the important as-pects of professional education: whether more spe-cialists or generalists are needed. By analyzing the

About the Workshop Organization

Karsten Menzel & Bernd Zastrau Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Danijel Rebolj University of Maribor, Slovenia

ABSTRACT: The first three workshops of the series on “Construction Information Technology in Education”were focused on curricula, programs, teaching methods and tools, scenarios for international co-operation, and the impact on adjacent engineering areas. Approximately 15 papers were published per workshop. The focus of the fourth workshop will be on evaluating the achieved results. This particular workshop pro-gram will allow for longer presentations and give more time for discussions. Therefore, only 6 out of 19 ab-stracts delivered were published in the proceedings and selected for presentation. Additionally, three key note speakers were invited to open the dialogue, stimulate discussion and inspire the audience. Finally, we will introduce a session about Facilities for Teaching, the “enablers” of all teaching and learn-ing activities. Although didactic concepts are unquestionably the most important pre-requisite for high quality educational scenarios, poor infrastructure, inappropriate classroom layout and design as well as expensive ef-forts to arrange classroom settings needed contribute to the demotivation of students and teachers. Therefore, after our 3rd key note workshop, participants will get “hands on experience” in a guided tour through the campus of the Dresden University of Technology, to be shown some examples of Facilities for Teaching.

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efforts needed for computational building design he indirectly raises the question if these tasks are to be “outsourced” from architectural offices or if there is a need for improved knowledge and skills for archi-tects to manage simulation tools more efficiently.

Luca Caneparo (Politecnico di Torino, Italy) il-

lustrates in his paper how a more holistic under-standing of complex design tasks can be achieved by case-oriented teaching. The paper also explains the benefits of information technologies supporting multi-dimensional information presentations and dif-ferent ways to access the “knowledge space”.

The paper by Scheer and his co-author focuses on

the aspect of how to model a “knowledge space” from an IT-perspective by introducing Hypermedia Educational Objects.

The paper by Sascha Alda, Armin Bernd Cremers

and their colleagues reports about their experience in developing and using a communication-centred learning platform to teach object-oriented software methods to engineering students.

Teaching IT-subjects in a more integrated way

might be one solution for delivering knowledge as well as skills to architectural and civil engineering students to finally enable them to respond to ex-tended professional requirements such as computa-tional building design.

3 SESSION 3: Facilities for Teaching

Volker Hartkopf (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Pitts-burgh) and Karsten Menzel were the organizers of a joint, interdisciplinary Distant Learning Project with participation by Braunschweig University of Tech-nology, ETH Zurich, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and TU Munich from 1997 to 2000. During that pe-riod the Intelligent Workplace Building at CMU Pittsburgh and the SCENE-LAB at Braunschweig University were inaugurated, serving as Teaching Environments for this joint teaching project.

After 2000, both authors contributed to numerous

other distant learning projects, such as the post-graduate program “Information Technology in Con-struction”(ITC Euromaster) having the opportunity and the need for using different teaching facilities. In their key note the authors will summarize, ana-lyze, and classify their experience. Based on this work they develop some design principles for inte-grated teaching facilities.

After this keynote workshop participants will

visit and critically analyze selected teaching facili-ties at Dresden University against these criteria. They will thus obtain an impression of how Dresden University managed its evolution from a technical school founded in 1828 towards a modern, holistic university addressing the educational needs of the 21st century by maintaining its traditions and com-plementing it with sophisticated technologies.

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KEYNOTE PAPERS

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1 INTRODUCTION

Current trends in information technology (IT) are yielding a wide range of new computer-based tools to support the architecture, engineering, construction and facilities management industries (collectively re-ferred to simply as “construction” in this paper). These tools—everything from project collaboration web sites to virtual building environments—promise great increases in the effectiveness and efficiency of designing and managing construction projects. However, these improvements cannot be realized without corresponding changes in the work tasks and skill sets of the project participants. In particular, this paper explores the assertion that new advances in IT must be accompanied by corresponding changes in project management. This paper focuses on changes in the form of an enhanced information management process and the role of a Project Infor-mation Officer. Elsewhere, we examine changes to the overall process of project management in general (Froese & Staub-French 2003).

This paper addresses the early phases of research on this topic: clarifying the observations and re-search questions, discussing the context (e.g., emerging IT), and suggesting solution frameworks (this further develops work reported earlier in Froese 2004). Future work will include further development

of the proposed solutions, experimentation and vali-dation.

2 THE CONTEXT FOR IT IN CONSTRUCTION

2.1 A Model Depicting the Role of IT in Construction Projects

As a first step in examining the relationship between IT and project management, we introduce a simple project processes model for exploring the role of IT in construction projects (Aouad et al. 1999 use a mo-re elaborate project process model—the process pro-tocol model—to analyze project IT). This model adopts a process perspective of construction pro-jects, and views projects in terms of the following elements (illustrated in Figure 1): • A collection of tasks carried out by project par-

ticipants (all tasks required to design and con-struct the facility).

• A collection of transactions involving the ex-change of goods or communication of informa-tion between tasks.

• A collection of integration issues—issues relating to the interactions between the tasks and transac-tions as a whole rather than as a set of individual elements. This also includes issues relating to in-

Information Management for Construction

T.M. Froese University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Canada

ABSTRACT: Changes brought about from advances in information technology for the architecture, engi-neering, and construction industries (construction IT) are not purely technical, but must be accompanied by significant changes to the management processes. This paper explores approaches to information manage-ment processes, and the role of a project information officer. The paper first presents the context for con-struction IT in the form of simple models representing the role of IT on construction projects. It then presents a framework for construction information management, organizing the wealth of issues around the dimen-sions of general management processes, breakdown of project elements, breakdown of information system elements, and information system objectives. It also discusses a breakdown of the areas of expertise required for construction IT. Finally, it suggests that from an organizational perspective, these information manage-ment practices should be consolidated around a high- level project management position dedicated to informa-tion management—the position of a project information officer.

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tegration across organizational boundaries, inte-gration over time (such as integration with legacy systems or future systems), and so on.

The model considers these elements across all pro-ject participants.

Given this process view of a construction pro-ject, it can be seen that construction projects are heavily information-based. Design and management tasks involve the processing of information rather than physical goods and even the actual construction operations involve critical information-based aspects in addition to the physical processing of the building components. Similarly, many of the transactions in-volve the communication of information rather than (or in addition to) a physical exchange of goods. Fi-nally, there are many overall integration issues that relate specifically to information, such as providing appropriate access to the total body of project infor-mation for any of the project participants.

From an IT perspective, the model provides a

categorization of the important IT elements of a pro-ject, and a basic understanding of the main roles of IT in supporting the construction process: • The project tasks correspond to the individual

tools or computer applications used to help carry out the task.

• The transactions correspond to the documents or communication technologies that are used to con-vey the information.

• The overall integration issues correspond to IT in-tegration and interoperability issues.

2.2 A Model Depicting the Human and Computer Information Flows

In addition to this process view of the overall pro-ject, it is beneficial to look more closely at the in-formation flows that exist between one participant, his or her computer applications, and other project

Work Task

User

Computer Application

Other Work Tasks, Users, and Applications

Data Entry

Interpretation of Results

Application Interoperability / Data Sharing

Direct Communication

Document Sharing

Individual User

Entire Social/Technical System

Figure 2: A model of human and computer information flows, showing elements and information interfaces for an individual par-ticipant and the overall system of a construction project.

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

TasksTransactions

Computer ApplicationsDocuments

Overall Integration Issues

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

Task

TasksTransactions

Computer ApplicationsDocuments

Overall Integration Issues Figure 1: A model of project processes that considers projects in terms of tasks, transactions, and overall integration issues. From an information perspective, tasks are associated with computer applications and transactions are associated with documents.

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participants. Figure 2 illustrates a model of human and computer information flows that shows key elements and information interfaces in an IT envi-ronment. Within the construction industry, most de-sign and management tasks are fairly well-supported by computer tools. However, these are not isolated activities—rather they are highly collaborative, in-volving large numbers of project participants operat-ing in a highly fragmented and dynamic environ-ment. Correspondingly, IT solutions involve not only stand-alone computer applications, but must be viewed as elements in an overall technical and social system.

Within this system, information flows between individual users and their computer-based tools (data entry from the user to the computer, and data inter-pretation from the computer to the user). Informa-tion also flows between users (as direction commu-nication—i.e. face-to-face or telephone conversations —or via exchanged documents), and between different computer applications (as shared computer data).

At present, information sharing typically in-volves a project participant entering project data into a computer application to produce useful project in-formation, creating a paper or electronic document containing the information, and distributing the document to others (via mail, fax, courier, or e-mail), after which other participants interpret the document and re-enter relevant information into their own computer applications. Thus, there is little systems-integration and interoperability, and the data exchange that does occur is inefficient, time-consuming, error-prone, and a barrier to greater computer functionality.

The inefficiency of this approach to exchanging information between computer systems (from com-puter application to human-interpreted documents and back into a second computer application) is im-proved by using direct computer-to-computer data sharing. However, it is not sufficient to rely on computer-based data sharing alone, since this creates the opposite effect. A user working with one appli-cation may interpret some project information as having certain significance for the project (e.g., the design doesn't meet certain user requirements, the costs are over budget, or the work method is infeasi-ble). If the same project information is successfully communicated to different computer application used by another project participant, there is no as-surance that the second user will interpret the same information in the same way. That is, they may have the same data available to them, but they may not recognize the design, cost, or work method prob-lems.

Efficient project communication, then, must take place along all of the communication channels: hu-man-to-human, human-to-computer, and computer-to-computer.

2.3 Trends in IT for Construction

The previous discussion of the role of IT relative to construction projects can be used in assessing the overall trends in IT for construction. We describe these trends in terms of three major focus areas that have been pursued over different time periods: i.e., three main eras in construction IT: • The first era of construction IT: most construc-

tion IT has historically focused on developing stand-alone tools to assist specific work tasks. Examples include CAD, structural analysis tools, estimating, scheduling, and general business ap-plications. This era of construction IT has been underway for more than four decades, and still continues. Most of the main computer tools used throughout the construction process are relatively mature: they have existed for many software generations and their basic feature sets have largely stabilized. This era corresponds to the processes in the project processes model and to the computer-human information flows in infor-mation flows model.

• The second era of construction IT: more recently, a separate trend in construction IT has focused on computer-supported communications. For exam-ple, E-mail, the web, document management sys-tems, etc. This era began largely with the advent of the world-wide web and the popular uptake of e-mail in the mid 1990s. This is a less mature field, with new tools and core features still emerging, and correspondingly, business proc-esses are still adapting. The focus of this era cor-responds to the transactions in the project proc-esses model and to the human-to-human information flows in the information flows model.

• The third era of construction IT: Much of the re-search and development relating to IT in con-struction carried out over the past decade has fo-cused not on individual applications or transactions, but on the potential for uniting all of these as a cohesive overall system. This work has focused on the overall integration issues defined in the model of project processes, and the com-puter-to-computer data sharing communications shown in the model of information flows. It has addressed the integration and interoperability of intelligent data between applications. This era is discussed in the following section.

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(This notion of evolving IT eras is reminiscent of Hinks et al., 1999, which presents a maturity model for construction IT that shows evolving levels of IT use including “application”, followed by “integra-tion”, and then “managed”. They also suggest that the maturity of construction IT and project manage-ment must evolve together).

2.4 The Third Era of Construction IT

While most construction IT resulting from the first two eras describes various aspects of the same con-struction projects, there is little direct exchange of data between these different systems. Construction IT provides “point solutions with no real data and workflow integration between them. Data is still be-ing recreated multiple times and transferred manu-ally within and across enterprises.” (Vaidyanathan & O’Brien 2003). This lack of interoperability in con-struction is a major source of inefficiency and a bar-rier to innovations. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology finds that, “Unfortu-nately, the construction industry has not yet used in-formation technologies as effectively to integrate its design, construction, and operational processes. There is still widespread use of paper as a medium to capture and exchange information and data among project participants.” (Gallaher et al. 2004). The re-port estimates “the cost of inadequate interoperabil-ity in the U.S. capital facilities industry to be $15.8 billion per year.”

Now, the third era in construction IT is emerging that focuses on the integration of project information among the various IT tools used by all project par-ticipants throughout the entire project lifecycle. The US National Science Foundation has defined the need for a new cyberinfrastructure to revolutionize science and engineering: “a national, reliable and dynamic, interoperable and integrated system of hardware, software, and data resources and ser-vices.” (NSF 2003). Garett (2004) argues that cy-berinfrastructure defines a necessary vision for civil engineering: an extensive set of functionalities, data models and data flows, and interoperability stan-dards. Elements of a construction cyberinfrastruc-ture have been the focus of research and develop-ment over the past decade, and results are beginning

to reach industry. Figure 3 illustrates the main ele-ments of a technology roadmap in which FIATECH (2004)—a North American industry organization dedicated to advancing technology for capital pro-jects—has positioned these emerging technologies into an overall vision for the construction industry. This roadmap (the largest, industry-driven effort of its kind) defines potential technologies for each of the major lifecycle phases of construction projects, with an over-arching management and control ele-ment, and elements addressing new materials and the workforce underlying them. A foundation layer supporting all of these objectives is an element pro-viding integrated data and information management technology.

In other industries (e.g., banking or automotive), integration has been achieved through large-scale computing systems established collaboratively among organizational partners. In construction, the fragmentation and short duration partnering of many small companies (Turner & Muller 2003) inhibits this type of solution. Systems must interoperate across all project participants with little customized configuration. This calls for a solution based on in-dustry-wide data interoperability standards. In con-struction, the Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs), established by the International Alliance for Interop-erability (IAI 2003) is the most significant data stan-dards effort. The IFCs have been under development since 1995 and they now form a mature data ex-change standard supported by many commercial software systems (Kam et al. 2003). The U.S. Gen-eral Services Administration, the world’s largest building owner, has set a goal of providing IFC-based building information models for all projects starting in 2006 (GSA 2003). The near-term poten-tial for this level of interoperability increases the ef-ficiency of information flows throughout the indus-try; the longer term potential involves re-structuring the entire design and construction process around comprehensive computer-based models of the build-ing—a virtual design and construction process. These comprehensive building information models (BIM’s) can play the same role in construction that prototypes play in manufacturing, revolutionizing the civil engineering design and construction proc-esses.

Real-time Project and Facility Management/Coordination & Control

New Materials, Methods, Products & Equipment

Technology and Knowledge Enabled Workforce

Integrated Data and Information Management

Scenario Based Project Planning

Automated Design

Integrated, Automated

Procurement & Supply Network

Intelligent Job Site

Intelligent Self-Maintaining Repairing

Operational Facility

Figure 3: Primary elements of the FIATECH capital projects technology roadmap.

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This construction IT era is quite young. It has reached a stage where there is general alignment among researchers and industry leaders as to the general vision for the future and the key elements required (e.g., as depicted by the FIATECH road-map). For many of these elements, much basic re-search has been completed and related technologies are now emerging as commercially viable solutions (Froese 2003). A full set of practical tools and changes to industrial practice are only beginning to appear.

3 THE DISCIPLINE OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

The third era of construction IT, with its focus on the integration of all computer-based resources into in-teroperable systems, may be poised to make signifi-cant impacts on the construction industry. These impacts may lead to far-reaching changes to industry practices. A consequence of this is that the man-agement of information and IT will need to be greatly enhanced over current information manage-ment practices. This section discusses different as-pects of an information management process to be carried out as a major sub-discipline within the overall practice of project management: a general framework for information management, a represen-tative description of an information management scope, and an organizational role for information management.

3.1 Current approaches to Information Management

Information and communications have long been recognized as important elements of project man-agement and formal information and communication management processes currently exist An example of a current communications management approach is described in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMI 2000), which defines a communi-cations planning framework (defining requirements and technologies, analyzing stakeholder issues, and producing a communications plan) and then three sub- issues of information distribution, performance reporting, and administrative closure. Information management, then, can be seen as very analogous to safety, quality, or risk—which have always been es-sential issues in construction, but which have in-creasingly become the focus of more formal project management processes over time. Never-theless, it is likely that information management is less fre-quently and less formally included in typical project management practices than safety, quality, or risk

management, and certainly much less than cost, schedule, or scope management practices.

A number of efforts have been carried out within construction IT research related to information man-agement practices. For example, Björk (2002) de-fines a formal model for information handling in construction processes. Turk (2000a) explored the relationships between information flows and con-struction process workflows, and makes a distinction between base processes (the main value adding ac-tivities) and glue processes (that make sure that the materials and information can flow between the base processes) (Turk 2000b). Mak (2001) describes a paradigm shift in information management that fo-cuses mainly in Internet-based information tech-nologies. Betts (1999) includes much work on the role of information technologies in the management for construction, with an emphasis on strategic man-agement of the firm.

These and other works have much to offer in the area of information management practices. This pa-per, however, takes a fairly specific perspective that has not been widely addressed: that is, the develop-ment of specific information management practices as they relate to the management of individual con-struction projects in the context of emerging (third era) IT.

3.2 A Framework for Information Management

A comprehensive list of all of the issues involved in the management of information systems for con-struction can grow very long indeed. To provide some structure to these issues, we propose that con-struction information management be defined as the management of information systems to meet project objectives. Though simple, this definition suggests a breakdown of construction information management into four main topic dimensions: a management process, project elements, information system ele-ments, and objectives. The following sections will examine each of these topic areas. (In the following sections, we have revised our earlier approach with issues suggested by Mourshed 2005).

3.3 A Management Process for Information Management

The management of information systems should fo l-low general management processes: • Plan all aspects of information system. This in-

cludes analyzing the requirements and alterna-tives, designing a suitable solution taking into ac-count all objectives and constraints, and adequately documenting the plan so that it can be communicated to all. Some of the analytical

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tools that can be used include cost/benefit analy-sis (though this may not be a straightforward process since the costs involved in improving in-formation management elements may be incurred by parties that are different from those receiving the resulting benefits), and a consideration of life-cycle issues in assessing costs and benefits (e.g., future information compatibility or hardware ob-solescence issues).

• Implementation of the plan, including issues such as security the necessary authority and resources for the plan, implementing communication and training, etc.

• Monitoring the results, including appropriate data collection relative to established performance measures and taking necessary corrective action.

3.4 Project Elements

The information management actions of planning, implementing and monitoring an information system should be applied to all of the parts of a project. This can involve the same project work breakdown structures used for other aspects of project manage-ment (e.g., breaking the project down by discipline, work package, etc.). However, there are perspec-tives on decomposing the work that are of particular relevance to information systems. We adopt the pro-ject processes model (shown in Figure 1) as a basis for structuring an information management ap-proach. Information management should address the three primary elements in the model: project tasks, information transactions, and overall integration is-sues.

First, the process should define each task, trans-action, or integration issue, including identifying participants, project phase, etc. This should corre-spond largely to an overall project plan and sched-ule, and thus it may not need to be done as a distinct activity.

For each of these elements, the information management process must analyze information re-quirements, design information management solu-tions, and produce specific information management deliverables. The level of detail required for the breakdown of project tasks and transactions de-scribed below should reflect the detail needed to achieve an effective overall project information management system. In general, this will be at a level where distinct work packages interact with each other, not a finer level at which work is carried out within the work packages themselves (for exam-ple, it will address the type and form of design in-formation that must be sent to the general contractor, but not the way that individual designers must carry out their design tasks).

The model considers these elements across all project participants (spanning all participating com-panies, not just internal to one company), and the in-formation management tasks should be carried out for each of these project elements.

Also, the project should be considered to be made up of not only the physical elements of the fa-cility to be constructed, but certain information arti-facts should be considered o be project elements in their own right, with their own value distinct from the physical facility. For example, a building infor-mation model resulting from the design and con-struction, which may be used as the basis for a facili-ties management system, is a significant project element.

3.5 Information System Elements

For each of the project elements to which we are ap-plying our information management processes, here are a number of different elements of an information system that must be considered: • Information: Foremost, we mus t consider the in-

formation involved in each of the project ele-ments. First, the process should assess the sig-nificant information input requirements for each element, determining the type of information re-quired for carrying out the tasks, the information communicated in the transactions, or the re-quirements for integration issues. With tradi-tional information technologies, information re-quirements generally correspond to specific paper or electronic documents. With newer information technologies, however, information requirements can involve access to specific data sources (such as specific application data files or shared data-bases) that do not correspond to traditional documents. Second, we must assess tool re-quirements by determining the key software ap-plications used in carrying out tasks, communica-tion technologies used for transactions, or standards used to support integration. Third, we must assess the significant information outputs produced by each task. This typically corre-sponds to information required as inputs to other tasks. After analysis, these results should be for-malized in the information systems plan as the in-formation required as inputs for each task, and the information that each task must commit to pro-ducing.

• Resources: the information management process should analyze the requirements, investigate al-ternatives, and design specific solutions for all re-lated resources. These include hardware, soft-ware, networking and other infrastructure, human resources, authority, and third party (contracted)

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resources. • Work methods and roles: the solution must focus

not only on technical solutions, but equally on the corresponding work processes, roles and respon-sibilities to put the information system to proper use.

• Performance metrics, specified objectives, and quality of service standards: the information sys-tems plan should be include the specification of specific performance metrics that can be assessed during the project and used to specify and moni-tor information systems objectives and standards of service quality.

• Knowledge and training: The information sys-tems solution will require certain levels of exper-tise and know how of people within the project organization. This may well require training of project personnel.

• Communications: implementing the information systems plan will require various communica-tions relating to the information system itself, such as making people aware of the plan, training opportunities, procedures, etc.

• Support: information system solutions often have high support requirements, which should be in-corporated as part of the information management plan.

• Change: the information management plan should include explicit consideration of change—how to minimize its impact, how to address un-authorized changes by individual parties, etc.

3.6 Information Systems Objectives

The previous sections outline a number of informa-tion system elements to be developed for all of the project elements as part of the information manage-ment process. Solutions for these should be sought that meet the general project objectives of cost, time, scope, etc. However, there are a number of objec-tives that are more specific to the information sys-tem that should be taken into account: • System performance is of primary concern, in-

cluding issues such as efficiency, capacity, func-tionality, scalability, etc.

• Reliability, security, and risks form critical objec-tives for information systems.

• Satisfaction of external constraints: here, we have here placed the emphasis on the project per-spective, but the information management must also be responsive to a number of external influ-ences. Of particular significance in alignment with organization strategies and information management solutions, including appropriate de-grees of centralized vs. decentralized information management. Other external influence include

client or regulatory requirements, industry stan-dards

• Life-cycle issues should be considered. These in-clude both the life cycle of the information (how to ensure adequate longevity to the project data), and of the information system (e.g., life-cycle cost analysis of hardware and software solutions).

• Interoperability is key objective for many aspects of the information system.

3.7 Maturity Models The permutations of all of the issues listed under the previous four dimensions leaves a monumental range of issues to be addressed in a project informa-tion management program. Not all projects will be able to do a thorough job of addressing all of these. Indeed, an organization could be assessed in terms of the degree to which is addresses each issue. For example, Mourshed (2005) uses the following ma-turity model scale for assessing organizations’ per-formance on information management tasks: • Non-existent: Not recognized/present, • Initial/Ad-Hoc: General awareness of the topic.

process is informal and reactive, • Repeatable: Agreed-upon but informal and not

usually revisited, • Defined: Formal and defined, • Managed: Increasingly defined, measurable, and • Optimized: Continuously revisited to measure

performance against goals, best examples are ap-plied.

3.8 Project Systems and Areas of Expertise

The previous section outlines a very generic frame-work for information management. Here, we look at the specific types of systems and technologies that might come into play on projects that take full ad-vantage of both traditional and emerging IT. The systems range of systems that should be considered within the overall information management is as fol-lows: • Project document management and collaboration

web site: a web site should be established for the project to act as the central document manage-ment and collaboration vehicle for the project. This will include user accounts for all project par-ticipants, access control for project information, online forms and workflows, messaging, contact lists, etc. A commercial service would generally be used to create and host the site.

• Classification systems, project breakdowns struc-tures and codes, and folder structures: much of the project information will be organized accord-ing to various forms of classification systems.

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These range from the use of industry-standard numbering schemes for specification documents, to the use of a project work breakdowns structure, to the creation of a hierarchical folder structure for documents placed on the project web site. The information management process must con-sider relevant industry classification systems such as OCCS (OCCS Development Committee 2004), and establish appropriate project classification systems.

• Model-based interoperability: many of the sys-tems described below work with model-based project data, and have the potential to exchange this data with other types of systems. The project should adopt a model-based interoperability ap-proach for data exchange for the lifecycle of the project. The information management process must consider relevant data exchange standards, in particular the IFCs (IAI 2003), and must estab-lish specific requirements and policies for project data interoperability. It must also establish a cen-tral repository for the project model-based data (a model server).

• Requirements management system: a require-ments management tool may be used to capture significant project requirements through all phases of the project and to assure that these re-quirements are satisfied during the design in exe-cution of the work.

• Model-based architectural design: The architec-tural design for the building should be carried out using model based design tools (e.g., object-based CAD). Although this improves the effec-tiveness of the architectural design process, the primary motivation here is the use of the resulting building information model as input to many of the downstream activities and systems.

• Visualization: using the building information model, which includes full 3-D geometry, there can be extensive use of visualization to capture requirements and identify issues with the users, designers, and builders. This may include high-end virtual reality environments (e.g., immersive 3-D visualization), on-site visualization facilities, etc.

• Model-based engineering analysis and design: the building information model is used as a prelimi-nary input for a number of specialized engineer-ing analysis and design tools for structural, build-ing systems, sustainability, etc.

• Project costs and value engineering: the building information model can also be used as input to cost estimating and value engineering systems. These will be used at numerous points through the lifecycle of the project (with varying degrees of accuracy).

• Construction planning and control: the project should use systems for effective schedule plan-ning and control, short interval planning and pro-duction engineering, operation simulation, re-source planning, etc. Again, the systems will make use of the building information model and will link into other project information for pur-poses such as 4-D simulation.

• E-procurement: project participants will make use of online electronic systems to support all as-pects of procurement, including E-bidding/tendering, project plans rooms, etc.

• E-transactions: online systems should be avail-able for most common project transactions, such as requests for information, progress payments claims, etc. These will be available through the project web site.

• E-legal strategy: project policies and agreements will be in place to address legal issues relating to the electronic project transactions.

• Handoff of project information to facilities man-agement and project archives: systems and proce-dures will be in place to ensure that complete and efficient package of project information is handed off from design and construction to ongoing fa-cilities operation and management, as well as maintained as archives of the project.

The above provides a breakdown of IT areas of ex-pertise from the perspective of the major systems that might be used on a construction projects. This is a useful approach in considering the required ar-eas of expertise for IT. However, it does not provide the best way of organizing a comprehensive “body of knowledge” for construction IT. For example, the European Masters program in Construction IT (Re-bolj & Menzel 2004) gives a good example of a cur-riculum for construction IT. Even here, however, there is a strong emphasis on the technology of con-struction IT and less on the overall information sys-tems and management perspective.

