Dianna Hardy
James Cook University, Discipline of Information Technology, Faculty Member
A recent ITiCSE working group argued the need to explicitly inform students of the academic integrity requirements that apply when they are writing computer programs. The working group proposed a wheel-like diagram that might be used for... more
A recent ITiCSE working group argued the need to explicitly inform students of the academic integrity requirements that apply when they are writing computer programs. The working group proposed a wheel-like diagram that might be used for this purpose and provided some examples to illustrate its use. Three universities in Australia have adopted the principle of informing their students about academic integrity in programming assessments, but have each taken a different approach to doing so. This paper reports on the three different approaches and explains why each was chosen.
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Many large scale research programs with massive data requirements (e.g. the Particle Physics Data Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network) use SRB to manage research data collections. Despite this broad adoption, the potential... more
Many large scale research programs with massive data requirements (e.g. the Particle Physics Data Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network) use SRB to manage research data collections. Despite this broad adoption, the potential of SRB and Data Grids is not fully utilized by the general research community. The reason for this under utilisation comes in part from the complexity of the Data Grid model and the lack of quality interfaces to SRB, making it difficult to use and configure. YourSRB, is a system developed in the course of our research which provides an intuitive interface to SRB and aims to enable a broader community to benefit from SRB. The system also simplifies the use of SRB’s awkward-to-initiate federation schemes, making SRB more suitable for use as the core of an organisational level research repository. In addition, our approach to federation makes the YourSRB system suitable for field workers who can off-line curate and annotate data, and subsequently federa...
The dynamic world of research demonstrates a distinct requirement for improved communication tools that easily facilitate collaboration. More than ever before, the need for solutions that are both flexible and economically sound has... more
The dynamic world of research demonstrates a distinct requirement for improved communication tools that easily facilitate collaboration. More than ever before, the need for solutions that are both flexible and economically sound has become a necessity. In order to better support the ever-growing needs of researchers for access to digital resources, this work demonstrates the necessity for delivering cost-effective infrastructure that can provide such a service. When utilised, this
Adolescents with ASD face challenges in forming positive friendships due to their ASD condition. This study developed a social networking platform based on the needs of a small group of ASD adolescents and their parents/carers and... more
Adolescents with ASD face challenges in forming positive friendships due to their ASD condition. This study developed a social networking platform based on the needs of a small group of ASD adolescents and their parents/carers and examined what potential benefits such a system could provide. We conducted seven co-design workshops with six adolescents with ASD over eight months. The team exchanged ideas and communicated through group discussions and drawings. The findings suggest that: (1) participants demonstrated self-advocacy skills through an iterative co-design process; (2) a safe and familiar environment encourages active participation from adolescents with ASD as co-designers; and (3) parents, community group and fellow participants play a pivotal role in engaging adolescents with ASD on a social-network.
Research Interests:
Many technologies afford functionalities that may be relevant to the daily lives of diverse groups of people but that does not necessarily mean that in all communities that they are mundane. Indeed our construction of domestication may... more
Many technologies afford functionalities that may be relevant to the daily lives of diverse groups of people but that does not necessarily mean that in all communities that they are mundane. Indeed our construction of domestication may reflect power relations and existing inequalities and its influence in design may exacerbate exclusion. We introduce a process to respond to the needs of Aboriginal women in designing systems to support community connectivitiy and preserve their heritage and some of the challenges it presents. We discuss designing technology probes to help us refine applications that can be subsumed into family and social life. We propose issues relating to rural-urban differences that arise when considering these users that have wider relevance for mundane technologies.
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The development of ontologies is traditionally a process of building vocabularies and understanding complexities of a specific domain to link data and infer knowledge. However, this method does not always include the domain experts... more
The development of ontologies is traditionally a process of building vocabularies and understanding complexities of a specific domain to link data and infer knowledge. However, this method does not always include the domain experts throughout the entire development process. This paper presents a Co-design framework as a structured methodology for ontology design and development. The framework, known as the Co-Designing Ontologies Methodology (C-DOM), presents a strategy to draw knowledge from the Subject Matter Expert (SME) without the SME needing to know any-thing about how to create an ontology. The C-DOM framework outlines a series of workshops that align to the layers of the Semantic Technologies architecture and has been developed via an iterative design process and tested in different domains with different levels of complexity and purpose. The first iteration focused on the creation of a light-weight ontology to link generic data in the incident and accident. The next iterati...
