John Hurst's Research Interests

1. Research Interests and Areas

• Computer Education Exploring issues in making the learning process for computing and IT students more effective and efficient.

  • Judy Sheard and I have teamed up with Silvia Edwards and Peter O'Shea at QUT for a project entitled "Changing the Culture of Teaching and Learning in ICT and Engineering: Facilitating Research Professors to be T&L Leaders". This has been funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council ($530K over 2.5 years).

  • PIAVEE has moved on. It is being re-engineered into a new system IVEE. IVEE (short for IntelliVEE, or Intelligent Virtual Educational Environment) is characterized by a more open approach to indexing, and uses the IBM UIMA framework to achieve this. It also uses a lightweight web browser client architecture, rather than PIAVEE's heavy native code clients.

  • A spin-off from the IVEE project has been the iCALT project. The iCALT (short for Intelligent Context-Aware Learning and Teaching), project focusses upon providing on-line, real-time feedback, together with a number of analysis tools. This real-time feedback may be provided to the teacher, the students, or to peer-review colleagues.

  • Check this on-line, dynamic publication database of all CERG publications.

  • PIAVEE Platform Independent Agent-based Virtual Educational Environment. Making development and dissemination of on-line course materials hassle-free.

  • ICTEd Project An AUTC-funded project to explore and disseminate innovative and/or best practice teaching in Information and Communications Technology.

• Document Technologies XML and Stuff. These web pages that you are reading now are rendered dynamically from XML sources using a custom-built cgi script. You can read about the Python cgi script as a literate program.

• Literate Programming: See the separate web page for more detail.

• Persistent Programming
• Formal Specification
• Computer Systems

2. Potential Projects available

See separate page for details.

3. Recent Publications

1. Avram, C., Carbone, A., Casey, D., Hurst, A.J., Sheard, J.I., Markham, S., Heathcote,V., Sirisuthikul,S.; Perceptions of IT Report, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, 2007
2. Sheard, J., Postema, M., Markham, S. and Hurst, J., Time versus utility: What IT staff say about the educational use of the Web, Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 2001, Tampere, Finland, June/July 2001.
3. Carbone, A., Mitchell, I., Gunstone, R., Hurst, A.J., Designing Programming Tasks to Elicit Self-management Metacognitive Behaviour, International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE2002), Auckland, New Zealand, December 2002.
4. Sheard, J., Ceddia, J., Tuovinen, J., and Hurst, A.J., Determining Website usage time from interactions: data preparation and analysis, Journal of Educational Technology Systems vol.32, no.1, pp.101-121, 2003.
5. Sheard, J., Ceddia, J., Tuovinen, J., and Hurst, A.J., Inferring student learning behaviour from website interactions: A usage analysis, Education and Information Technology, vol.8, no.3, pp.245-266, Sep 2003.
6. Hurst, A.J., MonAtar: The Monash Unit Description Avatar , International Conference on Computers in Education, Hong Kong, Dec 2003.
7. Markham, S., Krishnamurthy, S., Casey, D., Hurst, A.J., Chetty, M., PIAVEE - A Pedagogy-Independent Education Environment, International Conference on A Learning and Teaching, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2004.

4. Recent Seminars

1. Peer Review of Teaching, Teaching Quality faculty workshop, 30 Apr 2009. (Run jointly with Dr Fiona McCook, CALT - these slides are only my part of the workshop.)
2. Experiences with using the Learning Tool PebblePad, CERG Seminar, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, 2 May 2008.
3. Computing Education: What Have We Learnt From Computer Science (and Software Engineering)? Invited address to the 4th Melbourne Computing Education Conventicle, Deakin University, 16 Nov 2007.
4. Preaching The Teaching: Do the Politics and Religion of Teaching Mix? Seminar presented at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield, on 4 May 2007.
5. XLP: XML-based Literate Programming Seminar presented at the Faculty of Communication and Information Technologies, Swinburne University, Hawthorn, on 25 Nov 2005.
6. Experiences with the Monash Avatar Seminar presented at the Faculty of Communication and Information Technologies, Swinburne University, Hawthorn, on 4 Nov 2005.
7. Peer Review of Teaching Seminar presented at the Caulfield campus of the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield, on 1 April 2005; subsequently repeated at RMIT, Melbourne, on 20 May 2005.

5. Conference Rankings

See the web page at CORE

6. Research Conduct

The Australian Government has published a document on Research Conduct. Apparently it is important.