4 ORGANIZATIONAL ROLES: THE PROJECT INFORMATION OFFICER

4.1 Organizational Issues for Information Management

The previous sections have argued that emerging IT could significantly impact construction project proc-esses. The magnitude of this potential for IT to im-prove project processes depends upon the degree to which these processes evolve to fully embrace and exploit the IT. With IT playing a critical central role in the work processes, the information management becomes correspondingly critical to the overall pro-

14

ject management processes—managing the project will be just as much about managing the information and IT as it is about managing people, managing costs, managing risks, etc. With information man-agement becoming an increasingly important ele-ment of overall project management, the following challenging criteria must be considered in defining the organizational responsibility for information management: • Project focus: information management should be

project- focused and organized as a project man-agement function, as opposed to centralized within a corporate IT department. The informa-tion management process, as described above, is tightly coupled to the project processes and, in-versely, the project processes should be strongly influenced by the IT perspective. Furthermore, the information management must be responsive to project objectives and the needs of all project participants, rather than being driven by the cor-porate objectives and the needs of one company alone. This does not imply that a centralized IT group is not needed: the depth of IT expertise and resources required may be well-served through some centralized resources. Thus, a ma-trix organizational structure may be suitable, with primary organizational responsibility for informa-tion management residing in a project position supported by a centralized information manage-ment group (although matrix organizational struc-tures are generally not ideal, their use here would be similar to other common applications in the construction industry such as estimating or field engineering services).

• High level: since information management is central to the overall project management, it should not be relegated to a low level within the project organizational structure (e.g., as might be found with typical IT support personnel), but should be the primary responsibility of someone within the senior project management team.

• Separate function: Although the responsibility for information management should lie within the senior project management team, it would often be a poor fit with current senior project manage-ment staff. It requires a depth of specialized knowledge in areas of technology that are rapidly evolving. It may also be overshadowed by tradi-tional practices if it is added as a new, additional responsibility to someone that already handles other aspects of the project management, such as a contracts manager, a project controls engineer, or the overall project manager.

The above criteria suggest that, where possible, in-formation management requires a new, senior- level position with the project management team. We call

such a position the Project Information Officer (PIO). The overall responsibility of the PIO is to implement the information management as described previously. The follow sections outline additional issues relating to the PIO position.

4.2 Organizational ROLE

The PIO may be an employee of the project owner, lead designer, or lead contractor organizations, or may work as an independent consultant/contractor. Regardless of employer, the PIO should be consid-ered to be a resource to the project as a whole, not to an individual project participant organization. The PIO should be a senior management-level position within the project organization (i.e., not a junior technology support position). The PIO should report to the owner's project representative and work with an information management committee consisting of project managers and information specialists from key project participants. Depending upon the size of the project, the PIO may have an independent staff. In addition to the information management commit-tee, liaison positions should be assigned within each project participant organization.

4.3 Skills and Qualifications

Candidates for the position of PIO must have a thor-ough understanding of the AEC/FM industry, infor-mation management and organizational issues, data interoperability issues, and best practices for soft-ware tools and procedures for all of the major pro-ject systems described previously. Preference would be for candidates with a master's degree relating to construction IT and experience with information management on at least one similar project.

4.4 Compensation and Evaluation

Advanced construction IT offers great promise for improving the project effectiveness and efficiency while reducing risk. Not all of these benefits di-rectly reduce costs, yet the overall assumption is that the costs of the PIO position will be fully realized through project cost savings. This will not be a di-rect measure, but will be assessed on an overall qualitative basis through an information manage-ment review processes that examines the following questions of the information management and tech-nology for the project: • To what degree was waste (any non-value-adding

activity) reduced? • What new functionality was available? • How efficient and problem-free was the informa-

tion management and technology relative to pro-

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jects with similar levels of IT in the past? • What was the level of service and management

effectiveness offered by the PIO? • What is the potential for future improvements

gained by the information management practices on this project (i.e., recognizing the long learning curve that may be associated with new IT)?

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

This paper has argued that emerging IT will signifi-cantly alter the work practices of construction pro-jects, and that corresponding changes to the con-struction project management practices are required. The paper has focused on enhanced information management processes, presenting an overall frame-work for information management, listing the types of IT systems and issues that could make up the IT environment of future construction projects, and out-lining a corresponding organizational role in the form of a project information officer. In other work, we present a second aspect of this required change, an evolution to the way that overall project mana-gement itself is carried out. This evolution promotes the use of integrated IT to allow project participants to share a more common vision of the project as it progresses through planning, design, construction, and operation: we call this a Unified Approach to Project Management. These proposed changes to information and project management represent a conceptual solution to the defined problem. In future work, we hope to further develop these so-lutions and to apply them as pilot studies on full scale projects for testing and validation.

REFERENCES

Aouad, G., Cooper, R., Kaglioglu, M., & Sexton, M., 1999. “An IT-supported New Process”, in Betts, M. (Ed), Strate-gic Management of I.T. in Construction, Blackwell Science.

Betts, M. (Ed) 1999. Strategic Management of I.T. in Construc-tion, Blackwell Science.

Björk, B-C. 2002. “A forma lised model of the information and materials handling activities in the construction process,” Construction Innovation, 2(3), pp. 133-149.

FIATECH 2004. CapitalProjects TechnologyRoadmap Intro-duction, FIATECH: Austin, TX, USA, available at: http://www.fiatech.org/projects/roadmap/cptri.htm

Froese, T., 2003. “Future Directions for Model-Based Interop-erability,” Winds of Change: Integration and Innovation In Construction, Proceedings of Construction Research Con-gress, ASCE, Honolulu, USA, Electronic book (published on CD), 0-7844-0671-5.

Froese, T., 2004. “Help Wanted: Project Information Officer,” European Conference on Product and Process Modeling (ECPPM-2004) , Istanbul, Turkey.

Froese, T. & Staub-French, S. 2003. “A Unified Approach to Project Management,” 4th Joint Symposium on Information Technology in Civil Engineering, ASCE, Nashville, USA.

Gallaher, M., et al. 2004. Cost Analysis of Inadequate Interop-erability in the U.S. Capital Facilities Industry, National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST GCR 04-867.

Garrett, J. 2004. “FIATECH Vision and Cyberinfrastructure”, FIATECH Academic Workshop, Houston, USA.

GSA 2003. PBS Commissioner’s Guidance to the GSA Re-gions, General Services Administration, USA.

Hinks, J., Aouad, G., Cooper, R., Sheath, D., Kaglioglu, M. & Sexton, M. 1999. “IT and the Design and Construction Process: A Conceptual Model of Co-Maturation”, Interna-tional Journal of Construction Information Technology, 5(1), pp.1-25.

IAI 2003. Industry Foundation Classes , IFC2x Edition 2, In-ternational Alliance for Interoperability.

Kam C, Fischer M, Hänninen R, Karjalainen A. & Laitinen J. 2003. “The product model and Fourth Dimension project,” Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construc-tion, Vol. 8, pg. 137-166.

Mak, S. 2001. “A model of information management for con-struction using information technology,” Automation in Construction 10, pp. 257–263.

Mourshed, M. 2005. Online survey: Management of Architec-tural IT, web page at [http://www.ecaad.com/survey/]. Ac-cessed May 16, 2005.

NSF 2003. Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foun-dation Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation, USA.

OCCS Development Committee 2004. OCCS Net, The Omni-class Construction Classification System, web page at: http://www.occsnet.org/ [accessed June 24, 2004].

PMI 2000. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), 2000 Edition, Project Man-agement Institute: Newtown Square, PA, USA.

Rebolj D. & Menzel K. 2004. “Another step towards a virtual university in construction IT,” ITcon Vol. 9, pg. 257-266, http://www.itcon.org/2004/17

Turk, Z. 2000a . “Communication Workflow Approach to CIC,” Computing in Civil and Building Engineering, AS-CE, pp. 1094-1101.

Turk, Z. 2000b. “What Is Construction Information Technol-ogy,” Proceedings AEC2000, Informacni technologie ve stavebnictvi 2000, Praha, CD-ROM.FIATECH (2004), Capital Projects Technology Roadmapping In itiative, FIA-TECH, Austin, USA.

Turner, J. & Muller, R. 2003. “On the nature of the project as a temporary organization”, Int. J. of Project Management, 21(1), pp.1-8.

Vaidyanathan, K. & O’Brien, W. 2003. “Opportunities for IT to Support the Construction Supply Chain”, 4th Joint Sym-posium on Information Technology in Civil Engineering, ASCE, Nashville, USA.

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1 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Computational building evaluation tools have the potential to provide an effective means to support in-formed design decision making. Computational modeling, however, comes with a cost. Thereby, the most important cost factor is not necessarily soft-ware acquisition, but the time needed for learning and using the software.

The extent of required time and effort has been quoted by a number of previous studies around the world (Mahdavi et a. 2003, Lam et al. 1999) as one of the main hindrances toward the pervasive use of computational building performance assessment tools by designers: Currently, modeling applications are mostly used, if at all, in the later stages of design and by specialists, rather than architects.

Few studies, however, have explicitly dealt with the ascertainment and quantification of the actual ef-fort needed to understand, master, and apply compu-tational building evaluation tools. Thus, little factual information is available as to the cost and burden of computational building evaluation and its effective-ness in building design support. In this context, the present paper describes a case study, whose motiva-tion was to estimate the time and effort needed from novice designers to computationally evaluate the performance of building designs.

The importance of the energy performance of buildings as well as the quality of the indoor thermal environment as essential design evaluation criteria is well-established (Mahdavi and Kumar 1996). Scien-tific foundations for the description of the thermal

performance of buildings are well-understood and respective algorithmic formulations for its prediction have been developed (see, for example, Clarke 2001). More recently, efforts have been made to ex-pand the environmental evaluation beyond opera-tional energy into a more comprehensive set of indi-cators, thereby addressing the environmental impact of buildings (Mahdavi and Ries 1998, Fava et al. 1992). As applied to buildings, life-cycle assessment (LCA) refers to the major activities in the course of a building's life-span from its construction, opera-tion, maintenance, and decommissioning (LCA 2001).

The LCA process is a systematic approach and consists of four steps: i) goal definition and scoping; ii) inventory analysis; iii) impact assessment; iv) interpretation.

Many computation applications have been devel-oped to support the energy and environmental per-formance of buildings. Examples of energy simula-tion applications are ESP-r (Esru 2004), EnergyPlus (2004), and ECOTECT (2004). A comprehensive list of such tools may be found in DOE 2004. Like-wise, in the LCA area, a variety of computational tools are available that are generally built on a data-base of environmental information and can be used to evaluate the environmental impact of products and processes.

Examples of such tools are BEAT2002 (Holleris Petersen 2002), ELP (Forsberg and Burström 2001), Simapro (2004), Envest (2004), Athena (2004), BEE

An inquiry into the "effort space" for computational building design analysis

A. Mahdavi Department of Building Physics and Building Ecology, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

ABSTRACT: This paper describes a case study to estimate the time and effort needed by novice designers to computationally evaluate the performance of building designs. A group of senior architecture students partici-pated in the study, learning and using a software application to assess the energy performance of six project submissions for a school building design competition. The study's outcome (time investment ranges for vari-ous components of the modeling activity) was evaluated and further extrapolated to estimate the effort needed for a more comprehensive computational assessment of the environmental performance of designs. Moreover, the results were applied toward the demonstrative derivation of multi-dimensional simulation "effort space" for the estimation of time requirement for computationally supported building performance analysis.

17

(Berge 1995), and Eco-Quantum (Kortman et al. 1998).

Few studies could be identified that explicitly deal with the quantitative assessment of the time and ef-fort needed to prepare and conduct performance simulation studies. In a study of HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) simulation process, Madjidi and Bauer (1995) show that the bulk of the time needed for detailed HVAC simulations is spent to collect HVAC systems data.

The time required for the generation of the build-ing model is comparatively less time-consuming. Bazjanac (2001) argues that the majority of time in the preparation of input data for energy performance simulation is spent on describing the building ge-ometry. De Wilde (2004) reports that the energy simulation for a simple building required a full-time effort of two working days from an experienced doc-toral student.

2 APPROACH

2.1 Overview The time expenditure of 25 senior architecture stu-dents was documented as they evaluated the energy performance of six project submissions for a school building design competition.

Moreover, the time needed by a doctoral student to analyze the life-cycle performance of these de-signs was documented.

2.2 Energy simulation study The objective of this study was to estimate the time and effort needed to apply an energy simulation tool to assess and improve the energy performance of building designs. 25 senior architecture students par-ticipated in the study, which constituted the primary content of a semester-long elective course on build-ing performance modeling and evaluation. All stu-dents had previously attended a course on the fun-damentals of thermal performance of buildings (involving a time investment of approximately 60 hours).

The students were organized in terms of 10 groups (G_1 to G_10). Each group was required to analyze and report on the energy performance of a given de-sign using an energy performance simulation tool. Moreover, a thermally improved version of the ini-tial design was required as part of the students' final analysis report. Thereby, changes were to be sug-gested only to component properties; the basic ge-ometry and massing of the initially given designs was to be preserved.

Six submissions to a school design competition were selected as sample designs (P_1 to P_6). As such, they represented typical instances of prelimi-

nary designs. Given 6 projects and 10 groups, some projects were analyzed by more than one group. The energy performance of the designs was to be ex-pressed primarily in terms of heating load.

Given the local climatic conditions at the desig-nated building site (in Austria) and the building's function (school), it was expected that the buildings would perform satisfactorily without cooling re-quirement. Simulations were performed using Ecotect. This tool is appropriate for performance as-sessment in the early stages of design and thus suit-able for the present case study, which addresses the potential of tool usage by architects, rather than en-ergy specialists.

At the beginning of the study, the participating students were given an introductory tool tutorial, re-quiring approximately 10 hours. Throughout the study, the students were required to maintain a log reflecting their time expenditures for: i) creating a simple building geometry model in a

conventional CAD environment; ii) transferring the CAD model into the energy simu-

lation tool and preparing it for simulation; iii) performing the simulations for the initial design

and possible iterations; The majority of the participating students already

possessed proficiency in the use of the CAD tool prior to the commencement of the case study. The knowledge of such tools represents the standard part of a typical educational program in architecture.

Upon submission of the students' final reports, a comparative study of the time budgets of each group was performed. For benchmarking and comparison purposes, the energy performance of all six schools was also obtained independently by a more experi-enced doctoral student based on the same building information and using the same simulation tool.

2.3 LCA study

The objective of this study was to estimate the time and effort needed to apply a computational LCA tool to assess the ecological performance of the six pre-viously mentioned school projects. A doctoral stu-dent in Architecture applied the tool BEAT2002 to conduct the computations. For architectural LCA of preliminary designs, BEAT may be said to represent the proper level of complexity. The student had ac-quired the fundamentals of LCA as well as the know-how to run BEAT via self-learning (time in-vestment approximately 160 hours and 40 hours re-spectively): Knowledge of LCA and respective computational tools is typically not covered in the curricula of architectural schools.

The student's effort for the LCA study of the six schools was captured in terms of time investment for: i) project data base generation; ii) modeling in BEAT 2002; and iii) documentation of the results.

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Specifically, out of the spectrum of indicators that can be computed using this application, nine envi-ronmental performance indicators were selected and the corresponding values were computed for the six previously mentioned school design project submis-sions. These indicators are listed in Table 1.

The scope of the LCA analysis included in the present study the production of the building materi-als and components and their transportation to the construction site.

3 RESULTS

3.1 Energy Analysis Figure 1 illustrates the energy performance of the six original projects (in terms of annual heating load in kWh), as simulated by the 10 student groups. For comparison purposes, the figure also includes the energy performance as simulated by the doctoral stu-dent.

The deviations may be attributed to four broad er-ror categories corresponding to component, geome-try, zone, and material description (see Table 2). Table 1. Selected Environmental performance categories for LCA

Indicator Symbol Unit Global warming potential GWP kg (CO2) Ozone depletion potential ODP kg (CCl3F) Acidification potential AP kg (SO2) Nutrient enrichment pot. NP kg (PO4

3-) Human toxicity HT kg Photochem. Ozone form. POCP kg (C2H4) Hazardous waste HW kg Bulk waste BW kg Embodied energy EE MJ

Table 2. Types and instances of modeling errors

Error type Instance Component description

Error in the layer sequence of a multi-layered building component

Geometry description

Erroneous room dimensions

Zone set-tings

Error in internal load assumptions (magni-tude and schedule)

Material de-scription

Error in the value of thermal transmittance of an external wall

As mentioned earlier, the students groups were

required to use simulation to come up with a ther-mally improved version of the initial design (via changing component properties). Figure 2 shows the simulated heating loads of the initial designs to-gether with those of the improved version. Broadly speaking, two types of design changes were respon-

sible for the energy performance improvements in the course of simulation studies. The first type in-volved the improvement of the thermal insulation properties of building enclosure components (be-yond the standard assumptions in the design compe-tition submissions).

The second type involved changes in the dimen-sions of the transparent building enclosure compo-nents. It was mentioned before that the participating stu-dents were required to document their time expendi-tures (in hours) for various modeling tasks in the course of the case study. The results of this docu-mentation are given in Table 3. They involve time spent (per group) on: i) generating a simple geomet-ric model of the design in a CAD environment; ii) transferring the geometry model to the energy simu-lation tool and adding the necessary semantic infor-mation; iii) performing the simulation runs; iv) documenting the simulation results.

Note that the times given in Table 3 include also the time needed for the simulation of a number of design changes (about five iterations per group aver-aged over all groups) involving modifications of the thermal properties of enclosure components and the size of openings in the enclosure. For comparison purposes, Table 3 includes also reference times as needed for the same modeling tasks by an experi-enced doctoral student.

The overall results of the environmental assess-ment of the six schools (projects P_1 to P_6) are summarized in Figure 3 in terms of relative indices. For each category, the worst performing design was given the index value of zero. The performance of other schools was derived by proportionally relating their actual indicator value to the indicator value of the worst performing school in that category.

The time expenditures of the doctoral student for i) modeling the six buildings in the LCA tool and ii) documenting the results were also monitored and are shown in Table 4. Note that the information in this table does not include the time needed for the gen-eration of the project database, which amounts to approximately 24 hours for a new project with the size and complexity comparable to the design sub-missions considered in the present study.

Once a project database is generated, the time needed for the generation of databases for similar projects (sharing a number of building materials and components) can be reduced down to about 50%.

4 DISCUSSION

4.1 Time matters Consider the following scenario. A novice designer with an educational background in architecture (in-volving at least a semester-long course on the fun-

19

damentals of thermal performance of buildings) needs to estimate the energy performance (heating load) of a roughly 2200 m2 building based on a pre-liminary design (with the resolution level of a typi-cal design competition submission).

The designer has recently completed an intensive 10-hour tutorial on using a simulation tool for the assessment of the thermal performance of prelimi-nary designs. The assessment should explore possi-ble energy performance improvements (around 20%

heating load reduction) via "semantic" design changes (involving roughly five iterations on com-ponent properties and dimensions). For this scenario, our study implies a required time expenditure of about 30 to 40 person-hours (see Table 3).

Figure 4 illustrates the portions of this time spent toward generating the building model for simulation, running the simulations, and documenting the re-sults.

0

50000

100000

150000

200000

250000

G1 G2 G3 G4 G5 G6 G7 G8 G9 G10

Hea

ting

Load

[kW

h]

students Referance

Figure 1. Simulated energy performance of the six design projects (annual heating load)

0

50000

100000

150000

200000

250000

G1 G2 G3 G4 G5 G6 G7 G8 G9 G10

Hea

ting

Load

[kW

h]

initial improved

Figure 2. Simulated energy performance of the original and improved versions of the six design projects

Table 3. Overview of the time expenditures (means and standard deviations in hours) by the participating students groups (together with reference times of an experienced doctoral student) for performing various modeling-related tasks

CAD model Energy model Simulation Documentation Total time/project Mean (students) 4.6 15.0 9.9 6.0 35.4 STD (Students) 1.6 3.1 4.2 2.9 6.5 Mean (Ref.) 5.7 11.7 4.7 7.4 29.5 STD (Ref.) 1.5 2.9 1.2 1.0 4.8

20

Figure 3. Calculated relative performance of six design projects (P_1 to P_6) in terms of nine environmental impact indicators (zero denotes the worst performance, 100 the best possible per-formance in a given category)

Given the overall time budget for the design of a building, we conclude that time expenditure re-quirement alone does not explain the paucity of en-ergy simulation tool usage by architects in the pre-liminary stages of design.

The required domain knowledge is an integral part of the educational curricular of most architecture schools; it may be updated via a reasonable invest-ment in continued education, as expected from pro-fessionals in general. As to the tools and their usabil-ity, more performance simulation tools have become available recently that are suited for use in early stages of design. Such tools are not more difficult to use than typical CAD tools used by almost all archi-tects.

Thus, reasons for the paucity of tool usage amongst architects may have to be used elsewhere: A considerable fraction of architects do not seem to consider performance assessment as integral to their professional role. As with the structural analysis, they seem to believe that such tasks should be "out-

sourced" (i.e., performed by building physics "ex-perts"), even though the majority of the architects do believe they should know more about building performance and its evaluation methods (Mahdavi et al. 2003). Moreover, many design professionals complain about being overloaded and underpaid. Perhaps additional dedicated social investments in measures and tools toward better performing build-ings should be considered.

Table 4. Time required (in hours) by a doctoral student for LCA

Project LCA Mod-eling

Documenta-tion

Total time/project

1 15 12 27 2 12 12 24 3 11 11 22 4 11 11 22 5 10 10 20 6 10 10 20 Mean 11.5 11 22.5 STD 1.9 0.9 2.7

Simulation 28%

Documentation 17%

Building model 55%

Figure 4. Relative time allotment for various energy simula-tion-related tasks

We must note, however, that time expenditure re-quirements for simulation-based thermal perform-ance analysis can of course quickly go beyond the specifics of the above scenario. It might be the case that more design iteration would be desirable (in-volving also changes in building geometry).

Likewise, further performance indicators (e.g. those addressing thermal comfort issues in the sum-mer period, daylight availability) may have to be considered. One could argue that some additional simulation efforts beyond those considered in the above scenario would be still within the architects' realm of possibilities both in term of time invest-ment and required expertise. However, in order to judge this question in a reasoned manner, a versatile time estimation instrument would be required. Such

P_4 P_5 P_6

N

H

H

B

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

GW

ODP

AP

POC

EE

P_1 P_2 P_3

21

an instrument could consider various dimensions of a simulation study in terms of the factors that affect the required effort for simulation. Table 5 includes the primary dimensions of such a "simulation effort space". Table 5. Some basic dimensions of the "simulation effort space"

Dimension Remark Size The physical dimensions of the project Complexity The complexity of the form and assembly

of the design Resolution Preliminary versus detailed design Semantic it-erations

Number of modifications to building mate-rial, component, and system properties

Geometric it-erations

Number of modifications to the building form, massing, and topology

Performance indicators

Types and number of performance indica-tors (energy, light, acoustics, …)

Simulator's experience

Novice versus expert tool user

Our specific case study provides basic clues with re-gard to some of the dimensions of Table 5. We com-bined such data together with additional assumptions regarding the remaining dimensions of the simula-tion effort space, to construct a demonstrative proto-type simulation time estimation tool (see Appendix for the mathematical formulations of these assump-tions).

Figure 5 provides a few illustrative examples of predictions that were made for three distinctive sce-narios (see Table 6) using this tool. Thereby, the re-lationship between project size and the total required simulation study time are derived for three different scenarios as described in Table 5. It was assumed that: i) all projects had low levels of resolution and complexity; ii) all performance indicators could be computed using the same performance simulation application. Low, intermediate, and high level of ex-periences were denoted with 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

Note that Figure 5 is merely meant to illustrate the potential toward estimation of required simulation effort based on various pieces of information on the dimensions of the simulation effort space. The tool's underlying knowledge-base is quite rudimentary at this point and needs to be substantiated and vali-dated in the course of future studies.

The previous discussion of the required simulation effort circled around those performance indicators, which are covered in typical architectural curricula (e.g. heating load). Yet, increasingly, energy per-formance is being viewed as just one of the many parameters to be factored in the evaluation of build-ings. According to this view, the environmental im-pact associated with building construction and op-eration, for example, must not only consider energy use during the operation phase, but also a number of

other processes (involving embodied energy, emis-sion of green house gases, etc.). To accommodate these additional considerations, a comprehensive environmental LCA would be necessary. In view of required time and expertise, however, such a com-prehensive analysis represents a different scenario from the energy simulation case.

S 1

S 2

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000

Si ze [m²]

S 3

Tim

e [h

ours

]

Figure 5. Illustrative examples of time requirement estimations as a function of project size for three different simulation study scenarios (scenarios S1 to S3 as per Table 6)

Table 6. Illustrative simulation study scenarios depicted in Figure 5

S1 S2 S3 Semantic iterations 10 5 3 Geometric iterations 4 3 2 Performance indicators 3 2 1 Level of expertise 1 2 3

A novice designer with an educational background in architecture who intends to perform a computa-tional LCA study would have to spend about 200 hours to acquire the required domain knowledge and to learn to use a proper tool (this estimation is based on a self-study scenario and may be reduced if a formal LCA course and tool tutorial option is avail-able). To our knowledge, few architectural firms could or would be prepared to consider such level of investment, unless corresponding code compliance requirements are set in place and commensurate ad-justments to the professional design fee structure are made.

Given the scenario of a designer with knowledge of LCA and corresponding tools, the actual time re-quired to calculate the environmental performance of preliminary building designs is, however, not ex-cessive: Our case study (Table 4) suggests a time re-quirement of about 40 to 50 person-hours for the LCA of a preliminary design for a roughly 2200 m2 building. Figure 6 illustrates the fraction of this time spent toward generating the project database, LCA modeling, and documentation.

22

LCA 25%

Documentation24%

Database 51%

Figure 6. Relative time allotment for various LCA-related tasks

4.2 Considerations of effectiveness In all cases where clear building performance guide-lines are available, the derivation and interpretation of corresponding indicators is straight-forward. As such, a simulation study may show if a design is meeting a specific performance requirement in terms of mandated values of a corresponding indicator. Heating load or predicted annual energy use are ex-amples of such indicators.

We do not mean to imply that providing evidence for code compliance is the sole (or even the most important) mode of using performance simulation to support design: Much more can be learned about the future performance of an actual building through simulation of its behavior in the design phase. None-theless, this code compliance or benchmarking func-tionality of performance simulation is well-understood in principle by practitioners and is be-coming more of a routine component of the building design process.

Heating load, for example, may be quite a limited indicator in that it represents only one of the many indicators of a design's quality. But given a proper simulation procedure, it is possible in principle to derive and interpret its value in a conclusive manner. The same cannot be said of other indicators consid-ered in this paper.

