Student Papers

This project seeks to determine the solar exposure at a location at any time of the day on any day of the year, using a new technique which involves image processing. A series of photos is taken from a location of interest and are then processed to separate the areas of sky from the rest of the image. The sunlight that will fall on the location from where the images were taken can then be calculated. Critical to the success of this project is the image processing technique to separate the sky from the rest of the image. This paper is concerned with finding a technique which can separate areas of sky for a number of images taken under different conditions.

In university education the training for and the practice of a profession is still distinguished, but on closer examination the processes of knowledge acquisition and knowledge work are setting up a closed loop. These individual knowledge processes, termed e-learning and knowledge management if computer-assisted, focus on transfer of knowledge through cross-linking of people and documentation of knowledge. As far as communication and collaboration is concerned, the community knowledge processes have to be investigated more carefully. Students and scientific staff are counterparts facing each other in teaching as well as in research. Thus a valuable opportunity to enhance university education is often missed. The process model presented in this paper aims to bring together both groups as one joint collaborative learning community and, especially from the point of view of information technology, to facilitate interaction in this fundamental part of the scientific community.

This paper outlines a study of employers' computing requirements of new graduates and the actual computing competency of these graduates. It reports on preliminary studies and outlines some of the issues encountered. Employers and students have been interviewed and a gap been identified between what is required and what students believe they already know. Confusion is often encountered when the term computer literacy is used. There seems to be no consistent definition of what is expected when this term is used.

The New Zealand Government's policy frameworks emphasize ICT has a powerful, ongoing, economic and social significance for our nation state, yet the need to have women participate in ICT careers is still ignored despite documented shortages. A paucity of recruitment and retention strategies to encourage women's uptake of tertiary training courses in ICT reflects the neo-liberal policy vacuum. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper summarizes some constraints in current government policy, such as The Digital Strategy. The ICT culture of claimed gender neutrality and how women appear within ICT arise out of and perpetuate these discourses. Using a feminist poststructuralist framework, this persistent global problem is examined locally in two Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics in New Zealand.  In focus groups and in-depth interviews, women students explore their subjectivities and agency as emerging ICT professionals, and their experiences of acquiring technical skills in undergraduate courses, and the industry.