Stephen Witherden’s Website :: Research

Apologies for the dry nature of this post.

Last month there was a big to-do about a student who left a communion ceremony without having consumed the communion bread he had in his mouth. He apparently wanted to show it to someone outside the church who was curious. When they realised he wasn’t playing by the rules, people even tried to compel him to eat the bread but he “escaped”. He kept the bread for a week before returning it because he had received death threats.

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Last night I became acutely aware that this blog of mine is read by many of my family members and friends. I also became aware that most of my recent posts have had very little to do with something these people really want to know about: me.

So, I thought I would devote this afternoon to giving you all an update on my goings-on. I have sat down to write this many times, but there’s just so much to write it’s daunting. I also have this desire to start at the beginning, but the beginning is so far away that it would take till next year for me to elaborate on it all. So, here goes, stream-of-conciousness-like.

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It snowed yesterday. All week, the weather man had been threatening “ice rain” would hit us Thursday. When I returned to my car after work that night, I was surprised to see my car was covered in a film of ice. I unlocked the door and tried the handle. Locked. Unlocked it again then tried to open it: locked again! So I tried a third tie, this time I pulled harder and the door opened with a crack. The ice was keeping the door closed!

Needless to say, driving home was an experience. It was very difficult to see out of the rear view window at first but this eventually cleared up. At temperatures of -3C any precipitation that fell at that time ended up as snow. When I eventually arrived home I was treated to the sight of snow on my steps.

Now, I quite like snow but have never seen it actually snowing. This was the first time in my life I had ever seen a little precipitation. Granted it wasn’t anything close to a snowstorm, but it was still a wonderful (and cold) experience. It’s hard to believe that not too long ago we were sweltering at 110 F and now I have to leave the heater on all day and night so that the water pipes don’t freeze.

Auckland may be well known for four seasons in one day, but Texas certainly does appear to have very stark seasons. The next morning my neighbour (who borrows my washing machine every now and again) kindly dissolved the ice on my windscreen with isopropyl alchohol.

As they say here in the US: “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”.

Hi all, just a quick update. After 10,000 km and 11 hours in flight, I braved the ordeal of American customs. I was searched for bombs, patted down and everything!

It’s very hot here. My flight for Denver leaves in about an hour. My phone also works here so you can call me (in emergencies only).

A paper I co-authored a year back has just been accepted into EdMedia 2006.

The theory of the paper was basically using a visualisation technique to display the “relationships” between students in online education courses.

One of the interesting things I found was that it was very easy for the lecturer to “dominate” discussion forums by responding to every message. The visualisation made it clear that the discussion became very “hub-and-spoke” with the lecturer in the middle and students on the periphery.

If lecturers delayed in responding just a little, the profile of the discussions changed and a group of “core” students would be drawn into the centre of the discussion.

The opportunities for using this in real course discussions are quite appealing because it would encourage lecturers to think more about the “overall” picture of the “health” of a given discussion topic rather than the immediate problem of answering students’ questions.

The conference is in Orlando in June. Hmm….

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I have seen a number of different drivers for development endeavours:. Data driven, model driven and user interface driven. I believe that for the purposes of end user development, the interface driven development method is most appropriate. In fact, I think it is the most appropriate not only for end users but for the average application programmer as well.
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As a programmer, I constantly hear the siren’s cry of meta modelling. Programming is all about building abstractions to represent reality. By inference, being able to abstract these abstractions results in an “application generator” (or meta application) which can be used for any purpose. Some may call this the holy grail of programming.

At least that’s the theory.
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The more I think about it, the more I believe that what I am trying to do is address a gap I see in current end user development research. In particular, I think a certain kind of application (I call it a “data-centric application” but “transaction processing system” is appropriate too) has been left out of much end user development research.
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This document explains the thought processes that led me to decide on this potential PhD topic. Please comment
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I found this article by Stamen when searching for information about end user computing.
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I got this very interesting book out from the library and was amazed to see that research in programming by demonstration has not come an awful long way since the heady days of the first PBD systems.
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So, I have been thinking more seriously about my research lately and I came across a special issue on “End User Development” in the Communications of the ACM this month (see references at the end of this post):
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I finished my honours dissertation (or “research essay”) at the end of 2002. Below is an abstract, click on “more” to download the full text.

Decision making is one of the core functions of any organisation. In recent years, much effort has been expended attempting to solve the problem of how Information Systems may be used to facilitate organisational decision making. Information Systems affecting or intended to affect decision making are referred to as Decision Support Systems.

This research starts by coming to a clear understanding of the processes by which organisational decisions are made. Eight models of decision making in individuals and groups were studied to arrive at a number of requirements for an information system to support those processes.

We then report on more than 30 years of Information Systems research intended to solve the problem of organisational decision support. Beginning with the aptly named Management (Mis)information systems of the late 1960’s and culminating in the promise of inter-organisational decision support of today.

A number of existing frameworks and architectures for organisational decision support systems are reviewed and synthesised in order to arrive at a new decision making process, framework and architecture for organisational decision support systems. The concepts embodied in the framework and architecture are then evaluated by implementing them in a proof of concept prototype.

The prototype was found to meet the requirements of organisational decision support systems and the framework and architecture are believed to be valuable additions to solving the problem of organisational decision support.

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