For example, LCA tools can provide a large set of diverse environmentally relevant indicators. Not only it is rather difficult and cumbersome to assem-ble reliable input information for such assessments, but also it is quite a challenge to interpret their re-sults. In this regard, Figure 3 provides a point in case. Even though the results of the analysis have been expressed here in relative terms, it is not easy to gain a clear impression as to the relative environ-mental performance of the six projects involved. It is of course possible to derive a weighted average of multiple indicators in terms of a single aggregate in-dicator of environmental performance. However, the reasoning behind such weighting approaches is often inconclusive and difficult to objectify. In this con-

text, a conjecture may be appropriate. When we move from limited, concrete, and quantitative indi-cators to more comprehensive evaluation perspec-tives, we inadvertently lose on the conclusiveness of our evaluative tools and their results.

5 CONCLUDING REMARK

The paucity of tool usage by architects to derive the preliminary indicators of building performance (such as energy indices) cannot be explained solely based on the required level of knowledge and effort. How-ever, more comprehensive (e.g. LCA-based) compu-tational assessment of detailed building designs is currently beyond both the capability and the capacity of most architects.

In general, the efforts to simultaneously maximize comprehensiveness and objective reproducibility in architectural design evaluation have had limited suc-cess. Performance simulation tools can provide us with various views and appraisals of designs. These are very useful, as they are – if properly generated – reproducible and observer-independent.

But they are also partial, in that they usually have a very specific and technical scope. There remains a significant degree of choice on the side of an evalua-tor as to which of those partial views and appraisals, if any, are made effective in the overall design deci-sion making and quality evaluation processes. This is not meant to devalue the role of assessment tools that aim at objectivity, but to point to the limitations of their role in the current building delivery process:

The gap between the sum total of available ana-lytical evidence about a design's attributes and an overall evaluative judgment regarding its quality can be filled in practice with all kinds of subjective im-pulses and bottom-line monetary considerations.

6 ACKNOWLEGEMENT

The case study presented in this paper would not have been possible without the support and com-mitment of the participating students. The author would also like to acknowledge the contributions by S. El-Bellahy and E. Panzhauser toward the collec-tion of data used in this paper.

23

7 APPENDIX: ILLUSTRATIVE ALGORITHMS FOR THE COMPUTATION OF THE SIMULATION EFFORT SPACE

The total time (Z) required for a simulation task (in hours) is derived as the sum of the time components needed for construction of the CAD and simulation models (Zmc, Zmp), simulation runs (Zsim), and docu-mentation (Zdoc):

docsimmpmc ZZZZZ +++= These time components are computed in terms of weighted products of parameter concerning project size (S), degree of informational resolution (R), complexity (C), performance indicators (I), semantic and geometric iterations (SI, GI), and degree of the user's expertise (E):

( )mcmcmcmcmcmcmcmc EGISIICRSZ ⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅= 6.4 ( )mpmpmpmpmpmpmpmp EGISIICRSZ ⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅= 15 ( )simsimsimsimsimsimsimsim EGISIICRSZ ⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅= 9.9

( )docdocdocdocdocdocdocdoc EGISIICRSZ ⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅= 6 For some of these terms approximate functions were derived below that use, as input information, project size A (in m2), number of performance indicators (nind), number of semantic and geometric iterations (nsi, ngi), and the degree of user expertise (dexp=1 de-notes novice, dexp=3 expert user). For the case study described in this paper, all terms pertaining to reso-lution and complexity were assigned 1, indicating low levels of project resolution and complexity. As the experiment did not include projects of signifi-cantly deviating levels of complexity and resolution, associated functions were not derived.

5.0103.2 4 +⋅⋅== − ASS mpmc 1=== mcmcmc ESII

( ) 176 −⋅+= indmp nI ( ) 154 −⋅+= indsim nI ( ) 132 −⋅+= inddoc nI

( ) 183 −⋅+=== sidocsimmp nSISISI ( )gimc nGI ⋅+= 8.02.0

( )gidocsimmp nSIGIGI ⋅+=== 7.03.0 ( )1

exp 101.1 −⋅−== dEE docmp ( )explog1 dEsim −=

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Bazjanac, V. 2001. Acquisition of building geometry in the simulation of energy performance. Proceedings of the sev-enth IBPSA Conference. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. pp. 305 – 311.

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De Wilde, P. 2004. Computational Support for the Selection of Energy Saving Building Components. Doctoral thesis. Delft University Press. ISBN 90-407-2476-8.

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Vigon, B. 1992. A Conceptual Framework for Life Cycle Impact Assessment. Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Pensacola, FL.

Forsberg, A., Burström, F. 2001. Tools for environmental as-sessment of the built environment. Proceedings of Susplan 2001. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Holleris Petersen E., 2002. LCA Tool for Use in the Building Industry. International Journal of Low Energy and Sustain-able Buildings. Vol. 1. 1999. pp. 1 – 11.

Kortman, J., van Ejwik, H., Mak, J., Anink, D., Knapen, M. 1998. Presentation of tests by architects of the LCA- based computer tool Eco-Quantum domestic. Proceedings of Green Building Challenge 1998, Vancouver, Canada.

Lam, K. P., Wong, N. H., Feriady, H. 1999. A study of the use of performance-based simulation tools for building design and evaluation in Singapore. Proceedings of the sixth IB-PSA conference. Kyoto, Japan. pp. 675 – 682.

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Mahdavi, A. and Ries, R. 1998. Toward computational eco-analysis of building designs. Computers and Structures 67 (1998) pp. 357 - 387.

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Mahdavi, A., Feurer, S., Redlein, A., Suter, G. 2003. An in-quiry into the building performance simulation tools usage by architects in Austria. Proceedings of the Eight Interna-tional IBPSA Conference (Eindhoven, Netherlands). Augenbroe, G., Hensen, J. (eds). ISBN 90 386 1566 3. Vol. 2. pp. 777-784.

Simapro 2004. Pre’ consultants. http://www.pre.nl.

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1 DIFFERENT ICT NEEDS AND IMPACT ON INTERIOR SYSTEMS

Today’s available integrated IT-infrastructure allows students to attend lectures passively from every an-gle. However, interaction is an essential part of dif-ferent teaching styles. Video conferencing, docu-ment and application sharing, including sharing control would help to develop ODL-scenarios (open distant learning). But interactive cooperation is more than jointly using some software or documents. We argue that the ICT infrastructure does not suffi-ciently support all modes of interactive, remote teaching and learning. Active participation of stu-dents requires not only a backbone with sufficient performance for bi-directional audio and video transmission but also assisting and interactive de-vices such as beamers, cameras, smartboards, W-LAN as well as lighting and shading devices. These components should be easily and seamlessly acces-sible to students and teachers.

A number of different facilities and infrastructure setups have been used by the author in various joint teaching efforts over the last decade such as the

CSCW-Labs at the universities in Braunschweig (Germany) and Maribor (Slovenia), or facilities in the “Intelligent Workplace Building” at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh/PA, or a flexible teaching environment at Dresden University of Technology (Germany).

The limitations of the flexible teaching environ-ment were reached, when lecturers initiated sponta-neous discussions among students. Remote camera control and stored positions were not available. Therefore, it was impossible to focus on individual students and his or her specific contribution.

Video quality strongly depends on the appropri-ate lighting equipment and the acoustic conditions of the room. Especially equipped CSCW-Labs deliver much better conditions than standard rooms featur-ing ordinary direct lighting devices without dimming capabilities and low-quality blinds. Finally, inte-grated control devices with automatic blinds control, multiple artificial lighting scenarios, stored camera positions, etc. ensure an optimal scene and are much easier to operate than a traditional classroom setup with the need for multiple, individual control de-vices.

Is There Any Intelligent Classroom to Support New Ways of Teaching

Karsten Menzel Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Volker Hartkopf Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh/PA, USA

ABSTRACT: Many publications have been written about the necessity for interdisciplinary education and collaboration of A/E/C (Architecture/Engineering/Construction) students. However, little attention has so far been paid on the design and the development of an appropriate infrastructure to easily and flexibly supporting sophisticated interdisciplinary “remote” teaching scenarios. New scenarios and methods for teaching graduate and undergraduate students, such as locally distributed classes or project-based scenarios require appropriate integrated ICT and infrastructure systems. Information and communication technology (ICT) must become an integrated part of the built-in environment. ICT-components, presentation devices, lighting systems, and fur-niture need to be understood as one system, instead of being “add-ons”. This paper explains the importance of integrated, flexible Building-Furniture-ICT-Systems (BFI) for the flexible and improved support of teaching scenarios. By the example of typical work environments - a single workspace, a team space, and an integrated lab – it is explained how such a modular system could be intro-duced and adapted incrementally. A methodology is developed describing the interdependencies between dif-ferent didactic concepts on the one hand and ICT, immobile and mobile facilities, on the other hand. Conse-quently, a formalized synthesis strategy for integrated BFI-systems is developed. This strategy is based on evaluation criteria accumulating performance indicators of BFI-components. The criteria are based on experi-ence gained over the last decade in international, project-centered, collaborative teaching efforts for architec-ture and civil engineering students.

25

Furthermore, available audio equipment influ-ences the possible modes for presenting the teaching material to the students. A headset seems to be a good solution for lecturing, since it suppresses echo. However, in seminars it leads to the psychological effect that the lecturer is “encapsulated” into the “technical” equipment and thus loses the contact to the students sitting in the classroom. Desktop micro-phones are less disturbing, but since they are more sensitive, they transmit too much noise and might echo the voice from the loudspeakers. Wireless clip microphones have proved to be the most useful. The microphone is attached to the lecturer in a “static” way and can thus be tuned once and used over the complete lecture time. Also, the lecturer can act “hands-free” and is thus able to better interact with local students.

Finally, the lecturer can present the teaching ma-terial by using a smart board and explain digital con-tent in a much more interactive way than “statically” sitting behind his/her computer. The touch screen of a tablet PC can be used as an alternative solution to smartboards. Teaching material can be annotated by the lecturer in an easy way by using a pen working on the touch screen. The combination of animated slides and annotation will lead to more interactive teaching scenarios, avoiding the “sterility” that is inherent by presenting complete slides. Tablet PCs might be used either in big lecture halls, where the size of smartboards is too small for presentation, or in rooms without a smartboard.

2 TEACHING METHODS AND DIDACTIC PRINCIPLES

Within our first chapter the authors purely described their experience. However, for general evaluation and guidance, a more structured and formalized ap-proach is necessary to answer the question whether there is an Intelligent Classroom available to support sophisticated teaching scenarios.

Before analyzing the problem domain we will begin with a simple and pragmatic definition of the “Intelligent Classroom”.

DEFINITION: An “Intelligent Classroom” supports flexible lay-

outs, is equipped with modularly designed, easily ex-tendible infrastructure systems (fixed and move-able). All components of the infrastructure are seamlessly accessible to teachers and students, effi-ciently to maintain, and adaptable with moderate ef-fort in a short time to different teaching scenarios.

Design, construction, and implementation of such

an “Intelligent Classroom” aim at the optimal sup-port of different teaching scenarios. However, the

different teaching methods and didactic principles require different levels of ICT-support. Therefore, in Figure 1, teaching methods are classified into three main groups.

Teaching Style

InteractiveTeaching

Independent Work

NonverbalVerbal

QuestionImpulseConversation

Single WorkTeam Work

perform,lead,

develop,guide,

stimulate,advise,

receive,duplicate,

participate,think,

act,process,

Teaching(Teacher)

Learning(Student)

Presentation

T L(S) T L(S) T L(S)(-) ++ +(-)+

Intensityof Activity

Figure 1: Teaching Methods: Overview

2.1 Different ICT-needs of teaching methods

Interactive Teaching, or Team Work need a more different ICT-support than Presentations or Single Work. For each of the categories depicted in Figure 1 different levels of ICT-needs can be defined.

PRESENTATION This group of teaching methods is characterized by: • Access to shared information and • Need for uni-directional audio and video-

support. Lectures with remote students are scheduled in advance. Presentation material can be prepared and distributed before the lecture.

INTERACTIVE TEACHING This group of teaching methods is characterized by: • Integrated usage of tools and devices for:

o Information-sharing and communication, o Interactive presentation and o Team-oriented modification.

• Audio-communication and voting mechanisms are suggested. Video-support improves the qual-ity of interaction but is not absolutely required.

• Formalization allows organizing planned and scheduled team meetings. However, individual workers must be able to easily setup and arrange meetings with remotely working colleagues. Team areas and special labs must be available at a short distance from the home base of teachers and students.

26

TEAM WORK, INDIVIDUAL HOMEWORK This group of teaching methods is characterized by: • the need for intensive, spontaneous, and inte-

grated usage of communication and presentation devices, where the usage of communication de-vices is dominating.

• the strong need for video-supported communica-tion. Trust-building needs “face-to-face” com-munication.

• In some cases (planning, specialized domain functions) information and application sharing is needed to support brain storming and immediate documentation of work results.

• meetings of teams and individuals are scheduled in a spontaneous way. Therefore, the layout of spaces must be easily re-configurable.

3 EXAMPLES FOR INTELLIGENT BUILDINGS

The construction of buildings with complex re-quirement profiles demands extensive scientific and practical knowledge and experience. The team from the Department of Architecture at CMU added both, practical experience and in-depth knowledge about flexible building design and systems integration, gained from design and construction processes at the 'Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace-Building' (IW).

This research building is used to test construction parts and components as well as different office lay-outs, data-processing and telecommunication tech-nologies for their efficiency in operation. The nov-elty is that all components are integrated into the complete system - the 'building' - during the tests and can therefore be evaluated comprehensively.

The modularity in design and construction at the IW-building allows to easily exchange parts of the service systems but also to flexibly modify and re-arrange the layout of the building, its offices, work-spaces, and team areas.

The SCENE LAB is a multifunctional classroom for teleteaching and computer simulations at the Braunschweig University of Technology designed and developed by one of the authors. It supports various CSCW-scenarios, including: • the conferencing scenario

for multimedia presentations to local and remote students and interaction with the remote audience

• the engineering and design scenario supporting locally distributed, computer-aided collaborative design

• the high performance computing scenario for modeling and simulation of problems in the area of environmental science, of building phys-ics, and of architecture visualization

3.1 Types of teaching environments

This section specifies different types of teaching en-vironments. By re-arranging the layout and adding further components it is possible to incrementally extend the functionality of the described types of teaching environments. Each type addresses specific scenarios: the single workspace supports quick and inexpensive establishment and presentation scenar-ios, the team-area focuses on the support of co-located teams and interactive teaching scenarios, es-pecially individual work of project teams including homework, and the integrated lab can be used as a hub for complex ODL-scenarios.

The traditional home-base of teachers and stu-dents is most often a basic office facility. However, easy access to information and communication tech-nology, less cabling, and ergonomic furniture is not always available. The “cubicle” (see Figure 2 ) might be one low-cost alternative to temporarily in-stall an individual work environment to support the usage of desktop communication systems in a quiet place to have project-centered storage space but also the ability for creating a personal work environment (see also [9]).

Figure 2: “Cubicle” at the Intelligent Workplace CMU, Pittsburgh, PA

The second type of teaching environment focuses

on supporting sophisticated collaboration scenarios of distributed teams (see Figure 3). Integrated Labs are used as hubs for complex teaching scenarios. Therefore, they shall be operated at the university or department level at universities.

Integrated Labs combine various systems and components allowing to remotely access equipment (e.g. machines, cameras, voice control, blinds) and specialized facilities for the management of multi-point, multi-modal virtual meetings. It is possible to build an Integrated Lab by extending a modularly designed team area with additional system compo-nents (see also [10] )

27

Figure 3: Scene-Lab at Braunschweig University

The third type of teaching environments focuses

on the support of co-located teams and primarily considers individual work in project-based scenar-ios. Additionally, it allows the integration of stu-dents, teachers and experts working remotely.

By attending electronically-supported meetings and by using an embedded ICT-infrastructure, mem-bers of locally distributed organizations can virtually meet with each other. It takes only moderate addi-tional investments to establish team areas based on single workspaces.

Figure 4: Team Area at the Intelligent Workplace CMU, Pittsburgh, PA

4 FROM SINGLE COMPONENTS TO BFI-SYSTEMS

Facilities and interior systems should support teach-ing scenarios instead of dominating them. In order to achieve ergonomic work and to support flexible working scenarios the integration of certain building elements (e.g. shading or darkening devices, supply

networks [air-conditioning, power, computing]) with interior systems (e.g. flexible walls, lighting sys-tems, furniture, presentation systems), and with in-formation and communication systems (video-conferencing components, computers) is absolutely necessary (see also [3] ).

To better express the strong need for modular de-sign and flexible integration of ICT-elements into built-in artifacts and furniture, the term Building-Furniture-and ICT-Systems (short BFI-systems) is introduced. A BFI-system allows accessing multiple components, or elements through one single inter-face.

System / MacroLayer

Functional / MedianLayer

Component / MicroLayer

BUILT ARTEFACTSLoad Bearing StructureWall Systems, FacadeNetworks (all types)Lighting Systems

ZONES (Rooms, Floors)Furniture Systems

Presentation SystemsVideo-Conferencing Systems

Artificial Lighting Systems

SYSTEMS & COMPONENTSTables, Chairs

Projectors, Smart BoardsCameras, Microphones

Lamps, Task Lights

Figure 5: Classification of BFI-System Layers

4.1 Modular and Layer-Oriented Structure

BFI-systems are classified into the three different layers described below. The layer-oriented structure is introduced in order to reduce complexity when specifying a certain type of teaching environment.

COMPONENT or MICRO LAYER Elements of this layer support a dedicated activity

of an individual user (this might correspond to a specific role within the teaching scenario or one spe-cific person responsible for that role); e.g. they sup-port video-communication, or slide presentations and annotation.

FUNCTIONAL or MEDIAN LAYER Elements of this layer deliver main, general func-

tionalities to “the user”; e.g. they support presenta-tions, interactive work, or IT-supported team-scenarios.

SYSTEM or MACRO LAYER BFI-Systems belonging to the macro layer inte-

grate the different BFI-systems of the lower layers into one bigger system using synergy effects and fi-nally support a more efficient performance of teach-ing scenarios.

28

4.2 Component or Micro Layer

Table 1 illustrates the proposed requirements or specifications for the above defined teaching envi-ronment types. Each line of the table specifies the relationship between one specific BFI-system com-ponent and each of the three teaching environment types. It is not intended to specify or describe all possible BFI-elements of the Component Layer rather than defining a framework and specifying ex-amples that might help organizations to define their individual requirements in a structured and compati-ble way. Table 1: VO-work environment types and relation to BFI-

system layers and related elements

BFI-Classification Teaching Environment

Macro Layer

Functional Layer

Component Layer S T T I

ZONES Presentation X X ZON: Prs: Beamer X X ZON: Prs: Smartboard X X ZON: Prs: Document Camera X ZONES Video Conf.

ZON: Vic: Headset x ZON: Vic: Integrated video/audio x o ZON: Vic: Room microphone x x ZON: Vic: Loudspeaker o x x ZON: Vic: Cam. with auto focus x x x ZON: Vic: Cam w stored position x x ZON: Vic: Cam w remote control o x ZONES Furniture

ZON: Fur: Integrated cabling o x ZON: Fur: Reconfigurable tables o xZON: Fur: Flexible chairs x x xZON: Fur: Roomware o xLighting Artificial L.

LIG: Art: Task light o LIG: Art: Dimming x x o LIG: Art: Indirect x x o Lighting Natural L. x x o LIG: Nat: External shading x x o LIG: Nat: Blinds (remote control) x o Network Data

NET: D: Wireless LAN o x x NET: D: Under floor cabling o x x NET: Integration o x x NET: Int: Central control unit o x x

LEGEND Suggested component o Required component x S: Single Workspace T: Team Area I: Integrated Lab

4.3 Functional or Median Layer

BFI-Systems belonging to the ‘Functional Layer’ combine different BFI-elements of the ‘Component or Micro Layer’ with complementing functionalities into one integrated system supporting teaching func-tionalities (see Figure 6).

PRESENTATION SYSTEMS (Prs): By projecting or receiving/scanning content these

systems support de-localisation and synchronous work – two of the main characteristics of ODL. They contribute to improved co-operation and inter-action of groups working in different locations. Beamers, smart boards and document cameras must be installed in such a way that these devices can be used in combination with several sources and soft-ware types for presentations and interactive work in different teaching scenarios.

VIDEO-CONFERENCING SYSTEMS (Vic): These systems allow for exchanging video/audio

streams. In most cases, data exchange and applica-tion sharing is supported as well. However, the pure availability of Vic-systems does not automatically guarantee intensive, high-quality interaction among team members. The excellent technical performance of these systems can be influenced negatively by missing or misfunctioning interior systems.

Natural and artificial lighting systems as well as shading devices influence the performance of video components. Geometry, material selection, flooring and curtains influence acoustics and thus the per-formance of audio devices.

FURNITURE SYSTEMS (Fur): These systems shall support ergonomic work as

well as easy and fast reconfiguration of space lay-outs and usage scenarios of rooms (see also [7]).

Adaptability to different work scenarios Efficient building operation

Easy and fast adaptability of layouts to various work scenarios

Videoconferencing System

Central Control Unit

Reconfigurable Tables

Services

Presentation System

Sponteneous or scheduled communication & trust building

De-localised, synchronous & asynchronous team work

Figure 6: Integrating complementing support func-tions to system functionalities

29

4.4 System or Macro Layer Components of this layer belong to the main ele-ments1 of the built artifact itself (e.g. the building) or they are strongly connected with them. There is little opportunity for changing these elements with only moderate efforts. Therefore, they need to be de-signed in a careful way to address multi-purpose functionalities and to have enough extension capa-bilities over the whole life of the built-in artifact (see also [5], and [6]).

LIGHTING SYSTEMS (LIG): support direct, in-direct or task lighting. Shading devices, glazing and other types of natural lighting devices support or might even replace artificial lighting elements. In this way, a well-designed lighting system contrib-utes not only to the improved performance of ICT-systems but also contributes to a more sustainable operation of the teaching-infrastructure and healthier working conditions (see also [4]).

CENTRAL CONTROL UNITS (CCU): integrate the remote-control functions of BFI-systems of the Median Layer from one single point with one single user interface. Thus, on the one hand, the number of remote control devices decreases and, on the other hand, efficiency increases by reducing learning ef-forts by using one single control device. Addition-ally, the main control unit can be connected to the internet and thus all devices can be remote-controlled.

NETWORKS (NET): The installation of W-LAN and under floor cabling supports easy accessibility of the different media such as electrical power and computer networks.

5 SPECIFICATION OF TEACHING ENVIRONMENTS

Flexible teaching scenarios are better supported or even enabled through modularly designed BFI-systems and their integration into the built artifacts. To achieve such a modular design, the following de-sign patterns specify different types of teaching en-vironments.

The specification is divided into four parts. The first part describes Key Facets. The second part pre-sents one typical illustration. The third part de-scribes the functionality of each teaching environ-ment type. Finally, the fourth part characterizes the specifics of selected BFI-elements and systems.

The definition of the key facets are based on sur-veys and questionnaires taken from the EU-cluster project VOSTER and merged with findings from the authors’ own experience gained from different joint teaching efforts.

1 Main elements:= load-bearing elements and enclosure

5.1 Single Workspaces KEY FACETS: Furniture flexible (ergonomic) chairs Video Conferencing Integrated video/audio Network under floor cabling wireless LAN Lighting Task lights

Single workspaces are introduced to allow any indi-vidual (teacher or student) to quickly configure and inexpensively establish his/her project-specific workspace. Single workspaces consist of basic com-ponents. However, they must address all require-ments for teaching scenarios: ad-hoc interaction sce-narios, trust building, formalized work scenarios with or without participants from remote locations.

Ergonomic chairs (and tables) are defined as the most important feature supporting individual work. Secondly, audio devices need to support two modes, private work with headsets as well as a public mode using loudspeakers, in order to allow visitors to par-ticipate in audio and/or video conferences.

Team members of ODL-scenarios must be able to connect different hardware devices easily and com-fortably. Therefore, under floor cabling and wireless LAN are further key facets. Finally, task lights en-able users to better adjust lighting to different work-ing situations (e.g. reading, video conference, com-puter work).

5.2 Team Areas KEY FACETS: Network wireless LAN Presentation beamer, smartboard Network Under floor cabling Video Conferencing room microphone camera w. stored positions Lighting indirect lighting, dimming Furniture flexible chairs

30

Team areas support interactive meetings of co-located teams by simultaneously enabling the inte-gration of remote co-workers.

One major pre-requisite for such scenario is the flexible accessibility of computer networks through W-LAN. Team work additionally requires reduced cable work but a sufficient and appropriate power supply for all hardware devices. Consequently, W-LAN and under floor cabling are key facets.

Additionally, there is a clear request for sepa-rated, high-quality audio-functionality. Therefore, the usage of room microphones is suggested instead of integrated audio/video headsets. Furthermore, easy usability of video conferencing services can be achieved through cameras with stored positions and sophisticated lighting devices. Because it is esti-mated that team areas are used for only a limited time, the importance of flexible (ergonomic) chairs decreases compared to single work spaces.

5.3 Integrated Labs KEY FACETS: Presentation beamer, document camera Network wireless LAN under floor cabling Video Conferencing room microphone Loudspeaker camera w. stored positions camera w. auto focus Furniture flexible chairs

Integrated Labs are required to serve as hubs or the main facility for hosting a course. However, Inte-grated Labs are seldom available in academic insti-tutions. One reason is the high installation cost for such facilities and the lack of cost-benefit evaluation criteria for such complex systems.

However, the availability of integrated systems and controlled work-conditions will support user-friendly, situation-specific, and intensive usage of the different ICT-functionalities. It will definitely contribute to improved teaching-learning scenarios.

6 SYNTHESIS

Considerable progress has been made in terms of de-sign and development of single technical compo-nents such as smartboards, video-conferencing units or lighting systems. However, most of them are dis-covered as ‘single pieces’ instead of modules of an

integrated system. However, the functionality of each component must address the need for specific teaching activities as well as for teaching environ-ment types in order to avoid inappropriate, cost-intensive system design and configuration.

Table 2: VO-Workspaces, BFI-components and supported VO-functions

teaching-style

Component (C.) Inte

ract

ive

Teac

hing

Ver

bal P

rese

ntat

ion

Non

verb

al P

rese

ntat

ion

Sing

le W

ork

Team

Wor

k

C. required for all types of workspaces NET: Wlan: Wireless LAN x x x x x NET: Cab: Under floor cabling x x x x x ZON: Fur: Flexible chairs x x x x x ZON: Vic: Loudspeaker x o x ZON: Vic: Camera with auto focus o o o C. improving quality of presentation Single WorkspacesLIG: Art: Task light x x x ZON: Vic: Headset mic. earphones x C. improving flexibility Extendable WorkspaceLIG: Art: Dimming o o o LIG: Art: Indirect o o o LIG: Nat: External shading o o o C. supporting spontaneous team-work Team AreasZON: Vic: Room microphone x x ZON: Prs: Beamer x o ZON: Prs: Smartboard x o ZON: Vic: Cam. w. stored positions x x ZON: Fur: Integrated cabling o o ZON: Fur: Reconfigurable tables o LIG: Nat: Blinds w. remote control o o C. supporting co-ordination of teams Integrated LabZON: Prs: Document Camera x x ZON: Vic: Cam. with remote control x x ZON: Fur: Roomware x x NET: Ccu: Central Control Unit x x LEGEND Suggested c. o Required c. x Furthermore, a sustainable implantation strategy for teaching environments should consider possible sys-tems and components of the Macro Layer as early as possible because these elements are interconnected with main building elements. Therefore, it is not easy to add or modify such systems over the life-cycle of a built-in artifact (see [5]/[3]) Consequently, the category ‘extendable to’ is introduced in Table 2 containing different types of lighting & presentation components, as well as network elements.