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In the 2006 edition of the AlMA journal (Hardy et al, 2006) we reported preliminary research undertaken in order to determine the effectiveness of combining the federation of maritime archaeological data with semantic search to enable... more
In the 2006 edition of the AlMA journal (Hardy et al, 2006) we reported preliminary research undertaken in order to determine the effectiveness of combining the federation of maritime archaeological data with semantic search to enable archaeologists to share data. The central question for this research has been to discover whether archaeological information can be made available via a data sharing mechanism. Two additional research questions were also considered: 1. Are there tools available to federate or combine these datasets? 2. How can the search results be appropriately targeted when searching across a variety of data sources? This paper reports the results of the research which indicate that while it is possible to allow access to maritime archaeological datasets using a data federation system that a1so employs semantic search (Richards 2006), the usability of such a system can be problematic given the current state of maritime archaeological data and the relatively low level...
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Collaboration-intensive research is increasingly becoming the norm in the humanities and social science arenas. eResearch tools such as online repositories offer researchers the opportunity to access and interact with data online. For the... more
Collaboration-intensive research is increasingly becoming the norm in the humanities and social science arenas. eResearch tools such as online repositories offer researchers the opportunity to access and interact with data online. For the last 20 years video has formed an important part of humanities research, although dealing with multimedia in an online setting has proven difficult with existing tools. File size limitations, lack of interoperability with existing security system, and the inability to include rich supportive detail regarding files have hampered the use of video. This paper describes a collaborative data management solution for video and other files using a combination of existing tools (SRB and Plone intergrated with Shibboleth) and a custom application for video upload and annotation (Mattotea). Rather than creating new proprietary systems, this development has examined the reuse of existing technologies with the addition of custom extensions to provide full-featu...
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Adolescents with ASD face challenges in forming positive friendships due to their ASD condition. This study developed a social networking platform based on the needs of a small group of ASD adolescents and their parents/carers and... more
Adolescents with ASD face challenges in forming positive friendships due to their ASD condition. This study developed a social networking platform based on the needs of a small group of ASD adolescents and their parents/carers and examined what potential benefits such a system could provide. We conducted seven co-design workshops with six adolescents with ASD over eight months. The team exchanged ideas and communicated through group discussions and drawings. The findings suggest that: (1) participants demonstrated self-advocacy skills through an iterative co-design process; (2) a safe and familiar environment encourages active participation from adolescents with ASD as co-designers; and (3) parents, community group and fellow participants play a pivotal role in engaging adolescents with ASD on a social-network.
Research Interests:
Many Aboriginal Australians report a diminished sense of wellbeing in their every-day activities, due to the after effects of colonialization. The concomitants of racism and separation from their traditional lands and culture fuel this... more
Many Aboriginal Australians report a diminished sense of wellbeing in their every-day activities, due to the after effects of colonialization. The concomitants of racism and separation from their traditional lands and culture fuel this situation. Indigenous people from other countries report similar outcomes. This research aims to discover whether access and use of culturally appropriate Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can have an ameliorative benefit, enhancing participants' sense of support and engagement with their culture. Indigenous people often find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. Data from the ABS (2007) support this, showing that Australian Aboriginal people lag behind in their uptake of ICTs compared with other Australians. While multiple studies have shown that access and use of ICTs can provide real benefits in regards to empowerment for women, few of these studies have focused specifically on wellbeing aspects. This research cont...
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This paper deals with the possibilities and challenges of the digitisation of artefacts. It argues that artefacts are complex phenomena that consist of the material objects as well as the various forms of categorization and documentation... more
This paper deals with the possibilities and challenges of the digitisation of artefacts. It argues that artefacts are complex phenomena that consist of the material objects as well as the various forms of categorization and documentation that are connected with the objects. Digitalisation presents a genuine transformation of the artefacts that opens up new possibilities of use. These include providing access to and facilitating the reappropriation of cultural knowledge stored elsewhere, maintaining and developing a living digital cultural heritage, and gathering, sharing and transferring knowledge that is available within Aboriginal communities. In this paper we examine different types of digital repositories and we assess their suitability for use by Aboriginal communities. We classify a number of institutional archiving systems and analyse in some detail two interactive systems that were specifically designed for use by Aboriginal communities. The paper ends with a set of recommen...
