Mapping the relationships doctoral students have with their study, and other factors, which impact on how doctoral students perceive ICT, their research and their study.
Dr Kwong Nui Sim, recent recipient of ASCILITE’s Emerging Scholar Award, has developed a model that maps the relationships doctoral students have with their study, and other human and contextual factors, which have an influencing and determining impact on the perceptions that doctoral students hold about ICT (Information Communication and Technologies) and their research and study.
The model is able to be adopted into any context, where it highlights that individuals hold assumptions about, and have expectations of, ICT use; and those expectations and assumptions influence and determine their judgements about ICT and their use of ICT.
Further, more complex levels of perceiving and working with ICT within a context gives some focus to inter-connections, where people and ICT partner or collaborate. This includes ICT affordances that are seen as worthwhile when they support and enhance the work of the individual in ways that make sense to that individual, and when an individual alters and changes thinking or practices because of the influence and affordances that ICT can have.
No evidence was found to support an additional claim that as well as ICT affordances causing individuals to alter and modify thinking and behaviours, ICT, in turn, is able to alter how it responds to the people who use those systems. This is not out of the realms of possibility of course, with ICT increasingly being designed and built to be able to respond to users’ needs.
For more information about the relevant collaborative outputs (with Dr Sarah Stein, University of Otago) that emerged from this research study, please visit the Project Page. In addition, Kwong Nui and Sarah will run a workshop session to introduce this model in detail at the next FLANZ conference.
About Dr Kwong Nui Sim
Dr Kwong Nui Sim, Lecturer in e-learning/Academic Developer in the Centre for Academic Development, Victoria University of Wellington was awarded the 2019 Emerging Scholar Award by the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) at their annual conference held in Singapore late last year (https://ascilite.org/awards/ascilite-fellows/).
Kwong Nui’s recent research into the use of technologies in teaching and learning, co-funded by Ako Aotearoa, contributed to her success in gaining this international recognition. The Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand (FLANZ) would like to congratulate Knong Nui on her work. Kwong Nui is a current Executive Member of FLANZ.