An Interview with Rodney Carr
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Carr” refers to Rodney Carr)
Inter:	Rodney we hear a lot about road mapping in the political domain in regard to road mapping options for peace in the Middle East. It's really quite intriguing to think about the concept of road mapping as being applied to improving teaching and learning in higher education. So to begin with I just wonder whether you could explain to me what is road mapping as a concept?
Carr:	Ah, now that's a very interesting, ah, road mapping, like road mapping for the Middle East and it's ah, I don't think the English language has got a particularly good word for this, is the problem. The closest, the generic term for road mapping for units is really concept mapping. It's a form of concept mapping. I should have called it concept mapping in the beginning probably, but ah, you know, I don't know, I just called it road mapping. There's no good reason for it, it's just a form of concept mapping and it ah.
Inter:	It sort of catches the attention and you talk about it really being concept mapping, yet, what is the educational value of mapping concepts to understand the knowledge of a unit, a discipline, better, from a teaching and learning perspective?
Carr:	All concept maps have got the same sort of idea behind them. You start out with the big picture, right, big picture and ah, you drill, you allow students to see the overall structure of what you want to present broken down, it's just like a regular text book, that's kind of split into topics, you know, topic 1, topic 2, dit, dit, dit, all the way through. Road maps are just, that's a way of showing general information structure. Concept maps just present that usually in a hierarchical view, rather than a linear view. But it's the same sort of idea, ah, it's just a different way of presenting it. They're usually more visual which is appealing to students, particularly students that are used to playing games, they click on things, so. Concept maps usually are drawn on bits of paper with circles. The e-road mappings, road mappings is done with Power Point. There's tools provided to allow you to, basically a slide is a concept and you can link concepts together to form bigger concepts and themes and topics and units and courses, all the way up if you wanted to
Inter:	It seems to me, it's very challenging in regard to people having a very clear understanding of the way the knowledge of their subject is structured and organised. Now some subjects probably lend themselves incredibly well to that. They've got a well articulated, logical knowledge base. Maybe other subjects are more problematic in that regard but obviously whatever way you look at it you've got to have a very clear view of the way knowledge is created and best presented in the discipline to do it well.
Carr:	Yes you have got to be a real expert in your area, domain expert and you've really got to know your stuff to be able to do one as a staff member, as an academic. You can get help. Ah. Good interviewers, in fact it's one of the questions you've got down here later. Good interview skills can help staff to extract the themes. You can start out with, well, a structure in a text book, you can start out, or a usual set of Power Point slides given to you by a publisher or that was left over from the last person that taught it or when you taught it last time. You can use that to start pulling together themes and concepts and produce a concept map out of those, say, ordinary old lecture slides, linked together into concepts and themes and work your way up to build a map out of it. There's a couple of ways of building these things. That's one way, starting from the bottom and building your concepts and themes up. And you have to know what you're doing. You have to be a real expert to answer, to go back to your question. And, that's, but you can get help.
Inter:	Do you think too, Rodney, that it's a good vehicle for developing teacher expertise and understanding the subject, to be involved in this?
Carr:	I don't know. Not sure.
Inter:	Or do you really need to start with a fairly good knowledge of the subject to do it well?
Carr:	I've seen. Yeah. I haven't really tried that. It's not, it wasn't my aim. I think the aim really is to start out with somebody that knows what they're doing and do it and one of the… It's really somebody's mind map of the subject, of the unit that they're teaching. If you go in, it's somebody's mind, they have got to have the map there, kind of in place, they discover it and they are not always clear what the structure is in their head and they will invent it as they're going along and they will figure out, they will try one structure and say that's not right and then move things around, move the concepts around, regroup them. Ah. It's an iterative process. You can do it fairly quickly to come out with a structure but it, ah, you see people discovering it, the structure on the fly, but I think you've got to have the knowledge to begin with. For students; it's I don't really know, I'm a bit worried that what you, for first year students, you give them, we are giving them a map and that makes sense. You give them a structure of the unit coming from somebody's head, that they might have discovered as they're making it. So people put, a staff member puts together a mind map of how they see the unit fit in. We are giving that to students and saying, here is a structure for this whole unit. That's alright for first year students, probably for undergraduates but for postgraduates at least, I think you want them to do their own mapping. Now that's, I've seen this, I've seen that being used in this way for PhD, structuring PhD's. Now that's clearly somebody discovering and structuring information for themselves. They have got some data and now they're trying to structure their thesis out. And this sort of mapping, of concept mapping at that level is really a way of discovering knowledge.