Finally, one can conclude that due to the given characteristics, an incremental extension of Team Areas towards Integrated Labs can be managed more easily than the extension of Single Workspaces.

31

7 CONCLUSIONS

New forms of teaching need flexible infrastructure systems. Today’s academic institutions need other configurations of built-in environments and its fa-cilities than traditional universities such as open of-fice spaces, team areas, ODL-Facilities, etc. (see also [2]). The quick, easy and inexpensive recon-figuration of teaching environments, consisting of the ICT-infrastructure, furniture, lighting systems, moveable wall systems, etc. should be much more supported.

Figure 7 illustrates how modular design and a flexible and intelligent integration of interior sys-tems may lead to functions that enable up-to-date teaching scenarios and efficient work at academic institutions.

Prs and Vic-Systems

Prs, Vic & Fur-Systems

Prs, & NET-Systems

NET & Wall-Systems

All BFI-systems

Communication

Presentation

Interaction

Flexible Usage

Collaboration

BFI-Component

Interactive Teaching

Independent Work

Presentation

Team Work

Teaching StyleFunction

NET Systems DocumentationNonverbal Presentation

Figure 7: BFI-systems with supported functions

and related teaching styles There are still a large number of system integra-

tion issues requiring further interdisciplinary re-search. Besides the ‘technical’ problems in the archi-tectural and construction domain, one major issue is to develop improved comprehension of collaborative processes. Each potential team member (individual or organization) needs to understand and define in advance which teaching-learning-concepts (s)he pre-fers to apply in the different phases of life-long learning. By reading Figure 7 from right to left one will obtain first hint at what teaching scenario-specific BFI-systems or components might appropri-ately support.

Teaching environments are one important en-abler, supporting the individual team members to contribute to the achievement of common academic goals within a restricted time frame and of the best quality. Only the easy and efficient usage of inte-grated systems as well as adequate investment ef-forts will allow the majority of students and teachers to concentrate on the core issues of the education process instead of being dominated by technical is-sues, BFI-system maintenance, re-configuration ef-forts, or financial problems.

REFERENCES

[1] M. Apgar: ‘The Alternative Workplace: Changing where and how people work’: Harvard Business Re-view: 1998.

[2] H. J. Bullinger, W. Bauer & S. Zinser: ‘Zukunftsoffen-sive OFFICE 21’: vgs-verlagsgesellschaft Köln: 2000 (ISBN 3-8025-1442-4).

[3] K. Daniels: ‚Technologie des ökologischen Bauens’: Birkhäuser Verlag: Basel, Boston, Berlin: 1995.

[4] V.Loftness, V. Hartkopf, A. Mahdavi, S. Lee, J. Shak-varam & K.J. Tu: ‘The Relationship of Environmental Quality in Buildings to Productivity, Energy Effective-ness, Comfort, and Health – How much Proof do we need?’: Pro-ceedings of IFMA World Worklplace Con-ference, Miami Beach (FL), 1995.

[5] V. Hartkopf, V. Loftness, P. Drake, Fred Dubin, P. Mill & G. Ziga: ‘Designing the Office of the Future : The Japanese Approach to Tomorrow's Workplace’: John Wiley & Sons; (April 1993) ASIN: 0471595691.

[6] P. Jodidio: ‘Sir Norman Foster’: Benedikt Taschen Ver-lag GmbH: Köln, 1997.

[7] N. Streitz, Th. Prante, C. Röcker, D. van Alphen, C. Magerkurth, R. Stenzel & D. A. Plewe: ‘Ambient Dis-plays and Mobile Devices for the Creation of Social Ar-chitectural Spaces: Supporting informal communication and social awareness in organizations’: In: K. O’Hara, M. Perry, E. Churchill, D. Russell (Ed.): Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies: Kluwer Publishers: 2003. pp. 387-409.

[8] N. Streitz, P. Tandler, C. Müller-Tomfelde & S. Konomi: ‘Roomware: Towards the Next Generation of Human-Computer Interaction based on an Integrated Design of Real and Virtual Worlds’: In: J. Carroll (Ed.): Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millenium (553-578), Addison-Wesley, 2001.

[9] The CBPD at Carnegie Mellon University: http://weld.arc.cmu.edu/cbpd/

[10] ‘Scene-Lab’ (technical specification): http://cib.bau.tu-dresden.de/~karsten/Forschung /GTIBW/global/ scenelab/scene_main_engl.html

32

SESSION PAPERS

33

1 INTRODUCTION

The history of computer and information science in Civil and building engineering higher education is closely related to the introduction of FORTRAN in 1955, the tool with which engineers could start using computers on their own. Since then the focus in cur-ricula has changed from pure computer program-ming to pure engineering applications, in some cases with topics that were influenced by trends in IT, like computer graphics, artificial intelligence, neural networks, mobile computing etc. The question on what a civil engineer needs to know about IT, how-ever, still doesn’t have a clear answer.

As Smith states (Smith 2003) there are often gaps in modern engineering curricula regarding computer science. Few people today deny the importance of computers. However, many engineers believe inac-curately that computing is only a skill to be acquired on the job, not also a science to be learnt in an aca-demic setting. Nevertheless, most will agree that there is a growing lack of correlation between what is taught during undergraduate courses and how en-gineers use computers in practice.

According to the research conducted by Heit-mann (Heitmann et. al. 2003), academic require-ments for all engineering programs on the Bachelor university level should contain the following abili-ties in the area of Computer Science and Informat-ics: • use common computer tools to produce docu-

ments, make presentations, carry out calculations and simulations,

• design and maintain an Internet presentation of his work

• carry out computer based tasks using object ori-ented programming and expert systems

• use professional computer codes to prepare data, and obtain reasonable results from calculations

The Master level should add the ability to • Understand the algorithms of professional codes,

their limitations and requirements, to prepare the data for code in the proper way and to analyse ob-tained results of calculations. Due to the concern of appropriate computing

component in the curriculum, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Task Committee on Computing Education of the Technical Council on Computing and Information Technology conducted a series of surveys in 1986, 1989, 1995, and 2002 to assess the current computing component of the curriculum in civil engineering. Key findings of the latest study (Abudayyeh 2004) include: • the relative importance of the top four skills

(spreadsheets, word processors, computer aided-design, electronic communication) has remained unchanged;

• programming competence is ranked very low by practitioners;

• the importance and use of geographic information system and specialized engineering software have increased over the past decade;

• the importance and use of expert systems have significantly decreased over the past decade; and

• the importance and use of equation solvers and databases have declined over the past decade Although both studies share a common view on

computer tools, they have opposite views regarding computer programming and expert systems. ASCE is encouraging the educators to either integrate pro-gramming throughout the curriculum to address the competency challenge, or to eliminate programming from the curriculum, whereby Heitmann recom-

Computer science and IT in Civil Engineering curricula

D. Rebolj & A. Tibaut Chair of Construction and Transportation IT, Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Maribor, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

ABSTRACT: The paper analyses the current situation in selected Civil engineering curricula regarding com-puter science and IT and compares the expected knowledge with the knowledge needed to solve some typical engineering tasks in the IT pervaded professional environment of the near future. The paper concludes with a suggestion for the Construction IT body of knowledge as a part of the Civil Engineering curricula.

35

mends to carry out computer based tasks using ob-ject oriented programming.

Surveys and experiences show that the share and content of subjects related to Computer science and IT in undergraduate civil engineering curricula var-ies considerably from university to university. Typi-cally there are general introductory courses, pro-gramming courses, and specialised courses on IT applications like design of building models, techni-cal drawings, finite element and heat loss programs for the determination of physical behaviour, infor-mation systems to support construction manage-ment, or systems for enterprise resource planning. The courses are, however, mostly unconnected and only give narrow knowledge about specific aspects of computer science and IT. Some graduates, com-ing to the construction industry, know how to write a more or less simple computer program in a language like C++, Java, Visual Basic, or FORTRAN, some are more familiar with general knowledge about computer architectures and operating systems. Some have learned how to efficiently use office applica-tions and other general software (typically spread-sheets or even database systems), and some have de-veloped skills in using particular specialized software. But there is little understanding of the ho-listic potentials of the IT of today.

In our opinion the question is still open on what body of knowledge (BOK) in Computer science and IT a Civil Engineer should master. Although quite some research has been made on the needs of the construction industry for Construction IT knowl-edge, we see no clear body of knowledge to be de-fined yet. In the Erasmus master program develop-ment project a consortium of seven European universities have defined a curriculum consisting of knowledge we think is necessary to develop efficient IT solutions in the construction industry and re-search (Rebolj & Menzel 2004), but this program has been developed for only a minor population of Civil Engineers. Therefore we see a necessity to open the discussion and define the Computer science and IT knowledge, which the civil engineers of the 21 century will need to efficiently use IT in their everyday as well as high demanding engineering so-lutions.

2 CURRENT SITUATION IN CURRICULA

Using the short survey questionnaire (see table 1) our aim was to measure the current state and share of courses focused on Information technology in Construction (ITC; including basic Computer Sci-ence and Informatics courses) in the Civil Engineer-ing (and related) university programs.

Our survey has addressed a large list of educa-tional institutions, but only few of them responded. We had to conclude our survey with six universities

presenting nine programs and covering altogether 32 study courses. Larger survey base would enable us better statistical results. Therefore the results pre-sented in this paper have only comparative but less statistical value.

Table 2 shows interesting variety of IT related courses offered by different programs at all six uni-versities included in the survey.

Frequency distribution of IT technologies used in the program courses presented in the survey is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2 shows very common understanding of when compulsory and optionally ITC courses are in-troduced into the course curricula. Majority of IT content is introduced very early in the curricula; 44% of all compulsory and optional courses are lec-tured in the first two undergraduate years. With a considerable gap in-between (third year, honours) postgraduate level upgrades the undergraduate knowledge base with 40% of ITC courses (compul-sory - 25%, optional – 15%).

3 NEW CONDITIONS

Today, IT is definitely one of the fastest growing technology areas. But many studies have proved that AEC industry is adapting slowly to the new oppor-tunities and potentials. We are certain that one of the reasons lies in the share and content of IT in the Civil engineering curricula. We definitely are al-ready living in the information society and the con-struction industry does already recognize the impor-tance of new information technologies in their business process (see Fig. 3), but the higher educa-tion curricula seems not to fulfil the demand.

Construction IT has become an established re-search area, but again, the results are seldom found in the curricula. Could it only be because shares are fixed and there is no more space for new knowl-edge?

In Europe the Bologna process has shattered the higher education institutions. There is still no pre-dominant opinion about the need to reform the higher education programs. In this context we don’t think much has changed regarding the extent of a civil engineering university curricula in the Bologna perspective. The two cycle model (like 3 + 2 years) may be appropriate for some areas of higher educa-tion, but a civil engineer knowledge, understanding, abilities and skills have to meet certain require-ments, which a three year program can not cover. Therefore we are considering five years of higher education. However, the program content should be reviewed and renewed, whereby the development of information society and the abundance of informa-tion flow related to information technology should be considered. Not only in computer and informa-tion science courses, but in all courses. To carry out

36

such a project it is by far not enough to assign the lecturer in charge of IT courses. The importance of IT should be recognized by the head and the man-agement of a civil engineering department and the Construction IT knowledge and skills should be in-cluded into the strategy.

4 A POSSIBLE BODY OF KNOWLEDGE FOR THE FUTURE

It is not easy to determine the body of knowledge of Computer and information science in a Civil engi-neering curriculum. Although the future trends of IT in Construction are quite well predictable (Garrett 2004), and although we know what skills and knowledge a graduate should posses, this knowledge can’t be just stuffed into some ITC courses, because it is integrated throughout many areas. Law (Law et. al. 1990) is resuming the needs and issues of Com-puting in Civil Engineering Curriculum as “to enable students to possess, in addition to their engineering skills, both the ability to evaluate and use production software and the ability to organize and supervise the development of software”.

The question is how to achieve such goal. We are convinced there is no general solution because the integration of IT in non-IT focused subjects varies very much. It depends on IT skills and knowledge of professors and lecturers as well as on the subjects’ content. In case where the IT integration is very low, Construction IT courses would be needed to explain topics like computer graphic modelling, process modelling, various software tools and their integra-tion etc. But in case where IT is highly integrated throughout the curricula, only some core computer and information science courses would be needed to explain computer architecture, computer systems, data structures and databases and programming.

We think this open question is a good candidate for a detailed survey that could be carried out by one of the ITC focused associations, like for example CIB W78. In the framework of curricula reform at the University of Maribor we have proposed a body of knowledge for the civil engineering bachelor and master programs, which is formed around three ba-sic aspects: • Information representation (data structures and

models, information modelling, including classi-fication, representation, implementation and inte-gration)

• Information processing (computer systems and programming)

• Communication (interaction between computers and humans in all possible combinations); The detailed body of knowledge is represented in

table 3.

5 CONCLUSION

Because the IT field is changing rather fast in com-parison to other fields in civil engineering (i.e. phys-ics, mathematics) the course material is subject to frequent update therefore the body of knowledge should be classified according to the persistence and actuality respectively. The stable part definitely should form a sound basis for the civil engineers to be able to learn throughout his career. Only in this way AEC/FC firms will be able to adapt to fast changing IT potentials and benefit from them.

REFERENCES

Froese, T. 2004. “Help Wanted: Project Information Officer,” European Conference on Product and Process Modeling (ECPPM-2004), Istanbul, Turkey.

Rebolj, D. & Menzel, K. 2004. Another step towards a virtual university in construction IT, Electron. j. inf. tech. constr., 17 (9) 257-266 (available at http://www.itcon.org/cgi-bin/papers/Show?2004_17).

Ian F.C. Smith 2003. Towards a Vision for Information Tech-nology in Civil Engineering, American Society of Civil En-gineers, Reston, VA, USA, pp 1-10

Heitmann, G., Avdelas, A. & Arne, O. 2003. Innovative Cur-ricula in Engineering Education. Firenze University Press.

Abudayyeh, O. Y., Cai, H. , Fenves, S.J., Law, K. O’Neill, R. & Rasdorf, W.. 2004. Assessment of the Computing Component of Civil Engineering Education J. Comp. in Civ. Engrg., Volume 18, Issue 3, pp. 187-195

Law, K. H., Rasdorf, W. J., Karamouz, M. & Abudayyeh, O. Y. 1990. Computing in Civil Engineering Curriculum: Needs and Issues. Journal of Professional Issues in Engi-neering. Vol. 116, no. 2, pp. 128-141.

Garrett, J.H., Flood, I., Smith, I.F.C. & Soilbelman, L. 2004. Information Technology in Civil Engineering – Future Trends. J. Comp. in Civ. Engrg., Volume 18, Issue 3, pp. 185-186.

37

APPENDIX 1: TABLES AND FIGURES

Table 1: Survey to assess current state of IT in curricula I University II Name III Level (BSc, MSc, PhD) IV

Program Duration (ECTS or years)

V In current program VI In previous program VI

Share of ITC courses Expected in future program

VII Professors VIII Researchers IX Assistants X

ITC staff number

Technical staff XI List of ITC courses

Index Title Year ModeContact

hours ECTS 1 c 2 c 3 c 4 c

XII Topics covered Software used 1 Computer science basics 0 2 Basic computer programming 0 3 Advanced computer programming 0 4 Software engineering 0 5 Database systems 0 6 Modelling and visualization 0 7 Product and process modelling 0 8 Mobile computing 0 9 Knowledge management 0

10 Internet based technologies 0 XIII e-support in teaching and learning Software used

1 e-mail n 2 e-forum n 3 instant messaging n 4 digital course materials available on web n 5 upload of students works n 6 audio conference n 7 video conference n

8 integrated teaching & learning environ-

ment n

38

Table 2: Universities/programs/courses presented in the survey

Institution Program 1 Delft University of Technology Architecture 1.1 Informatics 1 1.2 Informatics 2 1.3 Urban CAD 1.4 Informatics 4 1.5 Informatics 5 1.6 Introduction to scripting and programming 2 Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences 2.1 The Emotive City 2.2 Computer Aided Design I 2.3 Computer Aided Design II 2.4 Materials & Constructions 2.5 Form and Media studies 2.6 Mediated Discourse 2.7 Computer aided Urban Design 3 University of Salford, UK IT Management in Construction 3.1 IT Management 3.2 Process 3.3 Technology 3.4 IT Implementation & Innovation 4 University of Maribor Civil Engineering 4.1 Computer and information science 4.2 Information technology 4.3 Information technology in construction 5 Higher School of Technology- Algarve Uni-

versity Civil Engineering Course

5.1 Informatics I 5.2 CAD 5.3 Computation 6 Surveying Course 6.1 Informatics I 6.2 Informatics II 6.3 CAD 6.4 SIG 7 University of Canterbury Civil Engineering 7.1 Mathematical Modelling & Computation

(MATH171) 7.2 Mathematical Modelling & Computation

(EMTH271) 7.3 Geographic Information Systems (ENCI462) 8 Waterford Institute of Technology Construction Project Management 8.1 Management of ICT 9 International Construction Management 9.1 Technologies Studies

39

IT technologies used in ITC related courses

0%20%40%60%80%

100%120%

e-mail e-forum instantmessaging

digitalcourse

materialsavailable on

web

upload ofstudentsworks

audioconference

videoconference

integratedteaching &

learningenvironment

Figure 1: IT technologies used in ITC courses

0%5%

10%15%20%25%

BSc1 BSc3 MSc1optional

Compulsory/optional ITC related courses

optionalcompulsory

Figure 2: Average distribution of ITC courses within curricula

0%

27,3%

72,7%

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%

Not important

Quite important

Very important

Figure 3: Part of the results of a survey performed by the students of the Faculty of civil engineering, University of Maribor in May 2005 among around 50 Slovenian AEC companies

How would you rank the importance of IT for your company?

40

Table 3: ITC Body of knowledge proposed for the reformed Civil engineering curricula at University of Maribor Bachelor level (years 1-3) Area Content L* Outcome

Computer architecture A von Neumann's model of digital computer, computer arithmetics, peripheral devices, program execution in a single processor com-puter, multiprocessor architectures, industrial computers

Operating system B OS functionality, OS development, characteristics and compari-son of OS (Windows, Linux), the importance of choice for enter-prises

computer graphics fundamentals A theory of colours, graphical primitives, 2D and 3D graphics, the use of computer graphics in engineering

Computer communications B communication media, internet, internet services and technolo-gies

Computer and information Sci-ence / Computer systems

Advanced use of common software and software development

B spreadsheets, editors, presentations, development of simple ap-plications (VBA)

Systems life cycle A Phases of the IS life cycle

Systems analysis C requirement analysis Systems design B design techniques, object oriented approach, algorithm devel-

opment Management of IS development projects B schedule planning, establishing working group, role of civil engi-

neer

Computer and information Sci-ence / Informa-tion system de-velopment

Documentation B importance, reuse, team work Program development concepts B open code vs. closed code Programming fundamentals B basic programming language elements Data structuring B basic and composed (user) types Programming of basic algorithms B stack, tree, lists, searching and sorting, simple matrix operations

etc.

Computer and information Sci-ence / Pro-gramming

Object oriented programming B development and use of non-trivial classes Computer graphic primitives B point, line, polyline, curve, surface Computer graphic devices A theory of colours, display devices, view window, real coordinates Computer graphic algorithms B representation, display, projections

Computer and information Sci-ence / Computer graphics

Standard graphic libraries B Windows, 2D and 3D Master level (years 4-5)

Data structures in Engineering A concepts and examples of structures describing engineering ob-jects and processes

program / object libraries and compo-nents

C ability of using object libraries and components (e.g. mathemati-cal, graphical, communication)

Application development B Civil engineering objects Documentation B technical software documentation

Construction IT / Development of engineering software

Data modelling of products and proc-esses in Civil engineering

C concepts, technologies, standards (IFC,STEP)

Database fundamentals A concepts, advantages, disadvantages, database models E-R model and relational database sys-tems

B characteristics, application, design techniques

Spatial database systems B GIS, standards

Construction IT / Database sys-tems

Applications in Civil engineering B case study Modelling methods B IFC, STEP Standard formats A actual standards

Construction IT / Modelling

Modelling systems B Software for modelling Information processing and communica-tion systems

B messaging systems, internet based collaboration environments

review of IT in Construction A mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, expert systems...

Construction IT / IS in Civil engi-neering

IS integration methods C data exchange standards and models, ability to use IFC on sim-ple examples

Information systems for project man-agement

C review, ability to efficiently use project management software Construction IT / process – pro-ject manage-ment systems Methods and systems for process mod-

elling A techniques and tools for process modelling, the role of process

model in managing processes in construction, 4D modelling

*A - knowledge and understanding, B - use of knowledge and understanding, C - analysis and synthesis

41

1 INTRODUCTION

"Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand." (Confucius, 450 BC)

Texts on paper and live talk have been the only communication and information technologies 150 years ago when the formats of academic education were set. Today, we receive information and learn from a variety of sources. However, such learning is rarely related to the official programmes of higher education where lectures and textbooks remain the dominant media. Moreover, the official learning process did not make a considerable change for dec-ades, although many students have great expecta-tions which the classic teaching methods cannot sat-isfy. It is difficult to attract students’ attention if the lessons are not dynamic and the lectured subject is not illustrated as it could be, considering all the modern technologies available. The fact that text-books are available on-line as PDF files or lectures delivered over a videoconferencing technology changes little in this picture.

1.1 Earthquake engineering and its teaching methods

It can be said that earthquake engineering is the sci-ence of investigating problems created by earth-quakes, and finding the solutions and practical ap-plications of these solutions, which results in planning, designing, constructing and managing the earthquake-resistant structures and facilities. Even from this definition it can be seen that it is an inter-disciplinary and complex science, which principles can be difficult to understand and even more diffi-cult to pass on. Those principles can often be ex-plained only through the long derivations of equa-tions and formulae, which makes the lecturers’ task of animating students and creating the feeling of ‘be-ing-in-the-world’ even more difficult.

Considering all said, it is not difficult to under-stand why the majority of lectures in earthquake en-gineering education is still delivered through a teacher centred approach (Figure 1), which has been criticized in recent years (Felder 2004, Christiansen 2004).

Development of computer assisted learning tool for earthquake engineering

R. Klinc, Ž. Turk & M. Fischinger Institute of structural engineering, earthquake engineering and construction IT (IKPIR), Faculty of civil and geodetic engineering, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

ABSTRACT: Today, we live in the world where the information and communication technologies are devel-oping faster than ever before. We receive information and learn from a variety of sources. However, such learning is rarely related to the official programmes of higher education. Lecturers must compete with, for ex-ample, Discovery channel, games and/or other audio/video/internet media. That is why many students today have great expectations which even the well prepared and quality books cannot satisfy. Besides, it is difficult to attract their attention when the lessons are not dynamic and the lectured subject is not illustrated as it could be, considering all the technologies available.

This paper describes a possible approach for teaching the basics of earthquake engineering through the use of animations (simulations) and active participation of the students. It could be a great addition to classical teaching methods in civil and earthquake engineering. Besides, the idea and the development of the prototype of the learning tool are described. That type of media gives the lecturer the opportunity to animate students, to give them the possibility to dig deeper into the discussed subject, and to learn through experimenting (‘play-ing’) with carefully prepared examples.

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Figure 1. Teaching approaches. a) top-down model, teacher centred approach, b) student-teacher negotiated, teacher ori-ented approach, c) bottom-up model, student oriented approach (Aaron et al. 2004).

1.2 Background and motivation

The fact is that most academic textbooks contain few illustrations with no colour, although the impor-tance of visual information in the learning process is well known. Turk & Fischinger (1999) define: “It is estimated that the sense of sight contributes to as much as 75% of individual’s knowledge, while hear-ing is rated at only about 13%.” Today, when lec-turers must compete with, for example, Discovery channel, games and/or other audio/video/internet media, even a quality book cannot offer enough. That is why the great deal of attention in educational domain has been focused on the interactive multi-media (Rieber 1996, Rieber 1999, Nulden 1999, Felder 2004, Sadik 2004, Christiansen 2004).

On the other hand, it is worth mentioning that earthquake engineering is constantly developing sci-ence which areas are still under formalisation, there-fore learning material and courses must be dynami-cally composed leading to the continuous update and the development of courses (Christiansson 2004).

Knowing this and considering the fact that in earthquake engineering we also learn from the past experience through the observations of structures and their components damaged by earthquakes (Fischinger et al. 1998), the need to provide students the ability of ‘seeing’, ‘feeling’ and ’being-in-the-world’ can be seen. That is how the interest for the discussed subject could be deepened.

In the past years, a great deal of attention in earth-quake engineering education at University of Ljubl-jana has been focused on finding a new way of clearing the basic concepts and principles of earth-quake engineering. The idea of a complex engineer-ing teaching tool which would gather different sources of knowledge emerged (Figure 2).

The work started in 1995, and in 1998 EASY, EArthquake engineering slide information SYstem, was introduced (Cerovšek 1998, Fischinger et al. 1998). In the following years, two other components were developed (example and EUROCODE in hy-pertext).

Figure 2. Scheme of the planned learning system (Cerovšek 1998).

The subject of this paper is the fourth, theoretical

(text book) component.

1.3 Goals and objectives

We have been focusing on the development of a learning tool, which would provide students the op-portunity of ‘being-in-the-world’. That can be diffi-cult task in earthquake engineering domain. There-fore, it was important to choose proper topics and present them in an appropriate way. We were hoping to create a text book, available both on the local computer as well as through the internet, with a se-ries of simulations, explaining the basic principles of earthquake engineering, encapsulating the complex-ity and the background of presented examples in or-der to ease the learning experience. It must also be mentioned that with this tool the problems of syn-chronisation in time and place, and the limitations of the static nature of traditional teaching materials can be solved.

2 REQUIREMENTS AND SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

When designing the system, the following require-ments had to be taken into account: − The developed tool must act as a standalone

workbook, but must also be suitable for the inte-gration into a more complex learning system with the previously developed components.

− To be able to easily extend the contents, the dy-namic and extensible table of contents must be developed.

− It must offer more than the printed letter and pic-ture.

− It must be usable through the internet as well as on the local computer (for the use on computers with no internet connection available).

EUROCODES

EXAMPLEEMPIRICAL SYSTEM

(EASY)

TEXT BOOK

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− It must offer the opportunity for the use in the distance learning classes.