This seed project 'Design thinking frameworks as transformative cross-disciplinary pedagogy' aimed to examine the way design thinking strategies are used across disciplines to scaffold the development of student attributes in the... more
This seed project 'Design thinking frameworks as transformative cross-disciplinary pedagogy' aimed to examine the way design thinking strategies are used across disciplines to scaffold the development of student attributes in the domain of problem solving and creativity in order to enhance the nation's capacity for innovation. Generic graduate attributes associated with innovation, creativity and problem solving are considered to be amongst the most important of all targeted attributes (Bradley Review of Higher Education, 2009). The project also aimed to gather data on how academics across disciplines conceptualised design thinking methodologies and strategies. Insights into how design thinking strategies could be embedded at the subject level to improve student outcomes were of particular interest in this regard. A related aim was the investigation of how design thinking strategies could be used by academics when designing new and innovative subjects and courses. This a...
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Design Thinking (DT) is a required skill of computing graduates according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA). However, according to the 2016 AIIA work ready skills survey there is a job-ready skills gap between the... more
Design Thinking (DT) is a required skill of computing graduates according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA). However, according to the 2016 AIIA work ready skills survey there is a job-ready skills gap between the industry expectations of design thinking skills and the ICT graduate capabilities in Australia. Design thinking applies methods that focus on problem-solving, ideating, and iterating in small bursts with continual feedback from users/stakeholders. This paper describes how an Australian university has embedded DT into the core of a Bachelor of Information Technology degree in a way that not only scaffolds DT skill sets across the three-year degree but creates a culture of design thinking. This DT 'strand' involves a two-day sprint that includes every year level as a mixed cohort. This paper presents the implementation of the DT strand and the industry-driven two-day sprint.
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Most co-design-based Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research is conducted with children and does not involve the participants directly. Studies have shown that people with ASD can take on the co-designer role in early phases of the... more
Most co-design-based Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research is conducted with children and does not involve the participants directly. Studies have shown that people with ASD can take on the co-designer role in early phases of the software design process. We present a longitudinal study that investigates how adolescents with ASD participate as co-designers in an iterative software design process. In this work, we conducted seven co-design workshops with six adolescents with ASD over eight months. The team exchanged ideas and communicated through group discussion and drawings. Our findings suggest that: (1) parents, community group and fellow participants play a pivotal role in supporting a longitudinal ASD co-design study and (2) adolescents with ASD are also able to make better design decision over an iterative software design process. These findings should to be considered when engaging adolescents with ASD as co-designers in a software design process.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
We reflect upon participation in design processes by people who emphasise 'primary orality', or direct, face-to-face, unmediated communication, due to their rural locations in places with low technology... more
We reflect upon participation in design processes by people who emphasise 'primary orality', or direct, face-to-face, unmediated communication, due to their rural locations in places with low technology ambiance and cultural antecedents. We focus on issues and relationships between rural contexts and primary orality of relevance to our projects with Indigenous people in regional Australia and villagers in remote rural
Research Interests:
This seed project ‘Design thinking frameworks as transformative cross-disciplinary pedagogy’ aimed to examine the way design thinking strategies are used across disciplines to scaffold the development of student attributes in the domain... more
This seed project ‘Design thinking frameworks as transformative cross-disciplinary pedagogy’ aimed to examine the way design thinking strategies are used across disciplines to scaffold the development of student attributes in the domain of problem solving and creativity in order to enhance the nation’s capacity for innovation. Generic graduate attributes associated with innovation, creativity and problem solving are considered to be amongst the most important of all targeted attributes (Bradley Review of Higher Education, 2009).
Research Interests:
Page 1. 148 Rural Encounters: Cultural Translations Through Video David Browning James Cook University Discpl. IT (TVL) david.browning@jcu.edu.au Nicola J Bidwell James Cook University Discpl. IT (CNS) nic@it.jcu.edu.au Dianna Hardy James... more
Page 1. 148 Rural Encounters: Cultural Translations Through Video David Browning James Cook University Discpl. IT (TVL) david.browning@jcu.edu.au Nicola J Bidwell James Cook University Discpl. IT (CNS) nic@it.jcu.edu.au Dianna Hardy James Cook University Discpl. ...