Inter:	Rodney we can probably all recollect working in unit teams doing distance learning print material and as you said people trying to concept map the structure and organisation of their material with pieces of paper and on a white board, using the more traditional media. Now you put the 'e' in front of road mapping, so it's e-road mapping, electronic road mapping, you're really talking about creating and presenting this type of concept mapping in electronic or digital form. What's the value in doing that, moving to an electronic environment and an e-tool to do it?
Carr:	That, what you described, doing on the white board that's not available for students. This makes it available for students and there are plenty of electronic concept mapping tools around, that Inspiration is one of them, for example. They're not available for students either. They're to help people. They're to replace the white board, that's all they're there for. You don't produce a concept map and then give it to your students using Inspiration. Well I suppose you could, but that's not what people use it for. The e in front, I could be using Inspiration but this one's using Power Point and that's on everybody's desk. Everybody's familiar with it, students are familiar with it, we all know how to drive Power Point to some extent and it's on our desks, it's on our computer. It's just a little step to, all it's doing, it's really simple. Every slide in Power Point becomes a theme and well instead of going page down, page down, next slide, next slide, working through it linearly, you put a hypertext, it's visual, so you make another. If three slides are in a little series but they're all about the same theme, about the same concept. They are all about ah, okay, what I did yesterday, computer hardware. So there is a series of slides. This is really simple. Four or five, it might have been six actually. Six slides on different aspects of computer hardware and they were say, input devices, all right. So oh, they're all about input devices. So you make another parent slide of all of those 6 input devices slides, you make another parent of all of those and you put an image of each one of the babies, the child slides on the parent, make them hyperlink, so you can click on the hyperlink on the parent and it takes you to the child. You have got to have navigation to get back so you add a little up button, back button on each slide so you can go back to the parent and to the parent's grandparent and work your way back up the tree that way. I did have up-layered other structures. Concept maps are usually done hierarchically like that. You can have other structures. Hyperlinks really. Old Hypercard, remember Hypercard, it's a bit like that.
Inter:	What was the genesis of this Rodney? I mean…You sat there one day, the light bulb came on metaphorically. You saw Power Point, something triggered off something to do with concept mapping. You were looking at print material. You went, I need an e road mapping tool. I can create one. I can see the benefit and then it all moved into this first year unit, Business Information Systems, that kind of unit.
Carr:	It actually started before that. That was the second one. The first one, remember, you might not have known, remember I ran this thing called Stats in a Day workshop. I still get queries for it but I just can't run it anymore, I don't get the time. What I did there was teaching basic first year stats in a day. I could see the structure in statistics and teaching stats. Stats is a piece of cake. It's got a couple of key concepts and once you understand those you can figure out everything else. It's really easy. So I thought, oh yeah, how can I show that very simple structure. There's a series of steps that you more or less have got to go through for, it's not formal, it's not like a recipe, it's guidelines. But so I could see this structure here, so I thought how can I show this structure and I was reasonably good with Power Point, and I knew how to do hyperlinks and it's no big deal, you go, format , hyperlink or wherever it is on the menu, it's that hard. So I thought, yeah, okay, I can do this. I'll make up a concept map of this. I…knew about concept maps. I always, I like, my philosophy in teaching is show students simple things then show them the details. So structure. Show them the structure, the overall structure, then get them to drill down if they need to, allow them to drill down if they need to. So I made them a concept, I made a concept map for Stats in a Day and it's what I used for running that workshop. And then MSC120 came along this was after, remember when Rodney Fountain died. He was unit chair and half way through the semester I got lumped with it. Here it is yours. Well no one else would do it so I just took it up and ran with it and I could see that we were using a set of regular publisher type Power Point slides and I thought well let's have a go at road mapping this one up too. It took a couple of iterations. The first year that I did the first version and it wasn't great. It took two iterations, while I was just learning how to do it and I didn't have a decent tool then. All of the, as I described before, those images of slides on the parent, that was done initially, oh, but it was awful. I used screen thief to dump them on there and then each one of them to make images and each one then had to be manually linked and the navigation had to be manually added and it took just that physically doing it even without the intellectual input, just physically very time consuming. It took about 20 hours per topic. Which is about same as writing it.
