Life long learning for improved product and process modeling support

The paper focuses on knowledge transfer and learning based on experiences from developing and carrying through master courses in Industrial IT (MII) and civil engineering at Aalborg University and 25 years of teaching experiences within the field. In the MII the students are recruited from industry to follow a 3 year 1/2 time national open education with most learning and project work done in an Internet supported distributed environment. The pedagogic method follows a project-based problem oriented learning paradigm (PPBL). The courses cover areas such as; object oriented programming and relational database design, human computer interface and user environment design, computer supported collaborative working, knowledge management, virtual buildings, intelligent buildings, and building systems simulation. Experiences are reported from use of distributed physical and virtual learning spaces, improved learning styles and learning/teaching methods, properties and functionality of digital learning material, improved and adapted pedagogic, tutoring and teacher-student interaction, distributed project collaboration methodology, and industry collaboration. Findings and experiences are illustrated with examples from MII course contents and student project works. 2 THE CHANGE PROCESS The learning process has not changed to any considerable degree during the latest centuries. A big shift came when the art of printing was introduced during the middle 1400 (Guthenberg) and it become practical and less expensive to pack and distribute information to a large audience. Today we phase a reality where we (teachers, students) have the freedom to immediately publish, give feed-back and pack information adapted for different needs and users on the World Wide Web (WWW). We have passed development stages from 'art of writing' (2500 b.b.) via 'art of printing' (1450 a.c.) to 'art of communication (2000 a.c.) with changed demands on information quality assurance methods, and highly adaptable access media to distributed digital information containers. The most important changes due to introduction of ICT in the learning process are Higher emphasis on learning (and learning to learn) than teaching. The teacher becomes more of a tutor (coach, facilitator) than information disseminator. Greater opportunities for distant learning in virtual environments. Life long learning becomes an important issue (time and place independent learning). Globalization with cultural diversity and global market place development with greater possibilities to combine courses from different universities (virtual universities) Increased modularization of information containers with dynamic formation of higher level containers and inclusion of time marked data. The semantic web provides a first generation tools to relate disperse web based information containers, (Christiansson 2003) Possibilities to adapt and/or develop new pedagogical methods/learning styles with respect to learning material, learning modes (exploration, discovery, problem based learning etc.), student competence and intelligence profile, improved collaboration, new teacher roles, and social contexts bearing in mind that IT in itself does not improve pedagogy and learning method. 3 IT IN CONSTRUCTION LEARNING DOMAINS Computer tools were introduced in the education during the mid 1960s. Our IT education experiences are based on course and education systems development as well as teaching from around 1970, 1972 course in "Computer Controlled Measurements and data manipulation and presentation" at Lund University, Sweden, 1983 courses in "Cad, and 3Dand database modeling using Medusa", (Christiansson and Herrera 1985). Workstations were expensive (25.000 US$), 1986 post graduate course in "Knowledge Based System", 1992 "New tools for knowledge transfer development of hypermedia systems", 1995 "To use and evaluate MultiMedia", and "Make your own MultiMedia Application" Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a cross disciplinary domain with strong relations to a number of established sciences such as computer science, cognitive psychology, mathematics, artificial intelligence, social sciences, and informatics. The Construction ICT is by nature also tightly connected to theoretical and practical building sciences. Parts of the learning domains are well supported by learning material e.g. relational database and relation algebra based representations. On the other hand many areas are still under formalization and learning material and courses must be dynamically composed leading to continuous update and development of courses. Figure 1 outlines building informatics related knowledge domains. Figure 1. IT in Construction learning domains