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ABSTRACT Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is a chronic disease that requires day-to-day management. Telemedicine is one way of providing support to patients, to manage and receive care from home. Medical researchers use clinical trials to evaluate... more
ABSTRACT Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is a chronic disease that requires day-to-day management. Telemedicine is one way of providing support to patients, to manage and receive care from home. Medical researchers use clinical trials to evaluate telemedicine technologies by comparing medical improvements of the patients. However, the patients’ interactions and experiences with the technology are important because unpleasant experiences may result in non-adherence to a medical program. HCI experts have contributed in user-centred evaluations for decades. This research complements a telemedicine clinical trial with human-centred evaluation to understand patients during the post- rollout phase. Findings present patients’ placement of telemedicine device in their homes, patients’ feelings of using the device and their family involvement, and our experiences of conducting a HCI research with medical researchers in a clinical trial. We conclude that though the telemedicine device is seen as life-saving, patients treat it just as a regular device. We conclude that telemedicine evaluations such as clinical trials can benefit from evaluation methods in HCI.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Many Aboriginal Australians report a diminished sense of wellbeing in their everyday activities due to racism and separation from their traditional lands and culture. Our research sought to discover whether access and use of culturally... more
Many Aboriginal Australians report a diminished sense of wellbeing in their everyday activities due to racism and separation from their traditional lands and culture. Our research sought to discover whether access and use of culturally appropriate Information and Communication Technology's (ICTs), could have an ameliorative benefit, enhancing participants’ sense of support and engagement with their culture. While multiple studies have shown that access and use of ICTs can provide real benefits in regards to empowerment, few studies have focused specifically on the well-being aspects. The research in this project was a Participatory Action Research (PAR) study with women and girls of the Gugu Badhun (an Aboriginal Australian language group) to explore ways to better support their familial and cultural activities associated with identity and group sustainability. The research was divided into three action-research cycles: group interviews and focus groups, use of a technology prob...
Research Interests:
Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is a chronic disease that requires day-to-day management. Telemedicine is one way of providing support to patients to manage and receive care from home. Medical researchers use clinical trials to evaluate... more
Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is a chronic disease that requires day-to-day management. Telemedicine is one way of providing support to patients to manage and receive care from home. Medical researchers use clinical trials to evaluate telemedicine technologies by comparing medical improvements of the patients. However, the patients’ interactions and experiences with the technology are important because unpleasant experiences may result in non-adherence to a medical program. HCI experts have contributed in user-centred evaluations for decades. This research complements a telemedicine clinical trial with human-centred evaluation to understand patients during the post- rollout phase. Findings present patients’ placement of telemedicine device in their homes, patients’ feelings of using the device and their family involvement, and our experiences of conducting a HCI research with medical researchers in a clinical trial. We conclude that though the telemedicine device is seen as life-saving, pat...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Cross-disciplinary collaborations potentially offer the diversity of understanding required to answer complex problems. However, barriers to cohort discovery exist because content about people is predominantly only in human-readable form... more
Cross-disciplinary collaborations potentially offer the diversity of understanding required to answer complex problems. However, barriers to cohort discovery exist because content about people is predominantly only in human-readable form on websites and/or in disparate databases. Notably, many cross-disciplinary collaborations never form due to a lack of awareness of cross-boundary synergies. This project applies semantic technologies to automate linkages to reveal hidden connections between people from metadata parameters about data, rather than from publication products. The information in metadata, commonly used for data discovery, can be used to link researchers for potential partnerships. The proposed system combines pre-existing and custom ontologies, populated from a number of accessible repositories, to describe the relationships between researchers based on metadata parameters. The system was tested from the researcher's perspective where significant alignments with pot...
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We reflect upon participation in design processes by people who emphasise 'primary orality', or direct, face-to-face, unmediated communication, due to their rural locations in places with low technology... more
We reflect upon participation in design processes by people who emphasise 'primary orality', or direct, face-to-face, unmediated communication, due to their rural locations in places with low technology ambiance and cultural antecedents. We focus on issues and relationships between rural contexts and primary orality of relevance to our projects with Indigenous people in regional Australia and villagers in remote rural
Research Interests:
Requirements gathering for design in rural and remote areas needs to be considered within the prevailing cultural context. We explain our use of video as a technological site for cultural encounters during the preparatory elicitation of... more
Requirements gathering for design in rural and remote areas needs to be considered within the prevailing cultural context. We explain our use of video as a technological site for cultural encounters during the preparatory elicitation of cultural influences and determinants. We outline the factors leading to the development of a co-generative approach arising from our understanding of the role played by indexicality during such encounters with different cultural systems of knowledge.