Inter:	When you talk about developing the approach, the e road mapping approach and your doing it, something in, you know training in Stats which you, you control that training session, that material. When you move to something like Business Information Systems and your talking about it's a big first year unit and a big team of people and at that point Rodney too, probably a very mature approach to teaching by distance education throughout the faculty with a well developed printed study guide and printed reader and computer conferencing and a prescribed text. How do you then open this up and persuade, encourage people's commitment to a new approach to it? And it sounds like a new approach, really, to developing a kind of electronically based study guide as well and moving away from the print one, so, well, how do you negotiate that?
Carr:	That came later. I developed the idea into 120 with this big team of people. So I put together, in the first instance, it was basically me doing, I ran MSC120. The first time I ran it, it was basically me on my own. It was before, really, unit teams had really got working all that well and then the unit team got hold of it. Well they had a structure then and the interesting thing is it seems that if somebody, an expert puts a structure down, there's evidence from MSC120, that other people, if it's a good enough structure and if it's not completely off the planet type structure. If it's a reasonable structure of the unit. The unit team can then take up ownership of the whole thing and have an input into it by, well they can modify the structure a little bit if they need to but they can add resources and that's what happened in MSC120. We got buy in from the team by, okay, well here's a general structure, what we need is a bit more information on this, in this theme, we need a few more slides or we need some other resources to build it, enrich it. And that's what happened with the unit team. They have been through a fair few people now and, they, it's wonderful to see. Bardo now, Bardo now and the team, the team, they, it's their product, it's wonderful to see. I was listening to Konrad lecturing with it the other day, I was listening to one of his audio streams and he's talking to the themes that are in the structure and like, he owns them, they are his now because he's had input into all of them. I made the first initial structure, but now it could have been anybody that does it. I think it's anybody. You make, somebody makes the structure and now the unit team can own it by enrichifying it for themselves.
Inter:	You mentioned other resources, Rodney and obviously adding more Power Point slides which is text and images but in the last couple of years the other resources have been audio visual resources, when you talk about enrichment. So could you give us some idea about what those resources were and how they were integrated into the Power Point concept map.
Carr:	They were, if you've got a theme, like, okay, you open up a slide in a lecture theatre and the lecturer will tell a story about it or they will describe something about a particular concept or they'll expand on the definition or they'll do a demonstration, maybe in Excel or something which is what the Stats stuff was. There's always something on every slide that the lecturer would add to. They might provide an interview, run a movie of a particular business or an interview of a business leader or somebody or wherever it's needed. Every slide in a lecture, you can do that with and all we've been doing is capturing those in various ways. A lot of them are audio files, video files, demonstrations, word documents. Some of them are just printed word documents. Somebody types the story in or a link out to a URL somewhere else in the world and then you link them into the relevant slide and now, all you're doing, you're putting them in, you're adding extra resources and not, not be in Power Point and your adding extra resources into your road map. So it's still, the road map is still being, you know, it's still got the right structure and everything, you're just enriching in at that level. You can add those sorts of things in at a high level if you want to give an overview of a topic or a lower level or even at course level. Get the Dean in to say what this course is all about.