− The user interface must be plain, intuitive and simple. It was decided that the user interface must follow

the common web form, so it was divided into two separate sections (frames); one for the index (table of contents), and one for the content (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Caption of the system architecture.

3 IMPLEMENTATION

We focused mainly on the development of a friendly and intuitive learning tool, describing some basic concepts and principles of earthquake engineering. The main purpose was to present some topics in a new way which would attract students’ attention, al-low them to dig deeper, and offer them more flexi-bility in the time and place of studying. For this task, animations and simulations were selected.

From the developers’ point of view, we wished to create a fully extensible and modern solution for the future integration into a complex system with previ-ously developed components. A very significant limitation was also the requirement that it must be usable both on the internet and local computer. That is why the selection of the most appropriate devel-opment tool was important. We decided to use Mac-romedia Flash 5 due to the facts that: − it is the most widely used tool for building high-

impact web pages, − it has a useful scripting language ActionScript

built-in, − approximately 92% of web browsers can view

Flash content without the need to install any fur-ther plug-ins,

− the process of learning is quite short if compared to the time of learning working with the competi-tive products.

What is more, the decision was made that the

whole text book will be in Flash format, so that the different parts of the text book can be build in the same manner.

3.1 Macromedia Flash 5 and Actionscript

Macromedia Flash 5 enables professional designers and developers to create effective next-generation web sites and applications. It can be used to create full-screen navigation interfaces, long-form anima-tions called movies, or “tween” animations that are capable of providing a control over the object attrib-utes. All interactive movies and complex animations are created by actions which are sets of instructions written in ActionScript (ECMAScript1-based pro-gramming language used for controlling Macrome-dia Flash movies and applications) that run when a specific event occurs.

More about Macromedia Flash and ActionScript can be read at http://www.macromedia.com.

3.2 Index section

The users’ first contacts with the tool and content are usually through the index. That is why its struc-ture and visual representation is important and must be properly composed.

One of the requirements was that index must be dynamic, so that adding content is as easy as it can possibly be. For this reason, it has been developed as an XML driven Flash document.

The format of the required XML file is clear, readable and can be customized quickly:

<TREE_MENU_NESTED OFFSET='15' MAIN-COLOR='#000000' SUBCOLOR='#666666' OVER-COLOR='#ff0000'>

<TREE>Topic 1 <TREE ACTION="URL" LINK="11.html" TAR-

GET="content">SubTopic 11</TREE> <TREE ACTION="URL" LINK="12.html" TAR-

GET="content">SubTopic 12</TREE> </TREE> <TREE>Topic 2 <TREE ACTION="URL" LINK="21.html" TAR-

GET="content">SubTopic 21</TREE> <TREE>SubTopic 22 <TREE ACTION="URL" LINK="221.html" TAR-

GET="content">SubTopic 221</TREE> <TREE ACTION="URL" LINK="222.html" TAR-

GET="content">SubTopic 222</TREE> </TREE> </TREE> <TREE ACTION="URL" LINK="http://www.topic3url.net"

TARGET="_blank">Topic 3</TREE> </TREE_MENU_NESTED>

1 A standardized, international programming language based on core JavaScript. This standardized version of JavaScript behaves in the same way in all applications that support the standard. Companies can use the open standard language to develop their implementation of JavaScript. (http://javascript.js-x.com/core_manual/glossary.php)

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The example XML above is presented in the in-dex as shown in Figure 4-5.

Figure 4. Caption of the generated index in 'closed' mode.

Figure 5. Caption of the generated index in 'open' mode. It is possible to insert submenus of any depth.

Changes in the XML file reflect directly in the de-veloped index without the need to modify the actual index file.

3.3 Content section

Content is the most interesting (from IT point of view) and important part of the work. The interface, which delivers content, was developed as a partially automatic and external-file-driven Flash document. Some components of this document, the title and subtitle of the document for example, can be cus-tomized through the external text files, while the others (previous and next document in line) are gen-erated automatically. This allowed us to customize the template quickly and to concentrate more on the content we wanted to deliver.

Figure 6. Partially automatic Flash document as a template.

On the top of the template some carefully pre-pared animations and simulations explaining basic principles of earthquake engineering were created.

Figure 7. Caption of the text book, as seen in browser window.

3.4 Example scenario

Creating the sense of ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling’ the structures and their behaviour under earthquake conditions were things we wanted to bring closer to the students. There is a big difference between the explanation in words and pictures, and there is even bigger difference between the picture and the anima-tion.

If we want to, for example, explain students the term “ductility”, we would tell them something simi-lar to the definition presented below.

Ductility is the ability of a material to withstand

plastic deformations without rupture. The opposite of ductility is termed brittleness.

There are various ways of quantifying ductility, and one of them is a curvature ductility which can be presented with a moment-curvature relationship.

There are different factors affecting curvature ductility. The most critical parameter is the ultimate compression strain. Other important parameters are axial force, compression strength, and reinforcement yield strength (Paulay & Priestley 1992).

The lecture would be more effective if we try to

explain the term with pictures, shown in prearranged order, describing some particularities of each picture and try to establish the link between picture and pre-viously orally described theory. That can achieve the desired effect for the time being, although it can take a lot of teachers time answering on a good deal of “what if” questions.

But on the other hand, the term can be briefly de-scribed and students can be motivated to identify particularities and persuaded to dig deeper by them-selves. The above term could be, for example, pre-sented in the way, shown in Figure 8.

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Figure 8. Caption of the example, explaining the importance and impact of the different factors on ductility.

Figure 8 shows a small ActionScript ‘pro-

gramme’, attached and encapsulated into a Flash document. All parameters, mentioned in the text above, can be modified, and results can instantly be seen on the screen. That allows students to experi-ment, see what kind of influence each of the factors has on the result, and hopefully, they would be able to clarify the term by themselves.

3.5 Examples created

In our work, we have created some sample anima-tions, describing the following terms of earthquake engineering: − Capacity of a cross section (Figure 9), − Ductility (Figure 8) and − Reduction of the seismic forces principle (Figure

10-11).

Figure 9. Caption of the interaction diagram, explaining the ca-pacity of a cross section.

All of the examples were made in Macromedia

Flash and even though we have soon realized that it

has some serious limitations, the majority of compu-tations were made with ActionScript.

Figure 10. Caption of the example, explaining reduction of the seismic forces principle.

It was pushed to its limits and we managed to do

the computations of the first two terms with it, but it failed at the example of reduction of the seismic forces principle (Figure 10-11).

Figure 11. Caption of the equal displacement rule example To overcome the limitations of ActionScript, we

have started using Perl2 despite the previously de-fined requirement that the text book must be usable also on the off-line computer. The external program DRAIN-2DX, capable of the nonlinear static and dynamic analysis of plane structures, has also been used.

2 Perl - short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, es-pecially designed for processing text. Because of its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for writing CGI scripts. Perl is an interpretive lan-guage, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs. (http://www.rustybrick.com/definitions.php)

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4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

Combining information technology with expert earthquake engineering knowledge can result in a modern and efficient learning tool, usable both on the internet and personal computer, for classical teaching in classes as well as for the distance learn-ing.

Our goal was to explore the tools needed, rapidly develop a prototype and focus mainly on the content of the earthquake engineering text book, leaving the programming and the IT perspective of the tool in the background. However, during the project we have realized that the programming part cannot be avoided. What is more, the programming (or the IT part) part demanded the greatest deal of our atten-tion, due to the fact that the process of creating spe-cial kinds of interactions with the support of com-plex calculating requires specific programming expertise we did not have. The fact alone that we have used (due to the licensing issues) relatively old (from IT perspective) Macromedia Flash 5 version caused much problems. The process of learning and programming itself was very time consuming and have taken too much effort and momentum. That is why the work is not fully prepared and was pre-sented only to a small group of students. Even though the experiment was not controlled, the ‘aha’ effect, noticed with students that have seen exam-ples, could be a sign that the method is appropriate and is worth investigating further.

In the future, our efforts will be oriented towards the evolution of the current tool and the connection of the tool with some previously developed compo-nents. From the IT perspective, we are planning to invest into a newer and more powerful version of the Macromedia Flash, due to the fact that the version used cannot offer as much as the newer version can. We are also planning to redesign the current inter-face as a common HTML document, using Flash for animation and simulation purposes only. One of the reasons is much easier connection between the sepa-rate parts of planned learning tool.

5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank Tatjana Isaković for inspiration, ideas, and help in the process of devel-oping the learning tool.

6 REFERENCES

Aaron, M., Dicks, D., Ives, C. & Montgomery, B. (2004). Planning for Integrating Teaching Technologies, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, Volume 30(2) Spring /printemps, http://www.cjlt.ca/content/vol30.2/cjlt30-2_art-3.html

Cerovšek, T. (1998). Računalniška podpora študiju potresnega inženirstva, diplomska naloga št. 1372 (in Slovene).

Christiansen, E (2004). Educated by design - learning by doing - outline of a HCI-didactics, ITcon Vol. 9, Special Issue ICT Supported Learning in Architecture and Civil Engineering, pg. 209-217, http://www.itcon.org/2004/14

Felder, R. M. (2004). Changing times and paradigms, Chem. Engr. Education, 38(1), 32–33, http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Paradigms.pdf

Fischinger, M., Cerovšek, T. & Turk, Z. (1998). EASY: A Hy-permedia learning tool, Electronic Journal of Information technology in Construction, Vol.3, pp. 1-12, http://www.itcon.org/1998/1

Nuldén, U. (1999). PIE- Problem based learning, Interactive multimedia and Experiential learning, WebNet 99, http://www.viktoria.se/nulden/Publ/PDF/PIE.pdf

Paulay, T. & Priestley M. J. N. (1992). Seismic design of rein-forced concrete and masonry buildings, New York: John Wiley & Sons

Rieber, L. P. (1996). Seriously considering play: Designing in-teractive learning environments based on the blending of microworlds, simulations, and games. Educational Tech-nology Research & Development, 44(2): 43-58

Rieber, L. P. (1999). Integrating Web-Based Technology into Education: Join the WWILD Team, World Wide Interactive Learning Design Team (http://it.coe.uga.edu/wwild/), http://it.coe.uga.edu/wwild/conceptpaper.html

Sadik, A. (2004). The Design Elements of Web-Based Learn-ing Environments, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, Vol 1. No. 8. http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Aug_04/article03.htm

Turk, Z. & Fischinger, M. (1999). Structuring Engineering Knowledge into Breakdown Cases, Learning engineering from breakdown cases, IABSE symposium Rio de Janeiro (IABSE reports, vol. 83)

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1 INTRODUCTION

“The more you learn, the more you earn”. With these words the EU-commissioner for education and culture Ján Figel’ stressed the meaning and necessity of lifelong learning at the 1st Wiesbaden Conference on Lifelong Learning in April 2005. While in the USA in the year 2004 already more than 12 billion US$ worth of business was made with online further education [1], Europe is legt behind in this develop-ment. The second part of the sentence "the more you earn" did not arrive yet in all heads of the Europe-ans, neither at the employers’, nor at the employees’, particularly not in a very conservative industry like the construction industry. Nevertheless, according to a study of the European Union, 90 % of all Europe-ans consider further education as an important addi-tion, in order not to lose their job in the globalized world. With nearly 5 millions unemployed persons in Germany it becomes clear that that there are only few jobs for poorly qualified people in Germany. Nevertheless, again contrary to the USA privately financed further education investments remain rather the exception.

In the year 2000 in Lisbon the switches were al-ready placed from the European Union. There it was decided that the European Union is to be devel-oped into the most competitive, knowledge-based region of the world. In this strategy lifelong learn-

ing assumes a key role. According to the words of commissioner Figel, the European Union develops from a society of coal and steel, over a society of ag-riculture inevitably into a society of knowledge. The goal for Europe is that at least 12.5% of the working population participates in further education regularly. Classical further education methods will not be able to cover the increasing need. New meth-ods must be used. A substantial part of it is the online further education.

2 BASIS OF OWS

Since more than 10 years the student education is supported with new media in the department of building materials, building physics and building chemistry of Darmstadt University of Technology. At first CBTs were produced and published on CD. Although the CD was very well accepted by the stu-dents and also the achievements of the students be-came noticeably better, there was the problem with the topicality of contents, which had frequently al-ready become outdated a few weeks after the expen-diture of the CDs, e.g. because of the introduction of new standards. With the increasing spread of the World Wide Web, the window of opportunity was opened to produce online-content, which is always up-to-date. You had to accept however that it is not possible to produce high-quality content, in particu-

OWS-Further Education in Civil Engineering

Peter Grübl, Stefan Köhler, Bernd Schmidt, Nils Schnittker Institute for Concrete Structures and Building Materials, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany

ABSTRACT: OWS is a system for implementing different scenarios of further education. It is based on two projects that were funded by the German federal ministry of education and that are widely used throughout Germany today. Development was continued after the funding ended in 2003. New programs for doing pres-entations in presence teaching and for carrying out exercises were added. Further education solutions have been implemented for different customers with the system thus created. OWS can be used for post-graduate studies, work-based training, and e-training colleges, ranging from fully-fledged university courses over of-fice- or free time training of selected topics to short questions to the system in case of specific problems. OWS offers to customers include consulting on further education, development of content, and implementation of complete learning-systems. At present some projects are in realization. One of these is the Blended Learning Course “Specialized Planner for Efficiency of Energy (IngKH)”, which will be done in co-operation between OWS und the Professional Association for Engineers in the State of Hessia (IngKH).

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lar moving media without much employment and high costs. A possibility arose as a result of the re-search program "new media in education" from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Re-search. Our institute succeeded to participate in two projects.

These two projects form the basis for the devel-opment of OWS, taken place afterwards, which was established without special financial support.

One of the projects is WiBA-Net (http://www.wiba-net.de) for online education in the subject Construction Materials. Currently the project has already nearly 2000 subscribers.

Its main focus was to transfer a whole university class to elearning. “Construction materials” is a topic that is taught to every student of civil engineer-ing and architecture in Germany. It deals with prop-erties and usage of materials such as concrete, steel, plastic and so on. Unlike other subjects at German universities, there is a memorandum of the univer-sity teachers concerned, which defines the content to be taught at all universities. The project was devel-oped as a cooperation of six universities. The part-ners are TU Berlin, TU Darmstadt, University Duis-burg-Essen, TU Hamburg-Harburg, University Leipzig and University Stuttgart and not at least the Fraunhofer IGD, which developed a new E-Learning platform called WiBA-MTS. The project was under the overall control of our department.

Figure 1. Homepage of WiBA-Net The contents of WiBA-Net are represented in the

form of e-learning units known as “E-Lehrpfad”. These E-Lehrpfads are characterised by a high por-tion of multimedia content. In particular, animations contribute to assist in the understanding of compli-cated circumstances. The contents of WiBA-Net are embedded in the WiBA-Infopool. For the admini-stration of the teaching materials a central repository is uesd, which all users can access with a common webbrowser. The different groups of users have dif-ferent rights of access, too. The WiBA-Infopool is divided into a tree structure. In addition the elements of the pool are described with meta data in the SCORM standard, whereby a simple search for con-tents is ensured.

Modes for Learners: Learners in the sense of WiBA-Net are the stu-

dents of the subject “Construction materials”. WiBA-Net offers the students mainly self–study-courses. Therefore the lecture is used to discuss the elearning content (Blended Learning). The courses subdivide into elearning chapters and into the E-Lehrpfads, which can be worked with directly. These consist of pages. These represent the lowest order level of the knowledge. The content of a page is limited by the resolution of the monitor. That means “no scrolling”. The principle of WiBA-Net is: “One page – one content- one knowledge unit”.

Students have access to communication func-tions, like forums and chats. You should not forget the functions email and last not least the old-fashioned function telephone, which is still used most frequently. A characteristic function of WiBA-Net is the online consulting hour that is a chat with moderation and a distributed whiteboard that can be used to work on diagrams, graphics etc. together.

In addition, WiBA-Net offers the virtual practical training to the students. This training helps the stu-dents with the preparation of the real practical train-ing.

Figure 2. Elsbeth - Display of the teacher Modes for university teachers: WiBA Net offers extensive functions for the sup-

port of the university teachers with the conception and execution of the lecture with the program "Els-beth" (electronic assortment of learning elements and labelling - production of part-automatic lecture-room presentations). The whole content of WiBA-Net is available in Elsbeth. Elsbeth was developed in the environment of WiBA-Net, however many func-tions were realized after the end of project.

The program Elsbeth helps with the preparation and with the execution of the lecture including mul-timedia elements. It contains a search function, in order to be able to display wanted contents of the WiBA-Net database. Selected content can be trans-ferred into a presentation by mouse-click. New con-tents can be uploaded to the pool at any time. The

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entire system is webbased so that all existing ele-ments are constantly available.

The provided lecture can be given webbased, i.e. during the lecture you can access the server from any computer and you can show the prepared mate-rial. If no internet connection is present, a locally installed version of the program can be used with the selected contents. If an internet connection is pre-sent, the current presentation can be supplemented by material from the server. The user surface is identical in both cases. The teacher has all selected elements on his desktop. He decides, what is to be demonstrated. The auditorium only sees the selected element on the canvas. The use of a tablet PC (as a substitute a laptop and a graphic tablet) permits the writing on the screen and the simultaneous display over the video projector. Then the system is fully comparable with an electronic overhead projector. The provided presentation can be converted to a Mi-crosoft Power Point file, too.

At the end of the lecture the presented content of the lecture can be made available to the students, whereby if necessary a previous revision is possible.

Since 2004 no more public funds are available for WiBA-Net. The project continues however, grows even and causes thus expenses. The registered asso-ciation “Freunde des WiBA-Net e.V.” (Friends of the WiBA-Net), founded in March 2005, supports the use of the WiBA-Net for education at university level and secures financial surviving of WiBA-Net. Everybody can join this association. Depending on the role, e.g. university professor with less than 100 students; his membership fee costs 150 € yearly.

Figure 3. 3D virtual building of the project LNB The second project “Lernnetz Bauphysik” (LNB,

http://www.lernnetz-bauphysik.de) is used to teach building physics, which is about moisture-, heat-, noise-, and fire protection in constructions. Here, the emphasis was put on applications and exercises, enabling the learners to apply knowledge to different tasks. A special feature is an application to display different types of buildings in a three-dimensional mode. All parts of the buildings can be selected and

attached with different materials and properties, al-lowing the student to make calculations based on those interchangeable values.

For the computational programs a common data model was developed. The development of this model is based on an XML-file, for which a three-dimensional, virtual building serves as a basis: the project file. It makes the necessary input parameters available to the computation modules and further it offers the appropriate space to write results back to the project file. The results can be reused of the modules as new parameters.

The access to the project file takes place via the use of the provided interfaces, alternatively by means of the http protocol (client computation mod-ules) or via the integration of appropriate proxy-classes (server computation modules). The server solution makes thus integration possible into pro-grams, both independently of their assigned pro-gramming language and independently of the basis architecture of the modules.

Figure 4. LNB – content page The described data model is open source. It is ex-

pandable, in order to be able to take new develop-ments in consideration. That concerns the extension and new creation of computation applications of building physics in connection with the energetic building analysis and it concerns the integration of new aspects and subjects, e.g. in the further educa-tion with OWS.

The learning network building physics was worked on as a group project with the universities Karlsruhe, Darmstadt, Kassel, Stuttgart and Weimar and the university of applied sciences Bieberach. In this case the chief executive office was in Karlsruhe. Also for the LNB some professors defined the con-tents by a memorandum.

The financial support for both projects ended on 31.12.2003. After that date, the projects were merged into the OWS system for further education.

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3 NEED FOR FURTHER EDUCATION

The provided lecture can be given webbased, i.e. during the lecture you can access the server from any computer and you can show the prepared mate-rial. If no internet connection is present, a locally installed version of the program can be used with the selected contents. If an internet connection is pre-sent, the current presentation can be supplemented by material from the server. The user surface is identical in both cases. The teacher has all selected elements on his desktop. He decides, what is to be demonstrated. The auditorium only sees the selected element on the canvas. The use of a tablet PC (as a substitute a laptop and a graphic tablet) permits the writing on the screen and the simultaneous display over the video projector. Then the system is fully comparable with an electronic overhead projector. The provided presentation can be converted to a Mi-crosoft Power Point file, too.

Figure 5. Half –life of knowledge Therefore in 50% of European SME’s, there is al-

ready a specific person or group responsible for identifying skill gaps und shortages and also for 50% of European SME’s, competence development activities are a key part of their general business strategy.

In an extremely conservative industry that strug-gles with enormous financial problems, like the building industry does, further training is a delicate topic. A survey started by OWS found out that the building industry invests only about 50 € per em-ployee and year for further education in average. This is less than the price for only one reference book mostly.

Sometimes a ruse is used in order to force the participants to the further education gently. For ex-ample the Professional Association for Engineers in the State of Hessia issued an advanced training guideline, which means that legitimized inspectors have to attend further education courses for 8 hours within 2 years. Otherwise they will loose their au-thorization. Now the association has problems with the large quantity of engineers who wants to book or must book courses.

4 ELEARNING TOOL

Elearning offers a skilful solution for the removal of capacity bottlenecks with further education semi-nars. Because of often badly prepared elearning courses and by a large portion general scepticism concerning the new media as education tool, the ac-ceptance of elearning is very bad. This is not amaz-ing, if you regard the following numbers:

- Only 58% of the Europeans said they are able to use a computer.

- Half of the respondents said they could not use the Internet.

- When people think about how to improve or update their professional skills only 12% of the respondents think about open and distance learning

Therefore OWS does not put pure elearning into practice, but rather the hybrid combination of Blended Learning whereby the advantages are sum-marized by elearning and by regular lectures.

The advantages of the elearning and/or Blended Learning are obvious. With elearning you have the possibility to describe complex and difficult topics with audiovisual media, animations etc. With the help of online tests the participants receive informa-tion about their personal knowledge conditions and thus they can concentrate on knowledge gaps or they can leave out certain topics. This leads immediately to the first organizational advantage. They save time. On the other hand they can use the won time for more difficult topics. They can decide their own speed of learning.

The next advantage is the local independence. At each place where you can find a computer that is online, learning is possible. No more special rooms are needed. And you can use the computer at any time, with consideration of your individual learning habits. That leads to the probably most important point, because you save costs. Much of further edu-cation costs result from travelling expenses and the enormous loss of earning, which is usually substan-tially larger.

A further advantage is in the theoretical inde-pendence of the number of participants. Only 30 to 40 participants can take part in conventional lec-tures. Objectively elearning convinces.

Therefore for example the KarstadtQuelle AG has founded a CompetenceCenter eLearning recently. All employees will be educated with this center.

Another example is the automobile supplier ZF Friedrichshafen, which defeated the always-lasting problem of acceptance with an elearning event. The employees were trained in a bus, which drove from one company location to others, equipped with com-puters. Certainly elearning doesn’t need any busses but the event was very successful and therefore the end justifies the means.

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On the other hand such complex projects are no longer necessary at the universities. A study of the HISBUS shows: In the year 2000 only 34 % of the students were acquainted with elearning. In 2004 the number climbed up to 86%. Certainly one reason is the research programme "new media in education".

Mrs. Bulmahn, minister of education and re-search, used this study as an opportunity for the quo-tation "if you regard the speed of the propagation of the new media at the education formations of the field of universities, then you get an impression, in which extent the lifelong learning will develop."

5 ELEARNING TRENDS

The developments of the new media in the education are characterized by terms such as distance educa-tion, blended learning, tele teaching, elearning, web-based learning, flexible learning and the two new ones, rapid learning and mobile learning. Clear defi-nitions and above all precise demarcations between the terms are difficult.

Enterprises are searching increasingly for rapid learning solutions. With rapid learning you can clar-ify questions very fast. In order to solve quick prob-lem you don’t need large elearning courses but you need short and precise answers.

In particular the mobile learning has an enormous growth potential. Mobile phones are omnipresent these days. More and more applications are going on the market, e.g. mobile navigation solutions run on small smart-phones. The displays of the devices be-come more and more performance, thus the writing becomes better readable. Almost any new mobile phone has a eBook function. The step of eBook to the elearning is only a small step. Mobile learning, e.g. in the train to the job in the morning, will in-crease.

The trend of the learning elements goes toward more complexity, more functionality and concomi-tantly to ever larger development time.

Figure 6. Guerra Scale: Levels of Online User Experience

The querra scale describes an increasingly inter-

active user experience using a one-to-ten scale, in which “one” involves the common experience of

simply reading text on a screen and “ten” represents a virtual reality scenario.

Thus the requirements increase for programming skill and for instructional design versatility. On the other hand the didactical success is not sure. Never-theless the MTV Culture cries out for more and more virtual reality scenarios, which must be still produced.

But the trend plays only a subordinated role, be-cause elearning with or without virtual reality is above all LEARNING. Since nobody invented the funnel of Nürnberg up to now, learning is always working, too.

6 DIVERSITY OF LEARNERS

Learners are different. This is a certain insight, which sounds natural, but which was not considered with elearning for a along time. At the beginning of the new century gender mainstream started to play an important part – in my opinion - thereby however ignored that the sex specific differences are substan-tially smaller than the differences with the learning habits in principle.

Mr. Ehlers made a well-differentiated view of the different learning habits in the year 2004. The study differentiates between four learning profiles:

- the individual learner - the result oriented learner - the pragmatist - the avant-gardist

7 OWS-FURTHER EDUCATION SYSTEM

7.1 Concept The concept of OWS is based on the experience of the last eight years. OWS supports all kinds of learn-ers. Usually OWS doesn’t offer courses as pure elearning, but always in connection with the blended learning thought.

An important aspect of OWS is the multi-dimensionality of contents. The first dimension represents contents on the screen the second dimen-sion are associated texts on paper. These texts will never offer the whole extent, but help the learners however additionally with the navigation of the course. Although most humans always work to a computer job with keyboard and pin, this familiar kind of work is not typical in elearning concepts. The learner - depending upon his own preferences - can make itself notes thereby both in the system, and on the paper.

An evaluation during the developing process among the users - teachers as well as learners - took

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place, giving important guidelines by which to form the resulting platforms and content.

In principle the contents of OWS are arranged into three areas. The E-Lehrpfade serve for the ef-fective knowledge transfer. There is always the pos-sibility of training with e-exercises and the possibil-ity of checking with e-selftests.

Figure 7. OWS-concept

The first page of each E-Lehrpfad defines the

teaching aim, calls few preconditions, if necessary, and gives a reference point of the operating time in average. Usually this is between 30 and 45 minutes. E-Lehrfade were divided into main pages and asso-ciated pages. The main pages give an overview of the content, the associated pages give deepening in-formation. On OWS’ recommendation you should work on the main pages first.