Research Interests:
In the 2006 edition of the AlMA journal (Hardy et al, 2006) we reported preliminary research undertaken in order to determine the effectiveness of combining the federation of maritime archaeological data with semantic search to enable... more
In the 2006 edition of the AlMA journal (Hardy et al, 2006) we reported preliminary research undertaken in order to determine the effectiveness of combining the federation of maritime archaeological data with semantic search to enable archaeologists to share data. The central question for this research has been to discover whether archaeological information can be made available via a data sharing mechanism. Two additional research questions were also considered: 1. Are there tools available to federate or combine these datasets? ...
Research Interests:
The dynamic world of research demonstrates a distinct requirement for improved communication tools that easily facilitate collaboration. More than ever before, the need for solutions that are both flexible and economically sound has... more
The dynamic world of research demonstrates a distinct requirement for improved communication tools that easily facilitate collaboration. More than ever before, the need for solutions that are both flexible and economically sound has become a necessity. In order to better support the ever-growing needs of researchers for access to digital resources, this work demonstrates the necessity for delivering cost-effective infrastructure that can provide such a service. When utilised, this allows the deployment of feature-rich, online systems ...
Many Aboriginal Australians report a diminished sense of wellbeing in their everyday activities due to racism and separation from their traditional lands and culture. Our research sought to discover whether access and use of culturally... more
Many Aboriginal Australians report a diminished sense of wellbeing in their everyday activities due to racism and separation from their traditional lands and culture. Our research sought to discover whether access and use of culturally appropriate Information and Communication Technology's (ICTs), could have an ameliorative benefit, enhancing participants' sense of support and engagement with their culture. While multiple studies have shown that access and use of ICTs can provide real benefits in regards to ...
Research Interests:
Collaboration-intensive research is increasingly becoming the norm in the humanities and social science arenas. eResearch tools such as online repositories offer researchers the opportunity to access and interact with data online. For the... more
Collaboration-intensive research is increasingly becoming the norm in the humanities and social science arenas. eResearch tools such as online repositories offer researchers the opportunity to access and interact with data online. For the last 20 years video has formed an important part of humanities research, although dealing with multimedia in an online setting has proven difficult with existing tools. File size limitations, lack of interoperability with existing security systems, and the inability to include rich supportive detail regarding files ...
Research Interests:
[Extract] Much of the data from archaeological investigations reside in heterogeneous databases in separate locations with different formats and dissimilar structures. In addition, data from individual excavations and other research are... more
[Extract] Much of the data from archaeological investigations reside in heterogeneous databases in separate locations with different formats and dissimilar structures. In addition, data from individual excavations and other research are frequently placed in databases that are maintained and accessed solely by the group responsible for the project. Due to the differing file formats, lack of access via a cohesive network, and issues regarding ownership and use of data, researchers have found it difficult to query multiple databases in order to ...
Many technologies afford functionalities that may be relevant to the daily lives of diverse groups of people but that does not necessarily mean that in all communities they are mundane. Indeed our construction of domestication may reflect... more
Many technologies afford functionalities that may be relevant to the daily lives of diverse groups of people but that does not necessarily mean that in all communities they are mundane. Indeed our construction of domestication may reflect power relations and existing inequalities and its influence in design may exacerbate exclusion. We introduce a process to respond to the needs of Aboriginal women in designing systems to support community connectivity and preserve their heritage and some of the challenges it presents. We ...
Research Interests:
Many large scale research programs with massive data requirements (eg the Particle Physics Data Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network) use SRB to manage research data collections. Despite this broad adoption, the potential of... more
Many large scale research programs with massive data requirements (eg the Particle Physics Data Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network) use SRB to manage research data collections. Despite this broad adoption, the potential of SRB and Data Grids is not fully utilized by the general research community. The reason for this under utilisation comes in part from the complexity of the Data Grid model and the lack of quality interfaces to SRB, making it difficult to use and configure. YourSRB, is a system developed in the ...
Research Interests:
Participatory Action Research (PAR) has a long history of use with disadvantaged groups in order to assist them to improve their living conditions, however its use with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects is less well... more
Participatory Action Research (PAR) has a long history of use with disadvantaged groups in order to assist them to improve their living conditions, however its use with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects is less well known. This paper examines a case study where PAR was tied with the use of a technology probe by an Aboriginal group, with the goal of determining if culturally appropriate design of ICTs could help support individual well-being. The results of this project show that although PAR and probes can be used together, this combination has the potential to alter how probes are traditionally used in the design space. To support this premise, we review the history of the probes method in the literature and discuss changes in how cultural and technology probes have been implemented in recent years. We argue that as modifications are made to these frameworks due to the needs of the research, two sorts of project results should be fully elucidated: (1) the cha...