Inter:	So Rodney, you're talking about the nitty gritty of the use of the product and presumably most students, well, the off-campus students get it free of charge and the on-campus students can buy it at a modest cost so they get the CD Rom. But you mentioned the nitty gritty of using it in the lecture, in the classroom. It's clearly not a resource only designed for use by the off-campus students. It's relevant to all students doing these subjects. Now you mentioned how it's been shown off in a lecture situation. Could you talk a little bit more about how do you use the road map in lectures with the on-campus students? You can talk about the undergraduate unit. You can talk about how it's used at the postgraduate level.
Carr:	Well, it is, it can be used, people, lecturers use it in a couple of different ways. It seems people in lectures don't, the initial reaction is to use them in a linear fashion still. Which is fine, you can still do that. You've got a theme which is typical lecture notes anyway. You've got the theme, then you've got a series of slides that then expand on that. That structure is still there, it's just presented in a hierarchical manner, so you can, first time through we mucked it up and we didn't have that structure underlying it and people got confused when they were, staff got confused when they were using it in a linear fashion through the lecture. But I've seen people, I think people are now starting to use it in lectures in the more visual hierarchical way, using the hyperlinks that are provided to continually reinforce to students, here is the structure that we're working with. So MSC120, I think the first slide that you come in at is the general overview of the whole unit and if you're doing a particular topic, week 5, topic 5, than you click on topic 5 and drill down in lectures. Students use it the same way from the CD Rom for reviewing or for seeing what's going to be covered in this weeks lecture.
Inter:	That's interesting because I was almost going to cut to the chase right then and ask you how do students use it? You know, you've got on-campus and off-campus and you've got particular cohorts with maybe, special learning needs as well, maybe international students, how they might use it. You know what do you pick up when you might use it in lectures, talking to students in the corridor, office, tutes, online? What sense are you making of the student experience of engaging with the road map, Rodney?
Carr:	We haven't had a lot, we haven't had any negative feed back for a start, so that's all looking good but we haven't done really in depth interviews with students or anything like that to find out how they're using it. It seems that they're using it to, the idea is that they're using, the anecdotal evidence is that they're using it to get the big picture and drill down. It's like a, it is an electronic study guide, so they're using it in the same way that they use a study guide. One of the things that, kind of, when you asked the question before about why e-road mapping. One of the reasons for developing it in the first place, this came out after I had started developing this, is when we were talking about the unit teams, how they take up ownership of it. It is also a way of a unit team, taking their existing resources, which is usually study guide and readings and lecture notes and getting away from the traditional study guide approach and what you can do, there's a couple of things you can do. A unit team could do what like Greg Wood has done and produce resources. Just enrich the unit by producing resources and that's happened. I mean, lots of times that's happened. There's a lot of examples around of producing resources. That doesn't, I can see all of those happening, that was fine, there's good resources and you can build it up that way, but that still leaves the printed study guide and I thought, not the printed study guide. You've got the two primary resources, you've got the study guide and you've got the lecture notes and they were sort of duplicating one another and you can either take the study guide and ramp it up somehow, so you've got all these extra resources and somehow link them in or you could start off with the lecture notes and link in all the resources and I could see these two things and I'm not much of a reader. Right, I'm a very, I want to click on things and drill down. So I don't like study guides. So I threw away the study guide, well I didn't throw it away because you can link out resources. But I started with the lecture notes and worked from them. I think the more obvious approach is to start with the study guide and do like what Richard did in MSC277. He took his more or less existing materials and their still text based. He's just, that unit he's htmlafied them and he's enriching things up by starting from the text based enriching things. That will do but it doesn't get the immediate impact, doesn't make it visual instantly. It still looks text based. This way you get something with a visual impact quickly. You start with your lecture notes, you sexify them up, you make them look interesting and exciting. The effect is you have got an electronic study guide at the end, so the effect is the same, but it's just how you get to that electronic study guide. Start with the lecture notes.