For the conclusion of an E-Lehrpfad a self-check is offered, which can be worked on anonymous and as often as intended. OWS doesn’t offer only the typical multiple choice questions, OWS offers the kinds of question drag’n drop, questions with gaps, allocation questions etc. and even essay questions, too. The evaluation of the questions takes place automatically and the learners receive an appropriate feedback. This is indicated according to the KCR principle (knowledge of correct result). A too de-tailed error correction is not desired, because new investigations of Mrs. Stanley Gully (psychologist in the USA) shows that many humans do not learn from errors in this connection. Therefore it is only important that they know the correct solution. The self-checks are very popular. The interactivity of the tests integrates the learners actively into the learning process. The popularity is reflected not least in TV-shows like e.g.. "Who Wants to Become a Million-aire?”. The trainer of the course gets information about the anonymous results of the self-tests there-fore the trainer can optimize the course. He can use the result for optimizing the normal lectures and for the online surgery, too.

Beside the tests there is still another substantially larger interactive learning element. With the help of the e-exercises the class participants can try and train their new knowledge directly. With the exer-

cises they can change various parameters and obtain the comprehension of the important connections.

With the regular study the participants always have the same previous knowledge usually, because of the German Abitur. With further education that is not right any longer, the previous knowledge is very different. OWS makes the different previous knowl-edge lucid with the help of pre-tests. Consequently you can adjust the parts of a course. For some par-ticipants you must add additional courses for other ones you can cancel some parts of a course.

An important component of OWS is the Supporter Concept. Tutors are available for technical questions almost around the clock. There’s nothing worse than participants lose the desire because of technical dif-ficulties. There are supporters for question of con-tent. Contentwise questions are usually answered within 24 hours.

The most important aspect of the OWS concept is the quality of the content. Therefore authors and it- experts are all in the same boat of OWS both.

7.2 System The OWS learning platform is divided into the ranges:

Figure 8. OWS Homepage

- my learning units - my learning subject material - forum - my exercises - my knowledge - communication - help - OWS information - downloads

7.3 Areas of application

7.3.1 Work-based training Work based training is the main application of OWS. Nowadays, further professional training is a must for

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engineers because the amount of available informa-tion increases all the time and decisions are required to be based on more and more precise detailed knowledge. With the help of OWS, participants can learn in their spare time or at their own place of work. They are free to determine themselves the speed and duration of the course – which increases the efficiency of learning.

7.3.2 Postgraduate studies Due to the reduction of the workload in the engi-neering curricula, many subjects of study are now being omitted in spite of the fact that they are never-theless very important for the education of engi-neers. For this situation, OWS offers Blended Learn-ing solutions. In particular people new to a career can cover any deficits in their knowledge very quickly.

7.3.3 E-Training College The E-Seminar has been designed either as ‘Blended Learning’ or for e-learning only. Current issues (e.g. prompted by the introduction of new standards) are speedily clarified by the E-Seminar.

Figure 9. Areas of applications

8 CURRENT PROJECTS

OWS organized an e-training college together with the Odenwaldakademie (Odenwald College). A blended course was offered to the participants about the topic "regenerative energy from biomass". In ad-dition to the lectures about this topic the participants worked on a E-Lehrpfad and checked their knowl-edge with a self-test. For example they had to order all element of a block-type thermal power station. The evaluation of the tests showed that contents were attentively worked on and thus the questions very well were answered.

Currently OWS and the Professional Association for Engineers in the State of Hessia (IngKH) com-pile a work-based training, which teaches engineers the “specialized planner energy efficiency IngKH”. The training course includes 132 lessons (= 132 hours). For the first time many of it will be elearning

units. In addition the participants will receive the certificate “energy consultant (BAFA)” if they pass the exam. The course will start in the autumn 2005. The demand for this course is rather great at present.

9 OUTLOOK

This year OWS was exhibitor at the fair CeBIT in Hanover at the stand of the hessian universities. The very high response shows us the importance of online further education in the future. Therefore OWS is planning a lot of new online courses at the present time.

REFERENCES

Grübl, P.; Encarnação, J.; Franke, L.; Hillemeier, B. König, G.; Mühlhäuser, M.; Reinhardt, H.-W.; Sesink, W.; Setzer M.J.; 2001; Multimediales Netzwerk zur Wissensvermitt-lung im Fach „Werkstoffe im Bauwesen“ für die Aus- und Weiterbildung von Bauingenieuren und Architekten. http://www.wiba-net.de (05.05.2005). Darmstadt.

http://www.lernnetz-bauphysik.de (05.05.2005). Hochschullehrermemorandum Bauphysik Reinhardt, H.-W.: Hochschullehrermemorandum Werkstoffe

im Bauwesen – Universitäre Lehre und Forschung. In: Bau-ingenieur 75 (11), 723-729.

Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Hrsg.); 2004; Kursbuch eLearning 2004 - Produkte aus dem NMB-Förderprogramm. Bonn.

Apel, J.H.; 1999; Die Vorlesung – Einführung in eine akade-mische Lehrform. Köln.

Kerres, M.; 2001; Multimediale und telemediale Lernumge-bungen : Konzeption und Entwicklung. 2. Auflage. Mün-chen.

Schulmeister, R.; 2003;Lernplattformen für das virtuelle Ler-nen : Evaluation und Didaktik. München.

European Commission: www.elearningeuropa.info (05.05.2005).

Guerra, T. , Heffernan, D.; 2004; The querra scale; http://www.learningcircuits.org/2004/mar2004/guerra.htm; (05.05.2004).

Kleimann, B.; Weber, S.; Willige, J.; 2005; E-Learning aus Sicht der Studierenden; HISBUS-Kurzbericht Nr. 10; Han-nover.

Ehlers, U. D.; 2004; Qualität im E-Learning aus Lernersicht; Wiesbaden.

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1 METHOD-ORIENTED EDUCATION

Two domains of the method emerge from Gabetti’s work, the design domain and the educational do-main.

Gabetti investigates the possible links between architectural design and technical-scientific research, and how the method can act as a trait d’union, even though «the design activity may be [...] internal to a process of scientific research, without actually being such itself tout court.»1 Through an epistemological interpretation, he highlights the ways in which the scientific method itself has been subject to disparate interpretations and expectations.

At one time expectations were higher: design was the result of a methodical procedure, e.g. Lodoli, Rondelet, Durand and the grille polytechnique. This was an “algorithmic” conception of design further advanced by the availability of new, more powerful and versatile computational tools (Stiny2, partly Alexander3).

Expectations have also been lower: the method «corresponds to the concept of strategy, which does not necessarily give a detailed indication of the ac-tions to be carried out, but just the attitude in which the decision must be taken and the overall plan ac-cording to which the actions must be carried out.»4

Whatever the expectations of the method, «Downstream from the technical operation one comes into direct contact with the individual [just as] any technical procedure that is carried through to completion leads to an art. [...] It is no longer a ques-tion of method, but of style, in the sense in which style, speaking in very general terms, is the organi-

zation and the implementation of what in the indi-vidual experience escapes the web weaved by the concepts, in order to grasp the generic fact according to a method. A posteriori a style can certainly be described as a strategy»5.

The capability to narrate a style as a strategy is an establishing act of architectural design education. It is the teachers’ ability to re-elaborate her/his own experience, her/his own design practice, in a narra-tive form, and to offer students lectures as a tool with which to develop their own design methodol-ogy.

However there is a quantum leap between method and style. A style cannot be a strategy, because a strategy must be usefully transmittable, whereas style cannot or rather, must not be an action on which education is based: the latter must take place in the dialectic between the proposition of methodo-logical coordinates and the presentation of exem-plary cases, which concretize those methodological coordinates according to particular interpretations. The stylistic aspect of these interpretations cannot be proposed without danger of plagiarism, which is precisely the opposite of a method for developing students’ own design methodology and style code.

1.1 The polytechnic tradition

The transposition of the method-oriented approach to the field of education dates back to the École Polytechnique. The polytechnic educational tradi-tion tends to provide students with propaedeutic tools during the introductory two-year course, a re-vision of these in the third year, and finally a design

Expectations and challenges brought by ICT in AEC education

Luca Caneparo Politecnico di Torino, Italy

ABSTRACT: This paper aims to present some considerations about the relationship between architectural de-sign education, technology of architecture and the expectations that can be reasonably placed on the innova-tions brought about by information and communication technologies (ICT). The starting-point cannot be in-formation technology itself, but rather the problematic nodes of architectural design, in order to explore and measure the impact and opportunities that information technology tools can have on design education. To this aim, we find the distinction between method-oriented and case-oriented architectural design made by Roberto Gabetti, who passed away recently, particularly interesting.

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synthesis during the fourth and fifth years. The teaching, which today refers to the technology of ar-chitecture, was part of the introductory and manda-tory teaching in the various years of the course.

In the best cases, the polytechnic Schools man-aged to translate the multiplicity of teaching pro-posed in the first two years into a method, which the students then applied in the design exercise and the engineer or architect subsequently applied in the professional practice.

The method proposed by the École Polytechnique is the scientific method, but not of theoretical or pure science, rather than of applied science. Monge, one of the founders of the School, highlights the identity of the methods between algebra and descrip-tive geometry, which he formalized6.

The educative role attributed to descriptive ge-ometry is particularly significant. At the time of its official foundation in 1795, the École Polytechnique dedicated 45% of its lesson time to descriptive ge-ometry, alongside analysis, mechanics, and architec-ture. In 1801 the lesson hours dedicated to descrip-tive geometry were reduced to 40%, and the tendency for this proportion to decrease continued in the decades that followed.

1.2 Symbol systems

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a growing awareness that the technical problems have to be oriented to the modeling of the physical, managerial and productive phenomena and that the modeling process could be beyond a graphical repre-sentation. Technology progressively followed sci-ence and research along the road of arithmetisation, to the detriment of geometric and graphic methods. In return it obtained greater flexibility and precision and with the advent of the first calculators7, and later of computers, growing automation.

The definition of the symbol systems, more gen-erally of the language, is a central issue for science: «the fact is that the use of a symbol system is not just an accessory, secondary aspect of the scientific knowledge. There cannot be science, in the strict meaning of the word, which is not expressed, i.e. which does not represent its objects in a symbol sys-tem»8.

In architectural design, the design procedure has remained tied to the graphical representation, while technological innovation since the industrial revolu-tion has introduced systems with their own know-how and methodologies which have brought about increasing specialization. At the same time repre-sentation of the design has become the link between the various competencies, with the aim of making the design content clear and communicable. Today we are facing the co-existence of different lan-guages, relevant respectively to the constructive,

structural, managerial, lighting, heating etc. aspects of the project9.

Mathematics has also seen a proliferation of dis-ciplines and symbol systems10. In the last decades scientific research in the natural and human sciences has begun to deal with problems that cannot be ex-haustively dealt with by one discipline alone, that cannot be broken down and analyzed in parts or sub-systems. Problems which require an emerging syn-thesis11 which actively involves researchers from different disciplines. The Santa Fe Institute, also known as the Institute of “complexity”, and other re-search groups have taken on the challenge to over-come the disciplinary boundaries through a work of linguistic and methodological integration. The work has resulted in new methods and techniques at the cross-over of many disciplines, for example statisti-cal mechanics, biology, genetics, economic and so-cial theory, and artificial intelligence. Much of this work has been carried out and made possible by ex-tensive use of computer models.

Research into information technology is causing the modeling and manipulation of symbol systems12 to become increasingly a method for the representa-tion and processing of knowledge. At the same time, scientific research is using this software to ex-tend the field of study to human sciences, for exam-ple into the areas of social, economic and psycho-logical research. In human sciences the main obstacle is the peculiar nature of phenomena, «in fact they bring with them a collection of meanings which resist a straightforward transformation into objects [...]. It seems difficult to be able to reduce a feeling, a collective reaction, or a linguistic fact into such abstract structures. But when all is said and done, the issue is not to reduce them, but to repre-sent them, even if partially, within systems of con-cepts.»13

In abstract terms, information technology tests methodologies and implements tools in order to enumerate symbols and define the relationships be-tween them. One of the lines of research into the formalization of symbol systems is that of ontolo-gies14. The term has been borrowed from philoso-phy, according to which an ontology is the study of the concept and structure of Being. In artificial in-telligence, it is that which “exists” and which can be represented. When knowledge in a field is repre-sented in a symbol system, the collection of entities which can be represented are called the universe of the discourse. An ontology implements the specifi-cation of a conceptualization, a discourse area com-prehensible both to the people who write it, and to the computers that aid the difficult work needed to formalize the symbol systems, within precise do-mains of application.

The implementation of knowledge-based systems has further boosted the research in the ontologies: a frequent motivation for implementing an ontology is

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Figure 8 – The design rationale capture tool

Path Through

Walk way

Path Through

Focal Space

Focal Space

court

ramp

Exposition

Orientation

Visual ArtCentre (VAC)Le Corbusier

GuggenheimFrak LloydWright

StaatsgallerieMuseumJames Stirling

Figure 1. An ontology can indicate that a concept defined “space” has an attribute defined “exhibition”.

to define a common language in order to share knowledge within a given field15.

Within the architectural domain an ontology can indicate that a concept defined space has an attribute defined exhibition (Fig. 1). However, in philosophy and artificial intelligence, ontologies normally deal with general structures, they do not contain specific instances of the concepts which they define: the definition of the instances is up to the knowledge base. In the field of architectural design, the in-stances of the concept of exhibition space, for exam-ple, can be both the Visual Art Centre by Le Cor-busier, and the Staatsgallerie by James Stirling.

The concept of exhibition space cannot be univo-cally identified in single architectures (Fig. 1), it must be placed on a more abstract level than that of the individual artifact. This level, which can also be defined as typological, encompasses, beyond cases, suggestions of design competencies and choices which can substantiate the knowledge necessary for developing a design method and architectural educa-tion.

1.3 Strategies

Design research in architecture cannot ignore the multiplicity of criteria, tools and theories which can-not be easily brought together into a single method-ology. «There is no pre-determined line: there are suitable methodologies and useful strategies, but there are no absolute methods or obligatory pre-established paths […]»16.

Architecture has often been influenced by theo-ries borrowed from different cultural and scientific contexts, however sometimes an essential compari-son and deepening work on the language and method has been lacking. At present in the domain of architectural design dealing with the emerging synthesis theory does not aim to promote a likewise operation, instead to reassert the peculiarities of ar-chitectural design, which has always involved a complex dialogue and interaction between different ideas, disciplines and know-how, and to place archi-

tectural design in the trans-disciplinary context of the emerging synthesis.

In the framework of the emerging synthesis the dialogue and interaction in the architectural practice is modeled as processes, evolving and changing in time. The attention to design is not only on events in the space-place or time-situation, instead the de-sign processes and practice attempt to formulate ar-chitectural principles within the space of the proc-esses, allowing space and time –i.e. architecture– to emerge as we know it. The process notion requires the development of the awareness of the multiplicity and simultaneity of the interrelations between the factors involved in the design: from the individual to the social, from the building to the city and the envi-ronment.

The emerging synthesis, applied to cross-disciplinary fields, such as physical and natural sci-ences, has developed new methods and tools of re-search. For the design process, these experimental methods mark the distance from any positivist mechanicism, which from certain assumptions, automatically and autonomously, produces specific design outcomes: simulation as the algorithmic automation of a design process.

Vice versa, in the context of the emerging synthe-sis, simulation participates in the design practice through an interactive process, across policy, plan-ning and design. The method can be broken down into choice ջ simulation ջ evaluation ջ adapta-tion / modification ջ choice ջ …17 The design process proceeds by means either of successive cor-rections and adaptations or of radical changes of strategy, if needed. This methodological conception is far from an algorithmic formalization, and is closer to the concept of method as strategy: «a global schema within which actions must take place.»18

In the context of a strategy, simulation is not the forecast of events with a higher or lower degree of approximation or reliability, but a tool for bringing together and orienting different competencies –also from society– on the design topic and for making the contents of the project clear and hence communica-ble.

It is also essential that method and processes rec-ognize the central nature of the quality of the design project. «Quality belongs to history and civilization: it cannot be ignored when operating in cultural con-texts. The attempt to bring scientific processes closer to the reality of an historical and critical com-ponent, belongs to a scientific context: finding some significant information in projects for active man-agement of the landscape, a management which cannot assign precedence to towns or areas, can be useful to promote progress in studies. Today it is possible to connect the scientific and technical worlds, in fact it is also stimulating.»19

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Simulation therefore as part of a design process, as the a priori definition of a design strategy. This definition is not an alternative to the possibility of a posteriori describing a style as a strategy, or «the organization and implementation of what in the in-dividual experience escapes the web weaved by the concepts, in order to grasp the generic fact according to a method.»20, as considered above.

Other professors of architectural design and tech-nology of architecture can probably agree with our conviction of the relevance of strategies in educa-tion. On the other hand, it is difficult to agree on a common definition of strategy, beyond a generic as-sertion of a strategy as the description of a fragment of design experience. Furthermore, agreement on the importance of strategies in teaching does not mean that these are shared, particularly if they derive from the subjectivity of a fragment of design experi-ence.

This is the theoretical core issue, with which ar-chitectural design education has to deal with. The problem is the description of strategies when «It is no longer a question of method but of style, in the sense in which style, generally speaking, is the or-ganization and implementation of what in the indi-vidual experience escapes the web weaved by the concepts, in order to grasp the generic fact according to a method.»21

Strategy is therefore the re-processing of an indi-vidual experience, the design experience, offered to students as both narration, during lessons, and knowledge oriented to practice, during the design exercises in the design studio.

1.3.1 Narration In WINDS22, a system for supporting architectural design education, the professor is asked to highlight the relevant concepts and topics during the lecture-narration. In the example in Figure 2, the lecturer has pointed out noteworthy concepts and ideas: on the basis of these the system is able to automatically recognize further occurrences of the same concepts and ideas.

The last generation of digital thesauruses, such as WordNet

23, no longer considers just the relationships between words, but also between synonyms and concepts, and differentiates the relationships be-tween concepts and words. WINDS implements a semantic organization in which concepts can be re-lated to words, excerpts of text, and also drawings, pictures, animations, and CAD models (Fig. 2). In Figure 2 «The words underlined are instances of previously defined indexes. Therefore this para-graph can be accessed through any of the above in-dexes. Furthermore co-occurrences of indexes in the paragraph increase the relevance of each index to the others. For example, if the concepts of “visibility” and “different scales” occur together many times in different paragraphs, they are considered relevant to

each other. When a student works on the “visibility” issue of his design the system could give the hints of considering the design at “different scales”. That is to say that the author should take into account co-occurrences of indexes when writing paragraphs.»24

Similar to an analytical index, this set of concepts is called the Concept Index of the course. The Con-cept Index of a course and of all WINDS courses in general constitutes an ontology, the instances of which are the individual concepts indexed in the courses.

Implementing ontologies is a challenging and la-borious task, because they are normally defined starting from terms and definitions of more general concepts. These concepts and the relationships be-tween them are formalized according to a process oriented from the general to the particular, top-down. Whereas WINDS supports the collaborative construction from the bottom-up of networks of con-cepts, because it allows for weak semantic relation-ships25. To be more precise, WINDS uses concepts to index pieces of text and uses the definitions in the Concept Index to set up a web of relationships be-tween indexed concepts26.

WINDS uses the Concept Index to highlight links with related or in-depth lectures within the same course or in other courses to the student and also to the teacher, at the course writing stage27. In each WINDS course there are two mechanisms for manag-ing the relations (e.g. prerequisites, in-depth) among the lectures, relating to two different ways of frui-tion, respectively explanatory and exploratory (Fig. 3).

Explanatory refers to the use devised by the teacher during the course writing, and is a narrative-like sequence, as in a text, in which paragraphs and chapters follow on from one another in the order de-termined by the author.

Exploratory refers to non-linear access to the con-tents, according to a network of references, where the correlated subjects are associated one to an an-other. In WINDS the network of references is not predetermined by the author, as usually with web pages. Instead it is the system which proposes refer-ences and associations, also between different courses, on the basis of a global ontology, built up on all the individual ontologies, defined in each course.

In WINDS a student working on one particular design topic can request further or more specific study material from the system. Using the Concept Index, the system promptly offers the student a col-lection of pertinent material, from which she/he can select the most relevant in order to explore the topic further. In summary, the WINDS system dynami-cally creates custom-made learning paths to suit the needs of each individual student.

To this aim all the courses, including the technol-ogy courses, present a design exercise. Furthermore,

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the narrative flow is stored in the system in homoge-nous content units, which in a text might correspond to paragraphs or sections. The lecturer establishes pre-requisites, skills to teach and educational goals for each learning unit. The result is that even the learning of a skill can be contextualized within a de-sign strategy.

Roger Schank has suggested learning should be problem-oriented, according to an educative meth-odology defined as the Goal-Based Scenario (GBS)28. In GBS, learning is not an abstract activ-ity, but is facilitated by placing skills in the context in which they will be applied, or used. So for in-stance, lectures on exhibition spaces must not be an aside from, separate, activity. Instead they must be directly related to the design problem, so that the student’s learning is contextualized and oriented to the design activity itself (Fig. 2).

1.3.2 Knowledge oriented to the practice «The two folds of the method have a common fea-ture, which consists of the necessary representation of the circumstances and ways in which a symbol

system acts. It seems that it is not possible to talk about a method unless it is possible to formulate rules and directions in a language, although, as we mentioned earlier, a method does not always require these rules to be made explicit before they are put into practice.»29

However, «One of the distinctive problems in representing designs is the richness and complexity of their descriptive content. Each design contains many related pieces of information that are often dif-ficult to describe or to decompose. Furthermore, not all of the information embedded in complete and ex-haustive records of existing designs may be immedi-ately relevant for aiding in current design problems. An approach, which addresses these unique prob-lems of representation of design knowledge, is to base it upon a decomposition of holistic case knowl-edge into separate chunks of design knowledge.»30

Here it is necessary to make a distinction between the two main poles around which to formalize the design practice. One is natural language, which makes it possible to describe a strategy in narrative form. The other is the representation in a formal

Figure 2. Learning is facilitated by placing skills in the context in which they are used.

The factory is intended to be seen by people travelling along a nearby mo-torway which is slightly raised.

Three high, apparently unstable, sup-porting posts, which are above all signs rather than supports, emerge from the horizontal building and ensure visibilityof the factory from a distance. As cars approach they see the building from above. The design of the building is such that the main facade becomes the roof so that the factory is identifiable from close up.

The skylights have been drawn up as windows and a corner of the “facade-roof” starts to slant and lean and it be-comes void. The architectural features are seen on two different scales: on a micro scale (inclined roof) from nearby positions, and on a macro scale (in-clined posts) from a distance. These features respond to both the issue of visibility and that of recognition for the importance of identification of architec-tural elements.

C1 C2

C4 C3

C4 1

2

3

4

5

6

Figure 3. Explanatory and exploratory tutoring.

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symbol system which, precisely because it is formal-ized, is also more univocal and representative.

The first pole goes into the second because it is possible to discern some emerging aspects in the practice continuum and to represent them by means of a formal symbol system.

A founding hypothesis of our design educative methodology is the awareness that the problem is not so much the representation of the design strate-gies in themselves, but a representation appropriate to learning, with which students can gradually de-velop their own, individual, design strategy. Later on, under “Case-oriented” education, we will con-sider the epistemological and gnoseological implica-tions of the relationships between the general and the particular in design education.

In 1994 we proposed31 a representation of the de-sign process in which the continuum of practice was discretized into a formal symbol system: acyclic graphs32. In this representation the stages of the de-sign practice are the nodes of the graph. While the structuring between the stages of the design, i.e. the implementation in an “individual experience”, are the arcs of the graph (Fig. 5).

The reference to the “individual experience” en-sures that the representation is not univocally de-fined or even definable: in our original formalization the nodes represent “Questions, Suggestions, Argu-ments, Reports, Decisions” 33. Rivka Oxmann has proposed a formalization of the nodes into “Issue, Concept, Form” 34, recently implemented into WINDS as:

Issue - states a design problem; Concept (Topic) - proposes a possible resolution

for the issue; Forms (Documents) - state a design case, exam-

ples, a failure etc. The symbol representation of a strategy (see ex-

ample in Fig. 5) is nothing more than the description of a fragment of design experience. In the educative domain, strategies have the difficult task of explain-ing a design problem to the student by establishing a clear relationship between the problem itself and an idea, example, solution, skill or even a failure.

Strategies and GBS have potentially relevant im-plications for educative methodology, because they introduce a transition from object-oriented education to process-oriented education, in which the object is the completion of an educative process.

Usually in the design studio, the interaction be-tween the teacher and the student occurs on the re-sult of the design process-practice: on its graphical representation. It is up to the professor’s individual ability and willingness to understand and interpret the cognitive and creative process, behind the graphical representation of the design, in order to suggest and guide the students in the design exer-cise. Research into the symbol systems and the strategies may turn out relevant for devising a meth-odology for architectural design education, oriented to knowledge, to the cognitive aspects, and to the design process and practice.

2 CASE-ORIENTED EDUCATION

Gabetti has enquired if there can be method/s out-side of science. The answer is yes: there are fields, those concerning the “individual”, such as medicine, psychology, and law, where the relationship between the general and the individual is oriented to the case.

The case as a method of «choosing sufficiently clear and distinct aspects, in order to dissociate them unequivocally, and to transmit the content using a language or ad-hoc symbolism». The case establish priority, «resigning oneself to not describing every-thing», and also denies any phenomenological reductionism, in favor of the «ability to orient suffi-ciently clear and distinct elements of the problems examined to design purposes»35 36.

Assume that the assignment of a design studio is an office building in an urban area. A student is working on the design of the façade and how it fits in the environment, the area in which the project is inserted. When further working to the design, the student realizes that the design of the façade poses problems relating, for instance, to the cool-ing/heating, privacy/sight, lighting/sunlight control. Basically, a design which deals with these and fur-

Figure 4. A screenshot of the WINDS system.

Figure 5. Representation of a strategy by means of an acyclic graph.

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ther problems requires specific experience, which the design exercise aims to motivate in the student. The student will consult manuals, books and jour-nals, and will talk to her/his teachers and other stu-dents. She/he will learn to design by designing. In other words by accumulating her/his own collection of cases which she/he will reference to37.

The experience, i.e. the cases, represent a critical element in the comprehension of what is learned, in learning by doing, by designing.

The more experience the student has collected and the more cases she/he has come across, the bet-ter she/he will know how to distinguish and to orient the specific peculiarities of the various façade sys-tems to a design aim. According to the cognitive science and constructivism38, learning an adequate number of cases will aid the student to appreciate and evaluate the distinctions and differences be-tween them.

In the last twenty years artificial intelligence has drawn the Case-Based Reasoning tools (CBR)39 from the cognitive sciences. CBR is a field of re-search which aims to represent experience -cases- by indexing them in a computer memory, defining strategies to contextualize them, and methods for re-trieving and processing them in order to support de-sign and educative activities.

In architectural design education, the WINDS sys-tem is a significant example of the application of CBR for representing design experience. In the sys-tem the cases describe solutions, design details, and technological systems, which either represent correct uses, incorrect or inappropriate uses. In WINDS the cases are structured as learning objects, indexed ac-cording to their eminent design features, and formal-ized in the Concept Index (Fig. 6).