Inter:	The road mapping in the study guide, it's sort of focused on, you know, the subject matter, the what of the teaching. But one thing that you did in extending, it might be a slight detour, but extending the road map, was to try and road map the key components of the teaching and learning environment for Business Information Systems by trying to show the relationships between the subject matter, the resources, online, the graduate attributes. So it was a mapping of the learning environment. Would you sort of explain a little bit about the logic of that Rodney? And embedded in that was the road map of the subject matter but it was at this sort of bigger picture level around the learning environment. What was the logic?
Carr:	The road mapping, what I've sort of talked about so far is, the road mapping of the unit content, which is what most lecturers are interested in and what happened in MSC120 is we could, there are other resources, like the online environment, library, assignments, things like that, that link into that structure as well. You want to combine them all into one structure. So what we did in MSC120 is we didn't make that structure the unit structure, the content structure, the first thing that they see. We tried to map out the structure of the whole unit independent of the content. Trying to relate, like you said,…
Inter:	I should have mentioned assessment by the way which is critical from a student perspective. I'm glad you picked up on that one.
Carr:	We've made assessment the key because that's what most students are really interested in. Now that, we haven't really pushed this. It's still road mapping, it's still mapping of content, but I think it should develop into this higher level one that we've never pushed. MSC120 has got that. It's basically a screen that lives above the content that's got a map of all of the resources, showing how, just what they all are and describing them and then linking down to them and the key to that was the assignments. There was, it hit them in the face, they were the key thing because that's what most students are interested in these assignments, so assignment 1, assignment 2, and the exam or whatever and then that was supposed to link out to unit content or to the library resources or to an online environment or we have in MSC120 the online client for one of the assignments. So it was supposed to be like that, now we've never pulled that one off completely. That's not how at the moment they're being used in most units. They're taking the standard content and richifying that up using road mapping and then adding resources so they haven't got to that, but in MS, what we're doing in MPC701 this time, which is the postgraduate version of MSC120. MPC701 and Tanya Castleman and myself we're teaching it this time, plus some tutors and she could see the structure and that's, she figures it, she uses it, I have seen her now, she went through it first time, she went through it with this linear stuff. I've seen her now. She'll go down and start using the navigation. So she understands the structure. But she is amazing at coming up with things to engage students. Now I'm not particularly good at that. Other people are a lot more imaginative at that. Tanya is a good one. So what she and I are doing, is every week we take, we aren't running lectures every week, we don't need lectures every week with these rich resources on the CD Rom and all the students have got the road map, so we don't have to spend so much time actually lecturing we only have, we only basically have a lecture every other week. Just a two hour lecture and we group the concepts. So last night we talked about hardware. So what we've done each week is we've taken the structure and taken the slides out of the road map and added in colour coded slides. We make them clear that these aren't in the road map. These are activities and we've added in, oh, there will be things like, how might you use this tool in business, or can you think of an example of using this particular methodology to develop an information system that you might have used in business or some of them are a lot more specific. Like, here is a spread sheet with some data in it. How might be a better way, we would put that up on the board, what might be a better way of, or show me some problems with the way this data is organised? So we're leading them down to the road of, instead of doing it in a spreadsheet use a database. So we've got a lot of activities that we do in a lecture, a big lecture theatre, it seats 200 and there's interaction in the lecture theatre and we've built that into the road map. Now the first time through, cause we're doing it on the fly and we're both really busy, we're actually pulling the slides out of the road map and making a separate set of Power Point slides for the lectures but I, I worked last couple of days, when I just was putting the last one together I did the reverse and put those colour coded slides, those slides that show this is something to do guys this is interaction guys, but you've got to do this, we do the same thing with the tutorials, link the tutorials into the road map, rather than the other way round. So it's, it's I think we will solve that problem.
Inter:	But it's really an interesting evolution Rodney, when you talk about the basic information concept mapped in text and still images, moving to multimedia to enrich the presentation of the stuff, the subject, to then show the linkages between the key components of the teaching and learning environment and then to move into activity and interaction. It's almost the final step in the evolution of the whole approach.