When the teacher interacts with a student, for ex-ample during the revision of a design exercise, she/he usually tends to present a certain number of cases, examples of designs and architectures. In general the professor bears the corresponding strate-gies and the design cases in mind, and uses them to

check, correct and enrich the student’s design exer-cise. The cases play a key role in the narrative struc-ture within which the teacher, starting from her/his own strategies, contextualizes and correlates the ex-amples-cases with the design theme and the stu-dent’s exercise.

Cases can therefore be extracted as «sufficiently clear and distinct aspects, in order to dissociate them unequivocally, and transmit the method using a lan-guage or ad-hoc symbolism», as in the WINDS sys-tem.

In this regard, the importance of the teacher’s re-vision lies in her/his ability to relate the case to the student’s design, in order to draw the attention to the aspects relevant to the specific design exercise.

Therefore the case is an emerging example within a design strategy, which the teacher puts forward to the student, while the strategies are the representa-tion of a fragment of design experience.

The ability to contextualize a case with respect to a design issue and to relate it to a design procedure can therefore be the trait d’union between cases and strategies.

3 THE CURRENT SUPREMACY OF CASE-ORIENTED TEACHING

In modern pedagogy we recognize important lines of research in which case-oriented methodology tends to prevail, at times to the detriment of method-oriented education. In our opinion, the roots of these pedagogical directions run deep, and go back to the North American legacy of pragmatism, of which James and Pierce were pioneers, and which reached intellectual maturity with John Dewey, pedagogue and philosopher, holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and later at Columbia University.

Dewey claims that the individual enacts his own knowledge in his actions, on the level of praxis. «The scientific attitude may almost be defined as that which is capable of enjoying the doubtful; sci-entific method is, in one aspect, a technique for mak-ing a productive use of doubt by converting it into operations of definite inquiry.»40 The aims of the method are to tackle difficulties, solve problems and design feasible possibilities. According to Dewey, the scientific method is the most effective tool for pursuing these aims. However, «There is no kind of inquiry which has a monopoly of the honorable title of knowledge. The engineer, the artists, the histo-rian, the man of affairs attain knowledge in the de-gree they employ methods that enable them to solve the problems which develop in the subject-matter they are concerned with. As philosophy framed upon the pattern of experimental inquiry does away with all wholesale skepticism, so it eliminates all in-

Figure 6. In WINDS the cases are structured as learning objects, indexed by their specific design peculiarities.

Design a roof

modular curved

light from the top

from the top

Lighting

modular curved

Geometry

Curved roof

System

Point

Structure

remind trees

INDEXES

CASES & DESIGN

Frame

Norman Foster

Stansed Airport, London

Renzo Piano, Huston

Structure

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vidious monopolies of the idea of science. But their fruits we shall know them.»41

We have given the primacy to Dewey the phi-losopher on to Dewey the educator, because we be-lieve that his functionalist pedagogy could some-times have been misunderstood by his functional education which, on the contrary, tends to give the primacy to the know-how over the knowledge in or-der to adapt it to the requirements of the labor mar-ket. Dewey’s comments on knowledge do not claim the supremacy of concrete actions over thought, or practice over theory; rather they confirm the indis-soluble nature of thought and action. It would be in-teresting to explore to what extent Dewey’s prag-matic theory of knowledge has affected the epistemological foundations of Papert’s constructiv-ism and Schank’s cognitive theories.

Dewey, pragmatically, founded cognition on practice: «ideas are neither copies of the world, nor representations linked principally to one another, but rather ingredients for rules and for plans of ac-tion.»42 Where the development of “modern” society has promoted and at the same time required a new interlace of culture and technology. Because of the increasing complexity of the technology and the binding of the science with the practice, a response has been the proliferation of ever more sector- and professional-oriented know-how: more specialized individuals with skills oriented to their specific role in business or society. Otherwise the response is the perspective, complying with the social circum-stances, of knowledge combining the capability to work intellectually and industrially, which in other words combines culture with practice.

According to Gabetti, in architectural design the reference to the social is in the historical dimension, where «quality belongs to history and civilization»21. The deepest sense of Gabetti’s historicism is in his having proposed and experimented design practice based on a concept of history as participation to both society and science-technology: «the attempt to bring scientific processes closer to the reality of a historical and critical component, belongs to the sci-entific domain: recover some significant directions in the plans for an active preservation of the land-scape, a preservation which cannot favor certain towns or areas, but instead it could turn out useful to promote the progress in the research. The connec-tion between science and technology, today, is pos-sible, and is even stimulating.»21

4 AN AGENDA FOR EDUCATION

Reconsidering, today, an agenda for education in architectural design and technology of architecture, we consider it important to plan for possible mutual contributions between method-oriented and case-oriented education. A synthesis between method-

oriented and case-oriented education, between the design studio and the lectures43, the École Polytech-nique and École de Beaux-Arts has been attempted several times since the nineteenth century, initially by the reform proposed by Viollet-Le-Duc, later ap-plied in the School of Berlin, then with the innova-tive teaching of Bauhaus, Ulm, and recently in the experiments with the “second design studio” 44. To-day this synthesis has received a further boost from educative theories -constructivism, learner-centered teaching and GBS- and the tools developed by the research, above all in the field of artificial intelli-gence. We hope that this synthesis will provide the education in architectural design and technology of architecture with methodologies and tools to meet the needs for specialist competencies and permanent training and, at the same time, to provide an answer to the increasing fragmentation of knowledge, which is ever more torn away from any methodol-ogy or “cultural” interpretation.

REFERENCES AND COMMENTS

1 Roberto Gabetti, “Progettazione architettonica e ricerca

tecnico-scientifica nella costruzione della città”, in Roberto Gabetti et al., eds., Storia e progetto (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1983), p. 59.

2 George Stiny, James Gips, Algorithmic aesthetics: computer models for criticism and design in the arts (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1978).

3 Christopher Alexander, Notes on the synthesis of form (Cam-bridge (Ma): Harvard University Press, 1966).

4 Gabetti, “Progettazione architettonica e ricerca tecnico-scientifica”, p. 57.

5 Gilles-Gaston Granger, “Metodo”, in Enciclopedia (Torino: Einaudi, 1977-1984), pp. 250-251.

6 «It is not a pointless exercise to compare descriptive geome-try with algebra; the two sciences have very close links. There is no descriptive geometry construction that cannot be translated into algebra; and providing the problems do not have more than three unknown values, every analytical operation can be considered the written version of the geo-metrical evidence». Gaspar Monge, Géométrie descriptive: Leçons données aux Ecoles normales an III de la République (Paris: Baudouin, 1799), pp. 15-16. According to Monge, descriptive geometry has a direct, ap-plied “character” which «enables it to take the place of analysis in the solution of numerous matters» Monge, ibid, pp. 15-16. Monge attributes descriptive geometry with an important role of link between science and technique. Not an alterna-tive role to that increasingly played by analysis in research and science – mathematics as a tool for investigation and understanding – the role it was attributed by Descartes in the founding act of the méthode. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison & chercher la variété dans les sciences plus la diotrique, les météores, et la géométrie, qui sont des essais de cette méthode. (Leida: Maire, 1637). Monge promotes descriptive geometry to a complementary role of the analysis, at an applied level, on the plane of the relations between science and technique. He conceives de-scriptive geometry as having a dual role, both practical and

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methodological. Practical, «the large-scale manufacture of machinery in the 19th century would not have been possible without descriptive geometry.» (Frederick Artz, L’éducation technique en France au XVIII

e siècle (Paris:

Alcan, 1939), p. 10.): infrastructures, buildings and ma-chines began to be designed according to the construction-manufacture (dimensioned); methodological, aimed at the formalization of problems and their solutions.

7 Pascal and Leibniz had already designed and built calculating machines.

8 Gilles-Gaston Granger, La Science et les sciences (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), pp. 46-47.

9 One of the priorities of the “modern movement” was to over-come this separation, which was above all methodological and linguistic, by promoting a central technical-intellectual figure.

10 At the 2nd International Conference on Mathematics in Paris in 1900, Hilbert raised the problem of the not contradictory nature of arithmetic. In 1931 Gödel’s theorem (Kurt Gödel, On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathe-matica and related systems Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962.) demonstrated that it could not be certain that the axioms of arithmetic do not lead to contradictions. With this he opened the way to the “loss of certainty” in mathe-matics (Morris Kline, Mathematics: the loss of certainty Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.). Science brought into discussion the unitary and consequential nature of the method. In his Principia (Isaac Newton, Philosophiae natu-ralis principia mathematica London: Imprimatur. S. Pepys, Ref. soc. praeses., 1686.), less than fifty years after Descartes’ méthode, Newton took a step backwards and did not claim to comprehend the nature of phenomena with his theories. Starting from an epistemological study, Feyera-bend, skeptically asserted the simultaneous impossibility of bringing the plurality of scientific methods back to a state of unity (Paul Feyerabend, Against method: outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge London: Humanities Press, 1975.). Husserl considered the fragmentation into special-ized fields of knowledge, each with its own peculiar lan-guage, at the basis of the crisis of European sciences (Husserl Edmund, The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology; an introduction to phe-nomenological philosophy Evanston: Northwestern Univer-sity Press, 1970).

11 Santa Fe Institute, Emerging syntheses in science: proceed-ings of the founding workshops of the Santa Fe Institute (Redwood City: Addison-Wesley, 1988).

12 Newell and Simon define a symbol system as «a set of enti-ties, called symbols, which are physical patterns that can occur as components of another type of entity called an ex-pression (or symbol structure). Thus, a symbol structure is composed of a number of instances (or tokens) of symbols related in some physical way (such as one token being next to another). At any instant of time the system will contain a collection of these symbol structures. Besides these struc-tures, the system also contains a collection of processes that operate on expressions to produce other expressions: proc-esses of creation, modification, reproduction and destruc-tion. A physical symbol system is a machine that produces through time an evolving collection of symbol structures. Such a system exists in a world of objects wider than just these symbolic expressions themselves.» Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, “Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbol and Search”, in Communication of ACM 19:3, 1976: 116.

13 Granger Gilles-Gaston, La Science et les sciences (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), p. 77.

14 Tom Gruber, “A translation approach to portable ontolo-

gies”, in Knowledge Acquisition 5:2 (1993): 199-220. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila “The Se-mantic Web” in Scientific American 284:5 (2001): 34-43. Roberto Poli, Peter Simons, eds., Formal ontology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).

15 An example of the use of ontologies is the categorization that Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) provides to users for searching the Internet. The Yahoo! ontology defines some general categories for research on the web using natural language. Formulation in natural language simplifies com-prehension of the ontology by users, who in this way can define concepts describing their interests. Yahoo! processes the ontology and uses it to search for the web pages re-quested by the user. Though in the Yahoo! ontology the links between concepts are merely taxonomic: there is no description of the concepts in terms of other relationships or attributes.


17 Luca Caneparo, Matteo Robiglio, “Evolutionary Automata for Suburban Form Simulation”, in Bauke de Vries, Jos van Leeuwen, Henri Achten (eds), Proceedings of CAAD Futures (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. 767-780.


19 Gabetti, ibidem, p. 76. 20 Granger, “Metodo”, pp. 250-251. 21 Gabetti, ibidem, p. 76. 22 Web based INtelligent Design Support (WINDS), a project

financed by the European Community in the 5th Frame-work, Information Society Technologies programme, Flexible University key action, coordinated by Prof. Mario De Grassi, Università di Ancona, Italy.

23 Christiane Fellbaum, ed., WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database (Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 1998).

24 Mario De Grassi, Alberto Giretti, WINDS Course Design: Principles and Practice (Ancona: IDAU, Unpublished WINDS Internal Report, 2000), p. 8.

25 WINDS does not require a shared conceptual and termino-logical base and does not impose a formal semantics of the relationship between concepts. One consequence is the “weak” semantics of the relationship between concepts, based on the relationships of association and inclusion. A further consequence is that the concepts are not formally defined and therefore lecturers and students are required to interpret the text, although this is usual to any writer or reader. Reasonably, the WINDS course Concept Index is a precur-sor of an ontology, it could be defined a “proto-ontology”.

26 Some software for the on-line course writing, “courseware” in current definition, can automatically create indexes, al-though these are indexes of terms rather than of concepts. Few courseware (e.g. WebCT or Interbook) makes it possi-ble to manually link concepts to parts of text, where the concepts simplify the structuring of the learning material.

27 There are currently 24 courses in WINDS, pertaining to ar-chitectural design, technology of architecture and project management.

28 Roger Schank, Goal-Based Scenarios, Technical Report #36 (Evanston: The Institute for the Learning Sciences, North-western University, 1992). Roger Schank, Robert Abelson, Scripts, Goals, Plans, and Understanding: an inquiry into human knowledge struc-tures (Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1977).

29 Granger, La Science et les sciences, p. 240.

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30 Rivka Oxman, “Educating the designerly thinker”, Design

Studies 20, 1999: 105-122. 31 Luca Caneparo, “Groupware and Design Education in Archi-

tecture”, in A. Harfmann and M. Fraser (eds.), Proceedings, ACADIA '94 Conference (St. Louis: The Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture, 1994), pp. 153-160.

32 At the beginning of the 1970s Horst Rittel and colleagues formalized a graph representation defined an Issue-Based Information System (IBIS), for the formalization and dis-cussion of “ill-posed” problems, i.e. problems where the definition of the problem itself is not clear. Werner Kunz, Horst W.J. Rittel, Issues as elements of in-formation systems (Berkeley: Institute of Urban and Re-gional Development, University of California, 1970).

33 «Each participant [to the design studio] can add Suggestions nodes to Questions nodes to offer possible solutions and opinions, setting up a link of the “answer to” type, indicated on the monitor by an arrow between the two nodes. Argu-ments nodes are added in the same way. An Argument can motivate (pros and cons), explain, or deepen a Suggestion node.» “Groupware and Design Education in Architecture”, p. 157).

34 “Educating the designerly thinker”, p. 106. 35 Gabetti, “Progettazione architettonica e ricerca tecnico-

scientifica”, p. 84. 36 The Écoles de Beaux-Arts have traditionally been more

“case-oriented”. The interaction between tutors and stu-dents is oriented to the object: the design is developed in the atelier (studio) and during this process the tutor dis-cusses and interacts with the students uninterruptedly. The teaching materials are the porte-feuille (portfolio), a large folder which contains the lecturer’s work, and also works by best students. As well as this, the examples of architec-ture were right in front of the students in Paris, at that time the capital of world architecture.

37 Spiro N. Pollalis, Case Studies on Management and Tech-nology in the Design Process (TU-Delft: Bouwkunde, 1993).

38 Idit Harel, Seymour Papert, Constructionism (Norwood: Ablex Publ. Corp., 1991).

39 Roger Schank, Alex Kass, Christopher Riesbeck, Inside case-based explanation (Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1994).

40 John Dewey, The quest for certainty: a study of the relation of knowledge and action (New York: Minton, Balch, 1929), p. 228.

41 Dewey, ibidem, p. 220. 42 Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy. A Gene-

alogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 132.

43 Mark Gelernter, “Reconciling Lectures and Studios”, JAE 41:2 (1988): 46-52.

44 Edward Allen, “Second Studio: A Model for Technical Teaching”, JAE 51:2 (1997): 92-94.

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Development and Usability of Hypermedia Educational Objects For Construction Engineering Education

S. Scheer Civil Engineering Research Centre,Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brasil

B. Carmem Lúcia Graboski da Gama Graduate Program of Numerical Methods in Engineering, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brasil

ABSTRACT: Nowadays there are many advances in the Information and Communication Technologies, and new possibilities arise to Education and the modern pedagogy theories seek for the importance of these technologies. It is fundamental the use of virtual environments, which allow the organization and reuse of hypermedia didactic material in the form of the so called ‘learning objects’. The strategy is development, organization, storage and evaluation of these learning objects for the academic community, and the adoption of a metadata model for use in a learning objects portal to dissemination (http://www.cesec.ufpr.br/etools/oe3). This repository for dissemination and distribution is associated with some educational technologies and may improve the learning and teaching process in the engineering area. In this paper some results are presented on the application of an ergonomic and pedagogic evaluation procedure for the learning objects. It consists in a first application of a checklist of use and functionality to the portal and the objects repository. This permits to verify the interaction between educational objects usability and the learning process in terms of an ergonomic and pedagogic quality assessment. It intends to contribute effectively with the construction and structural engineering learning and teaching processes as well as with other similar engineering areas.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, one of the good results of the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Education is the construction and dissemination of virtual teaching and learning environment. Therefore, it is crucial the dissemination of reusable interactive hypermedia contents like the called learning objects.

Learning Objects' definition according to IEEE/LTSC, refers to “any entity, digital or not, that can be used and reused during the learning process using technology”. Such objects can have hypermedia content, instructional content, learning objects, and support software (IEEE/LTSC 2004). Learning objects are elements of a new teaching and learning methodology based on the use of computers and the Internet. They are object oriented based with the characteristic of reusability.

Efforts in the development of such educational tools lie in the construction of a object oriented methodology to support the creation, organization, storage and offer of contents using patterns. A

related work described in Scheer & Gama (2004) brings ideas to create a knowledge generation network emerging in the form of a learning objects repository for the structural engineering eduction (http://www.cesec.ufpr.br/etools/oe3).

As an educational project, one of the objectives of the OE3 Project is to support the formation of human resources, associated to the search of ergonomic and pedagogical resources (Oliveira Silva 2002, Hack 2004) for correct and coherent application of these educational elements.

Another foreseen result is the generation of a learning object’s collection for the Structural Engineering, with publication in a web portal for open dissemination and improvements by the use of educational technologies in teaching and learning activities as well as in related areas. The construction of this learning object’s collection will allow the development of learning systems capable to provide the students the knowledge in any moment and anywhere.

However, the construction of this environment is not a trivial process of didactic material organization

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and neither, a mere transcription of books in new formats. It requires a lot of effort involving human resources and financial support.

One of the concerns of the project is in accomplishing an ergonomic analysis of the portal, looking for a possible integration between the usability and the learning process. This ergonomic development study looks for provide functionalities that supply the users' needs and give the intuition, facility and efficiency in its use. In educational portals, the interfaces should be creative and attractive (Kalinke 2003). The ergonomic analysis should be in consonance with the apprentice the system. That means, to learn about the system and to learn using the system, i.e., learning the concepts beginning from the manipulation of the learning objects in the web portal. In this context, the quality assessment of the information and contents available in a learning objects repository needs models and standards.

2 OBJECTS REPOSITORY CONSTRUCTION: STANDARDS FOR WEB

The construction of an educational environment should take care of some technical aspects. One of them relies on the development and identification of the learning objects. The development of these objects should foresee the possibility of its reuse, organization and a metadata classification, stored in a learning objects system (Learning Content and Learning Management Systems).

There are several efforts for contents or learning management metadata standardization (Scheer & Gama 2004), like LOM (IEEE/LTSC 2004) of the Learning Technology Standard Committee of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, IEEE/LTSC; SCORM of Advanced Distributed Learning; IMS-Metadata of the Instructional Management System Global Consortium; and the Dublin Core Metadata specification.

In addition, the facility for description, creation, manipulation, and content visualization in the Internet, leads to the use of the XML language (eXtensible Markup Language) which was developed to describe document content, and projected to be used in the Internet according to the definition of the World Wide Consortium – W3C (W3C 2005). It is a favorable tool for the storage and description of data for the metadata that will be used in the portal and it offers larger flexibility than HTML to define tags. It is a free and expandable language, allowing authors of web documents to create its own tags. This facilitates a exchange of

information between the author and the user of the web sites.

XML language supplies a description of the document in a tree form, becoming appropriate for storage of data in the Web. The first representation of these data in the described repository is in a taxonomy fashion (Fig. 1).

For the development of XML documents a procedure is being used in the project’s repository that will generate the data structure generating the XML documents in real time. Through these documents it will be possible the integration among the portal of the referred project and others from different universities, facilitating the improvement, through the technology, of the teaching activities and engineering learning and related areas. As an example, in the OE3 project here described, the contents should be structured and organized in a metadata model.

The chosen metadata is adherent to one of the standards, the LOM (Learning Objects Metadata) (LTSC/IEEE 2004). This standard follows the generic purposes of metadata. The developed learning objects, organized and following these standards can be recovered when and how it is necessary. Another characteristic is the capacity to reserve blocks that can have references for another objects and be combined sequentially to build larger learning units. Fundamentaly they are built in an object oriented fashion, looking for creativity and reusability in numerous contexts.

Figure 1. Homepage with a learning object taxonomy

The learning objects can have any digital media in a hypermedia format like images, videos, presentations and texts. The important is that the media combination lead to a reflexive attitude.

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A number of strategies for development can be used, and the most popular are the Java applets (platform independent) or Macromedia Flash programs (Microsoft Windows dependent).

Figure 2. Two different software tools to the same problem: applet Java and Macromedia Flash implementations

In Figure 2 appears a web homepage with the

same problem simultaneously programmed with these two software solutions.

3 ERGONOMIC AND PEDAGOGIC CHARACTERS FOR LEARNING OBJECTS

Different web-based environments and learning objects are being used in educational activities. Facing the amplitude of the question and the uncertainties related to efficiency and quality of the developed educational objects, it is necessary to identify and establish assessment models. These models must consider the actual appearance and applications of learning objects.

An learning object, as Java applets, must have a number of characteristics: it must be easy to use and to understand; it must have motivational and attractive aspects; finally, it must permit assess the user comprehensiveness level. Some of these characteristics are named as ‘usability’ and ‘learning’ following Gamez (1998). These properties are used in the assessment process for educational software as the ‘ergonomic’ and ‘pedagogic’ characters.

3.1 Usability as ergonomic character

Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use as stated by Jakob Nielsen

(http://www.useit.com). The word ‘usability’ also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process. Usability has five quality components: - Learnability: How easy is it for users to accom-

plish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?

- Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?

- Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?

- Errors: How many errors do users make, how se-vere are these errors, and how easily can they re-cover from the errors?

- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design? There are many other important quality attributes.

A key one is utility, which refers to the design's functionality: Does it do what users need? Usability and utility are equally important: It matters little that something is easy if it's not what the user wants. It's also no good if the system can hypothetically do what it is wanted, but it is not possible to make it happen because the user interface is too difficult. To study a design's utility, it is possible to use the same user research methods that improve usability.

A checklist was used in order to help in the assessment process of usability (section 4). It verifies the relationship between user and computer (system).

This type of procedure permits the assessment and diagnosis of interface problems. The characteristics of such an assessment are: accessibility: how easy is the system for users; readiness: verifies if the system informs and conducts the user during a session; compatibility: verifies if the system adheres to the user expectations and needs.

3.2 Learning as pedagogic character

Learning is a quality attribute for the interface human-computer that tries to measure the pedagogic quality to a software. It must be tied to the didactic context, i.e., an apprenticeship that leads to autonomy, creativity, critic thinking, and knowledge construction. The learning object pedagogic characteristics to verify are: attractiveness, available user help; information readiness; exercise and practice; tutorial; and hypermedia/hypertext.

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4 THE ASSESSMENT PROCESS

The main objective of this short assessment was the analysis of the learning object of Figure 3 in terms of its usability efficiency and its performance as a pedagogic tool. The applied assessment process consisted in the application of a checklist available together in the studied applet itself (the red text start button in the same homepage).

Figure 3. The assessed applet: bending-compression of wood structural elements During the second semester of 2004, the students engagement was through the resolution of a specific exercise given by the teachers of “Wood Engineering” undergraduate discipline of the Civil Engineering courses at two different universities in South of Brazil (Curitiba, State of Paraná): one public and the other private. After his formal subscription and the exercise solution, the student is asked to kindly answer the checklist questions directly in the same web session.

Figure 4. Questionnaire about educational software evaluation

For this study purpose it was applied a subset of the universe of 274 questions about educational software evaluation (Hack 2004, Gamez 1998) process as follows: ten questions for usability and another ten for pedagogic purposes (Table 1). The Figure 4 shows the web questionnaire. And, the collected possible answers in the available checklist were: ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘partially’ (p) and ‘does not apply’ (n.a.). The small set of questions were decided taking care of the desired characteristics and in the way that guarantee efficient student response with correctness and truth. Table 1. Questions for assessment of characteristics: checklist

Ergonomic (usability)

1 Is the wait time for homepage show up acceptable?

2 Does the system give download option?

3 Are the use instructions (how-to) given by software easy to be understand?

4 Have the executed applications good performance? 5 Is there a contact option for contact with the support

team? 6 Are there alternative to mouse use in terms of keyboard

use (shortcuts) for selection and execution of menu options?

7 Are there sound signals when problems occur during the data input?

8 Are the sound resources well explored and with adequate use?

9 Does the system demand an explicit ENTER action for the data processing?

10 Do the button legends helpful for the navigation?

Pedagogic ( learning )

1 Are the writing and text style good, clear and easy to understand?

2 Have the navigation buttons expected reactions? 3 In case of errors, are they treated and clearly informed? 4 Is easy to find an explanation for your doubts? 5 Do the motivational resources remain interesting during

the time with no constant repeated situations? 6 Has the software sufficiently clear icons without

ambiguity? 7 Does the software offer a short student performance

report at the end of the session? 8 Are there instructions to error situations? 9 Are there complementary materials available to student

access? 10 Can you feel that the informations presented are learned

(‘dominated”) and you can get good results in an formal examination?

The first data collection with the cooperation

from the teachers and students of the two universi-

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ties leads to 141 student responses for the public university and 53 for the private one (Table 2). To understand the analysis here presented it is impor-tant to note that Brazilian public universities are free of charges (no taxes) and have a more severe compe-tition in the admission examination.

Although the possible remote access, most of the students answered the questionnaire at the universities laboratories (83% in the private; 78% in the public).

Other question is the P.10 (“Can you feel that the information set presented is dominated and you can get good results in an formal examination?”) which results in percentage for affirmative (‘yes’) answers are: 52% for public university and 28% for the private. In addition, for question E.3 the results are: 72% ofr public and 43% for the private. These two question results somehow corroborates with the common sense between the teachers from both universities is: the students of the private university tend to be more teacher dependent, more passive in their behavior. The public university students showed to be more active and search harder for their self knowledge construction with autonomy and free expression.

In terms of access to ‘technology’ (computer labs) the private university has little advantage. The Brazilian educational conditions permit to confirm that is unquestionable the infrastructure and the lab facilities are better in the private schools.

In the software dimension of the analysis, it was observed that the answers are very satisfactory in terms of usability and pedagogic subjects. The results permits to get that the initial proposition of the OE3 project was achieved in this study: to give software tools to help engineering teaching and learning with quality and confidence.

Table 2. Percentage results for the checklist questionnaire

Ergonomic ( usability ) Public University Private University

E yes p no n.a. yes p no n. a. 1 78 26 6 0 83 17 0 0

2 59 6 52 12 35 47 18 0

3 72 22 5 6 43 38 19 0

4 62 22 4 12 53 27 20 0

5 27 12 40 21 39 22 17 22

6 25 24 26 25 17 35 13 35

7 7 6 39 48 14 7 10 69

8 4 38 28 57 7 28 10 55

9 22 14 55 9 30 20 30 20

10 85 10 20 3 47 53 0 0

Pedagogic ( learning ) Public University Private University

P yes p no n.a. yes p no n. a. 1 79 14 10 0 53 27 20 0

2 85 12 0 3 83 17 0 0

3 25 24 10 41 17 35 13 35

4 37 33 19 11 13 44 26 17

5 35 30 17 18 77 0 23 0

6 66 24 4 6 50 25 0 25

7 16 15 42 27 7 29 21 43

8 13 19 42 26 7 30 33 30

9 61 12 6 21 50 25 0 25

10 52 41 2 5 28 55 17 0

5 SOME CONSIDERATIONS

The learning objects development through such a cooperative network (eTools) with construction of a repository like OE3 Project it is an outstanding manner to improve the knowledge independent of distance and time. It is important to take advantage of the communication readiness and the increasing use of the Internet/WWW for research and educational purposes. The creation of assessment mechanisms for these educational software components and for the use evaluation will permit that more universities, companies and any people to share knowledge.

Moreover, learning objects could be understand as an incentive to the (self) study to any kind of students when searching for distance education and life long learning efforts.

It is important to note that under the optics of the software development, the use of free and open software tools developed in academic institutions should also be highlighted. The character of open application, of public domain, free of costs to the final user (teachers and students, engineering professionals), as reusable objects for application in teaching, learning and professional activities, shows that the effort is worthy.

The next challenge will be to verify the usability of these educational tools in the teacher´s point of view. New studies to verify existent approaches and implement a really adequate web-methodology and assessment methods for student performance are needed.

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6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was partially supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development of Brazil (CNPq) under a grant for small IT groups development.

The authors would like to thank to all the teachers and students that give support to this study. The learning objects research development group is formed by the paper´s authors and the following persons: M. S. Abe, C. C. Verzenhassi, A. Luft.

REFERENCES

Gamez, L. 1998. TICESE - Manual do avaliador. Master thesis. Universidade do Minho e Universidade Federal Unviersity of Santa Catarina. Florianóplis: UFSC. http://www.labiutil.inf.ufsc.br/ferr_usab.html

Hack , C.A. et al. 2004. Ergonomia em Software Educacional: a possível integração entre a usabilidade e aprendizagem. Available at: www.Labiutil.inf.ufsc.br/ergolist/check.htm . Access Jan 2004. [in Portuguese]

IEEE/LTSC Learning Technology Standards Committee. IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata. Available at: http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/. Acess Sept 2004.

Kalinke, M. A. 2003. Internet in Education. Curitiba: Expoente.[in Portuguese]

Krauss, F. & Ally, M. 2005. A Study of the design and evaluation of a learning object and implications for content development. Interdisciplinary J. of Knowledge and Learning Objects 1(1):-. Available at: <http://ijklo.org/Volume1/v1p001-022Krauss.pdf>.

Oliveira Silva, C. R. 2002. MAEP: um método ergopedagógico interativo de avaliação para produtos educacionais informatizados. PhD Dissertation, Federal University of Santa Catarina. Florianópolis: UFSC.

Scheer, S. & Gama, C.L.G. 2004. Learning Objects for a Teaching and Learning Network in Structural Engineering. In: X ICCCBE, Weimar, Germany. Proceedings (CD-ROM).

W3C Consortium. 2005. Extensible Markup Language XML. Available at: http://www.w3.org/xml/.Access Mar 2005.

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http://ijklo.org/Volume1/v1p001-022Krauss.pdf

1 INTRODUCTION

The contribution of learning objectives from the field of computer science has become an integral part in the curriculum of construction engineering. In particular, methods from the area of object-oriented software construction are regularly taught in both lectures and exercise courses. The reason for the adoption of object-oriented methodologies is to provide students with a deeper understanding of both the design and the functionality of software systems such as Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems. Also, the (object-oriented) structure of standard building models (e.g. IFC) supported by current CAD-systems can be more accurately conceived. Besides, complex theoretical methods, such as the computation of finite elements, can be understood and communicated more intuitively, if an object-oriented program simulates these computations. Ex-ercise courses thereby serve as a suitable option for students to design and to implement such programs on their own under the supervision of an instructor.

The acquaintance and development of object-oriented software systems requires a sound mathe-matical way of thinking, in order to abstract from (complex) real facts and to reason about appropriate solutions in terms of typical programming language constructs (objects, relationships, methods, etc.). Owing to the mathematical orientation in the tradi-tional computer science education, students of this study course usually have minor problems to learn this way of thinking. Students of construction engi-

neering typically have different emphases in their studies and classify courses for computer science education only as extracurricular. Apparently, most of these students have neither sufficient background nor the experience with concrete programming lan-guages (e.g. Java), modeling languages (e.g. UML) or auxiliary CASE tools (e.g. Eclipse) that are re-quired for the development of object-oriented sys-tems. The acquirement of these languages and tools constitutes an additional overhead, which, conse-quently, complicates the progress of the entire exer-cise course and may lead to frustration.

The learning platform GeoCafe [Bode et al. 2004] addresses the problems mentioned above by provid-ing a communication-centered learning environment. This platform has been developed in the course of the joint research project “GeoInformation”1. The overall goal of this project was to improve both dis-tributed and constructivist learning of IT learning contents in the field of geography by means of a col-laborative, multimedia-based learning environment. GeoCafe allows a group of students to design and implement arbitrary software fragments in a collabo-rative manner. The platform supports co-operative learning by means of integrated communication elements like chat and whiteboard. These elements can be used by students in order to discuss about

1 This joint research project was funded by the Federal Minis-try of Education and Research (BMBF) during the period 06/2001 - 12/2003. More details can be found on the Website of this project : http://www.geoinformation.net

Group-Oriented Learning of Object-Oriented Software Methods in Construction Engineering: A Case for GeoCafe

S. Alda, M. Won & A.B. Cremers Department of Applied Computer Science, University of Bonn, Germany

ABSTRACT: This paper presents the results of the research project GeoInformation. The goal of this project was to develop a communication-centered, multimedia-based learning platform (GeoCafe) aimed to support the education of object-oriented software methods for geography students. Since both the learning contents for IT education and the general requirements for students in construction engineering are similar to those in geography, the findings of this project can also be adopted to enhance group-oriented learning of object-oriented concepts in the area of construction engineering. The design principles of the learning platform Geo-Cafe are motivated and justified by modern pedagogical insights. In this paper, we focus on a technical pres-entation of the GeoCafe platform as well as on an illustration of potential application scenarios, in which the platform could be deployed.

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technical problems or to easily share results. Geo-Cafe itself is based upon component-based client-server architecture. Components thereby implement learning applications such as a development envi-ronment implementing a simplified Java dialect aimed especially for beginners (GeoJava) as well as basic service components supporting the communi-cation between students (chat). New components satisfying specific requirements for a given project course can be developed (or purchased) and added to the GeoCafe platform. Students are equipped with a client environment, which accomplishes them to download new components from the GeoCafe server (repository) and, in turn, to install and to use these components. Although the platform (and the project) has been designated for the group-based education as well as for the self-education of geography stu-dents, their ideas can necessarily be adopted for sup-porting the organization of small-sized construction engineering courses. This can be justified by the fact that both subjects comparably demand a strong comprehension of technical and mathematical as-pects.

In this paper, we will present both the GeoInfor-mation project and the GeoCafe platform in more detail. We will also show how the platform could enhance the execution of project courses in construc-tion engineering and to what extend the learning ap-titude of students can be increased.

This paper is structured as follows: section 2 elaborates concepts for instructing learning contents from the area of computer science, in particular for the instruction of programming languages. These concepts are motivated and justified by modern pedagogical insights and aims, which are also de-lineated briefly in this section. Section 3 presents GeoCafe, a communication platform supporting col-laborative learning activities. This platform utilizes the learning concepts emphasized in section 2. The fourth section demonstrates a suitable use case of GeoCafe in a fictitious learning session. Section 5 finally concludes this paper.

2 CONCEPTS FOR INSTRUCTING PROGRAM-MING LANGUAGES

The focus on the instruction of object-oriented pro-gramming languages is either set on the acquisition of the actual language (like Java, C++, or Smalltalk) or the comprehension of algorithms and data struc-tures that can be implemented by a distinct language. This fact can be observed in both textbooks and courses: • Algorithms (e.g. search or traversal algorithms)

or data structures (e.g. binary trees or graphs) are mostly visualized as graphics (books) or anima-tions (courses). The reference to a concrete im-plementation is often only indicated in terms of

pseudo code (see for instance [Ottmann & Wid-mayer 1996]). Knowledge in an object-oriented programming language and, more importantly, in the object-oriented methodology is either pre-conditioned or elaborated briefly.

• The teaching of a programming language is basi-cally carried out by means of pure text (books) or text slides (courses) imparting knowledge about basic syntactical elements (types, condi-tions, loops) and advanced concepts (object-orientation, organization of software, reflection concepts) (see for instance [Deitel and Deitel, 1999]). Algorithms to demonstrate the language are only used as simple examples, whereas the learner is not squeezed to have a deep knowl-edge about algorithm theories.

Apparently, the acquisition of a programming lan-guage without covering and studying related algo-rithms makes less sense. Analogously, the instruc-tion of algorithms without a sound introduction to an object-oriented language appears rather incomplete.

One of the goals of the above mentioned GeoIn-formation project was to identify and to propose new procedures for instructing programming languages and algorithms in parallel by means of up-to-modern multimedia and communication techniques. The adoption of these techniques should not only assist, but also enable a group of learners to learn an ob-ject-oriented programming language according to recent insights from the area of education science. In the next section, the chosen learning model for this project will be elaborated.

2.1 Constructivist learning model Our approach for a communication-based learning platform intends to realize findings of the construc-tivist learning model [Kopp et al. 2001]. With re-spect to this model, knowledge is no longer pas-sively instructed, but actively constructed by each individual learner. The process of learning thus be-comes an active construction process. The instructor of a course abdicates the traditional role of a tutor (or authority) and takes over the role of an accompa-nying coach or trainer, who helps and consults par-ticipants during the process of knowledge construc-tion. According to [Reinmann-Rothmeier & Mandl 2001], the process of learning being arranged by a constructivist model mainly exhibits the following characteristics: • Learning as an active process: the active partici-

pation accomplishes each learner to adopt new learning contents effectively. Both motivation and interest are an indispensable requirement for this process

• Learning as a self-controlled process: the learner is enabled to control and to verify his own learn-ing progress

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• Learning as a constructive process: acquisition and usage of knowledge is derived from existing knowledge structures

• Learning as a situational process: The acquisi-tion of knowledge is bound to problem-oriented contexts and specific situations

• Learning as a social process: The acquisition of knowledge is mastered by the interaction with other learners within a group.

The advance of this learning model is due to the in-creased learning effectiveness: knowledge that is de-rived by individual, constructivist learning activities is internalized to a higher degree than knowledge that is learned in an abstract way [Weicker 2005].

The above mentioned processes can be initialized for the parallel learning of a programming language and corresponding algorithms through a communica-tion-centered learning platform that supports the group-based, explorative development of algorithms. Generally speaking, explorative development typi-cally encompasses methods like the “trial-and-error” method for finding solutions of a problem. In the next section, we will present three key functional re-quirements for implementing explorative develop-ment methods into a learning platform.

2.2 Requirements for a learning platform We have identified three distinct requirements a learning platform has to fulfill in order to allow a group of learners to develop object-oriented algo-rithms in an explorative manner: synchronous com-munication, visualization and animation of algo-rithms, and equalization of complexity. In the following, these properties will be explained in more detail:

2.2.1 Synchronous Communication

During the last decade, mainly asynchronous com-munication media like Email, newsgroup bulletins, or Web portals have proven to support well collabo-rative learning activities within virtual communities. Members of these communities can share experi-ences, discuss problems, or coordinate common ac-tivities asynchronously (i.e. time-shifted). Instant messaging systems like chat systems allow for syn-chronous communication: chat participants can ex-change text messages, which appear directly within a dialog. Prominent chat systems like ICQ [ICQ 2005] have mainly emerged in the area of entertain-ment. In fact, these systems are hardly deployed to support virtual learning communities. We claim that the introduction of a chat system improves the text-based, synchronous (i.e. simultaneous) discussion and the exchange of knowledge within a (virtual) group of active learners. However, for an efficient support of learning processes in which new knowl-

edge is to be extracted, existing chat systems yet ex-hibit a couple of drawbacks: • Most chat-systems do not feature logging

mechanisms, which record (all or important) contributions resulting from their registered chat members. Logging mechanisms are in particular useful for members, who join a learning group at a later date. By retrieving earlier contributions, new members are capable of participating to on-going discussions instantaneously. Besides, con-tributions can be reworked by a moderator, so that important findings can be emphasized or re-used for subsequent courses.

• There are no chat systems that accomplish mod-erated discussions. In analogously to conven-tional face-to-face meetings, a dedicated mod-erator (as for instance the tutor of course) should possess the rights to reject contributions or to summarize current results. Authors like Koppen-höfer et al. also point out the necessity of moder-ated chat systems especially for the enhancement of learning processes [Koppenhöfer et al. 2000].

• Recent chat systems do not allow for integrating additional context information into a discussion. In some intensive discussions it might be benefi-cial to visualize the object of discussion (e.g. a class diagram, source code, visualization of an algorithm). Additional tools like a whiteboard component could be added that accomplish not only visualizing context information, but also enable learners to edit or to annotate new infor-mation to the object of discussion. Thus, new knowledge can be constructed within a discus-sion.

We conclude that a sophisticated chat system for a learning platform should comprise (1) a logging mechanism, (2) a role model including the role of a moderator, and (3) a whiteboard component to aug-ment discussions with context information.

2.2.2 Visualization and Animation

The visualization of internal event, data or control flow fosters the comprehension of complex algo-rithms. Typically, the visualization of algorithms is carried out by means of simple graphics. An ad-vancement of this type of visualization constitutes the animated representation in terms of small movies and animations. The notion of animated visualiza-tion facilitates the intuitive illustration of technical issues, which are, otherwise, difficult to illustrate through conventional, non-animated visualizations [Weidenmann 2002a].

The animation of algorithms and data structures has been analyzed by a number of projects detecting a couple of different systems suitable for different programming languages (see for instance the LEO-NARDO system [Crescenzi et al. 1997]). In fact, most of the system we have studied for our project,

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distinguish between the programmer and the user of an algorithm animation. While the programmer is responsible to set up the animation for a selected al-gorithm, the user is restricted to “play-back” the animation. The interaction between end-user and animation is only possible to a minor degree (e.g. by changing pre-defined parameters). If we remind the assumptions of the constructivist learning model (section. 2.1), this restriction is rather counterpro-ductive. Consequently, for the implementation into a learning platform, we claim that the separation be-tween user and programmer should be abolished, that is, the user (learner) produces both the program code and the pertaining visualization. This so-called multi-coding of algorithms through text (program code) on the one hand, and through graphics (anima-tions) on the other hand, have a positive impact on the knowledge acquisition of the learning protago-nists (see a study in [Weidenmann 2002b]).

2.2.3 Equalization of complexity

For the first steps to learn when learning a pro-gramming language, it is not necessary to have a complex programming environment offering too tricky operations for program control (e.g. debug-ging, export functions) as it can be found in rather professional systems (so called Integrated Develop-ment Environments (IDEs) like Eclipse [Eclipse 2005]). Moreover, it is sufficient to provide begin-ners with a selected number of operations that facili-tate the intuitive acquaintance with a new language. Also, the beginners should be freed from complex syntactical elements of a language (e.g. pointer arithmetic) or extensive libraries (e.g. Java’s Swing classes for GUI implementation) that are too diffi-cult to understand right at the beginning. The usage of a “restricted” subset of the entire programming language can also be ensured by a programming en-vironment. A prominent example for such a confin-ing programming environment is the NIKI language [Pattis 1981], which is a subset of the PASCAL pro-gramming language.

2.3 Non-functional requirements Apart of the above explained functional require-ments, we also consider the demand for adaptability and extensibility as important non-functional re-quirements for this platform. By means of a platform that allows for the extension of the environment with new functionality, the provider of a platform (e.g. lecturer) can modify the platform according to new demands (e.g. for the case that a new Java version is to be used). The adaptability of the platform could also enable end-users (learners) to adapt their client installation according to personal needs or wishes. In particular, the end-user adaptability (tailorability) requires the involvement of deliberated adaptation

tools and mechanisms. According to the author Morch, for instance, adaptation mechanisms should be offered in different levels of complexity (see [Morch 1997]).

2.4 Review of existing systems We observed that for each of the above described requirements single tools or systems are necessarily available. An integrated platform, covering all men-tioned functional and non-functional requirements is, according to our evaluation, yet missing.

For our evaluation, we also reviewed existing In-tegrated Development Environments (IDEs). Well-known examples of IDEs are, among others, NetBeans [NetBeans 2005], Eclipse [Eclipse 2005], or Oracle’s JDeveloper [Oracle 2005]. As already outlined in the previous section, these IDE are basi-cally used for the professional software develop-ment. Communication media such as synchronous chat channels are missing for all IDEs. Synchroniza-tion of developing activities is practicable through an integrated version control system (CVS), where developers can check in changes to source codes and make these changes available to other participants. Comments can be added to each check-in action util-izing a simple rationale management system. How-ever, for learning purposes, the CVS is too extensive and too complicated. NetBeans and Oracle are closed architectures, that is, these IDEs do not allow for the integration of new components. Eclipse, however, puts into practice an open, plugin-based architecture based on the OSGi component architec-ture [OSGi 2004]. This allows users of Eclipse to in-tegrate new functionality in terms of plugins and to wire these plugins with other, already existing parts of the system. Potentially, one could think of, for in-stance, a chat plugin to be integrated and connected with a source editor. In this way, Java classes could be dragged directly to the chat, visualized ade-quately, and transferred to other remote learners. Apparently, the sound transformation of Eclipse to-wards an entirely light-versioned learning environ-ment fostering the explorative development of algo-rithms is, in our opinion, somewhat tedious. Also, the extensibility and adaptability features of Eclipse are rather inappropriate for less-skilled end-users, as no tailoring mechanisms are actually offered (such as mechanisms on different levels (see requirements in section 2.3)).

The intention of GeoCafe is to close the gap of existing learning tools and developing environments with an integrated platform that provides a learning environment covering all mentioned requirements. Furthermore, the non-functional requirements (sec-tion 2.3) should be integrated allowing for the flexi-ble modification of the platform by both tutor and learning end-users.

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3 THE GEOCAFE PLATFORM

This section outlines the structure of the GeoCafe learning platform. GeoCafe is implemented as a cli-ent-server architecture: each learning participant is equipped with a client installation that includes ser-vice components like an extended chat, a shared whiteboard, and a user management tool. These ser-vice components do in particular support the com-munication and interaction among students, thus, fulfilling the first functional requirement “communi-cation” as outlined in section 2.2. All other func-tional requirements for the learning platform that have been elucidated in this section are implemented in terms of so-called learning components. Both types of components will be presented in more detail in the following sections.

3.1 Service components In the following, the three service components of the GeoCafe platform are described. These components realize the platform as a communication-based plat-form that enhances the remote communication among the learning participants.

The GeoChat component is the central compo-nent of the GeoCafe platform (see figure 1, lower-left corner) that enables a group of learners to ex-change messages synchronously. This chat compo-nent offers a couple of features that are not available in conventional chat systems. First, it allows refer-encing directly to old chat contributions that have

been previously published in the chat. This reference mechanism avoids formulating references by means of textual phrases (“Like you said above…”). Be-sides old references from within the chat system, references can also be defined to (recent) content from the whiteboard component. All references are visualized as small pictures next to textual contribu-tions. By clicking on these pictures, the correspond-ing reference will be displayed to the user. Further-more, all contributions that are made during a chat session (text and graphics) are recorded persistently on the GeoCafe server. Thus, new users can consult the chat log and introduce themselves to past chat sessions. Essential discussions that have been con-ducted in past sessions are preserved and can be re-considered again for self-learning purposes.

The user management component is depicted in figure 1 (upper-left corner). All enrolled users in the GeoCafe environment have to authenticate after they have started their clients. Each user is assigned an individual user profile that defines his competencies in the platform and, hence, within the virtual learn-ing community. For instance, a user is able to adopt the role of a moderator or a beginner. Depending on his role, contributions during discussions (chat) or in terms of visualizations (whiteboard) are highlighted accordingly.

The shared whiteboard component (right screen in figure 1) offers a drawing area that can be used by all participants synchronously. The whiteboard is used especially to visualize context information like class diagrams and thus to augment online discus-sion among participants in the GeoChat component.

Figure 1: Overview of GeoCafe : user management, whiteboard, and chat are realized as service components

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Users can either draw arbitrary diagrams or copy ex-isting snapshots or graphics into the whiteboard.

3.2 Learning components Learning components implement a rudimentary pro-gramming environment that can be used for teaching students with little or no knowledge of the object-oriented methodology. These learning components can be combined with the service components ex-plained in the previous section in order support a collaborative learning environment. In theory, an in-finite number of components could be integrated for arbitrary programming languages and modeling lan-guages. For the GeoCafe project, mainly two learn-ing components have been implemented for demon-stration purposes: the GeoJava Editor component and the GeoJava Visualization component, respec-tively. The GeoJava Editor is a text editor for the GeoJava language, a Java dialect that was especially designed for Java beginners. GeoJava reduces the complexity of the original Java language not only by omitting complex syntactical elements, but also by introducing new and (more) intuitive elements. The GeoJava Visualization component can be used to visualize data structures such as trees or queues. More information about learning components can be found in [Bode et al. 2004].

3.3 FreEvolve – the base of GeoCafe The structure of the GeoCafe platform as a composi-tion of independent components (chat, whiteboard) offers new options for the adaptation of a client-sided application. An administrator is now able to disable or enable components with respect to a given role of a single user. For a new user, for instance, the component utilizing the logging mechanisms could be removed completely. Also, it is possible to add a second whiteboard. The technical realization of this flexible component-based platform is based on the FreEvolve platform, which will be presented briefly in this section.

The FreEvolve platform [Stiemerling 2000] is a distributed runtime environment for executing com-ponent-based client-server applications. All compo-nents that constitute an application initially reside on the FreEvolve server. At any time, a user is able to select an application (e.g. a chat application) from a list of available applications, which can in turn be obtained by the FreEvolve server. If a user has cho-sen an application, a plan that describes the structure and the interplay of the components belonging to this application will be loaded and analyzed by the server. According to this plan, all components are then instantiated on both the remote client and the local server environment and are connected accord-ingly. The GeoCafe platform is, consequently, repre-sented as a collection of different FreEvolve compo-

nents and additional plans that describe the GeoCafe applications.

On top of the runtime environment, FreEvolve provides auxiliary adaptation tools [Won and Cre-mers, 2002] accomplishing the modification of com-ponent-based applications during runtime. For modi-fying a composition, these tools thereby utilize the same operations as used for creating a composition: adding and removing components, changing pa-rameters, and changing the connections between components. In this way, the GeoCafe can be adapted according to specific requirements that might arise during a learning session. During the ad-aptation process, all individual steps carried out by a user are checked by the FreEvolve system. These checking mechanisms can determine if the integrity of a composition has been violated, as for instance, caused by unwary adaptation actions.

3.4 Outlook:DeEvolve We extended the original FreEvolve platform to-wards a peer-to-peer runtime environment, the so-called DeEvolve platform [Alda & Cremers 2004]. This platform abolishes the distinction between a client and a server: each runtime environment is able to function as a client and/or a server simultane-ously. Peers are enabled to self-organize into self-managed peer groups, which can be founded accord-ing to common topics or interests. All GeoCafe components can also be deployed as peer-to-peer enabled applications in the DeEvolve environment such permitting students to set up private learning (peer) groups.

4 AN EXAMPLE LEARNING SESSION

The findings of the GeoInformation project, that is, the GeoCafe platform and its accompanying compo-nents have been evaluated by conducting example learning sessions with a number of students from the study course of geography. Owing to the obvious similarities in the computer science education in both geography and construction engineering (both have a strong emphasis on the instruction of object-oriented methodologies), we think that the GeoCafe platform can also be applied to support program-ming courses in construction engineering. In the fol-lowing, we elaborate a fictive learning session for a programming course.

Consider a small group of students, who partici-pate in an exercise called “Object-oriented Software Construction”. The indented goal of a session in this exercise is to develop a small Java program that traverses and visualizes a graph-based data structure. The session is organized by a tutor, who takes over the role of a moderator in the learning environment.

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At first, each student is capable of implementing an individual solution for the given assignment. To do so, he can use the GeoJava Editor. At this point, each student possesses the appropriate rights to use this editor component. The students can also share experiences codes, class diagrams, and even graph visualizations through the chat or through the white-board component. At the end of the session, you can expect that more experienced students have found a practical solution, while less sophisticated students have not figured out any solution at all. The modera-tor is now able to adapt both the GeoJava Editor and Visualization components in such way that one se-lected student can demonstrate his solution for all other students. All activities that are processed lo-cally in the visualization and editor components by the selected student are also transferred remotely to all other students, so that they can follow the deriva-tion of the solution within their local editor and visualization components. Meanwhileall other stu-dents are resigned the access rights to these compo-nents during the demonstration, in order to avoid any confusing remarks. Each contribution resulting from within the editor or the visualization component (and also from within the chat component, which can still be used during the demo) is recorded in the logging component. Each student is able to refer to this log to obtain a history of the session, which can be used to envision the results.

Note that for such a as session, the participating students are not necessarily forced to stay together physically in a class-room. A session can also be executed in a virtual class-room, with the students staying at home, that is, without any direct, verbal communication acts.

5 CONCLUSION

In this paper we presented the GeoCafe platform, which implements a communication-centered learn-ing environment to support collaborative learning scenarios. Although designed and implemented for supporting the education of object-oriented method-ologies in geography, the platform can also be adopted to enhance small-scaled exercise courses in construction engineering.

REFERENCES

Alda, S. & Cremers , A. B. 2004 "Towards Composition Man-agement for Peer-to-Peer Architectures", in Proceedings of the Workshop Software Composition (SC 2004), affili-ated to the 7th European Joint Conference on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2004). Barcelona, Spain.

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Basic IT-Knowledge for Engineers (b.it.ing)

Barabara Hauptenbuchner, Michael Berg Dresden University of Technology, Germany

The paper was not available for print.

81

APPENDIX

83

A Alda, S. 73

B Berg, M. 81 C Caneparo, L. 57 Cremers, A.B. 73 F Froese, T.M. 7 Fischinger, M. 43 G Graboski da Gama, C. L. 67 Grübl, P. 49 H Hartkopf, V. 25 Hauptenbuchner, B. 81

K Klinc, R. 43 Köhler, S. 49 M Mahdavi, A. 17 Menzel, K. 1, 3, 25 R Rebolj, D. 3, 35 S Scheer, S. 67 Schmidt, B. 49 Schnittker, N. 49 T Tibaut, A 35 Turk, Ž. 43 W-Z Won, M. 73 Zastrau, B. 3

Author Index

85

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