Carr:	It was never planned out this way. I'm not a very good planner and I'm not very good at seeing where things are going to end up. I don't know that anybody is actually, but I'm particularly not good at it and I take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. So Tanya, just building in her bit of interaction it's amazing to see, that happens accidentally, it links in to them.
Inter:	You've got another person involved beyond the undergraduate team but in a sense able to talk the talk of educators in Information Systems, so you're still with your immediate disciplinary colleagues. I'm sort of interested in your work now with colleagues in other disciplines. Now you've done work with the economists, now you're stepping beyond your immediate collegiate group of your discipline field and beginning to engage with other people on the concept and they must add other things as well to the model or the thinking, Rodney. Tell us a bit about that.
Carr:	Yes, certainly. The economists; that was a second year unit that they mapped out. It was pretty much the same actually, that was the same idea. Economics has got concepts and you drill down, it was really an easy one, in inverted commas, easy one to road map. We're doing, sitting down doing one. But the thing that they brought to it was, well one of the things, they brought lots of stuff, they brought their expertise for a start. They saw it as a problem solving tool. Very interesting. They saw students using this to solve problems. Now I never saw it as that. I saw it as, well here's how you, well I guess I did when you think about it, cause those steps in the Stats one were, How to solve a stats problem. Any way they saw that, they saw it really, not as presenting information at all, they saw it as, here is an assignment for you students, you have to do that, here is how you can use the information to help solve the problem that you've got to solve and that's just a different slant on it. They, it was quite impressive to see them. They didn't have the tool initially. They were doing it by hand and they did a lot more text based linking and they came up with quite a good structure but they did it by text based hyperlinks. I showed them how to do that and they didn't go down the visual road and right at the end, I sat down for a few hours with each one of them because they all did separate topics and then we worked as a group to put them all together into a, we spent a morning basically putting the whole structure together and making it visual in the end. Doing the visual road mapping all came together very quickly. I've seen that now with other units as well. I've worked with a few now. It's only early days yet. They're, people are doing it on their own but I've seen, it's really the same thing. They'll take a set of Power Point slides, look for common themes and start grouping them together. I forgot to mention a good thing with this visual presentation of a concept map, they are visual any way, but doing them for students in Power Point, it's not just circles and arrows. You build pictures out of the concepts and the common, you group the concepts usually, so the visual effect is important. You group your slides, like if you've got little sub themes you'll group them. If you've got one that's talking about something slightly different you'll move it off to the side and so can you see the initial visual thing I'm talking about?
Inter:	Yes.
Carr:	At time, a lot of things can be presented over time. The history and development of ah, the software package is what I picked last night. It had a beautiful time line, obvious time line, obvious way of structuring the information on a parent slide, you structure your childs, your children on the parent on along a time line or you present ah, concepts usually build on one another so you build them in that sequence. Though, now this is the MAE201 economics team saw this, that the developer, the academic, the teacher puts the, they present the structure and in a way they can add arrows and things like that to show students in which order they should do the slides but students don't have to do it that way. They can skip topics. They don't have to drill down if they don't want to. They say, oh I don't need to know about that yet or I know about that topic, I'm going to skip to the next one. They have got the freedom to do that. I didn't ever. When I'm doing lectures, I'll do that all the time, I'll skip whole themes and say, like I did last night. I don't want to talk about input devices in any detail. They can go and look that up in the text book or look it up with the details in the road map itself. In the lecture I just skip those slides. Just went down to the parent of input devices and just said, oh you can just look that up yourself and went back up to the parent of that one and then on to the processing. How a computer processes stuff. So it was, students do that as well, they skip, they can skip themes if they want, they can skip whole concepts if they want to and the MAE210 team saw that as a pretty important flexibility that this whole concept mapping allows for students.
Inter:	You've got this bigger vision or ambition to try and develop a road map for the complete undergraduate commerce program. What is that about?
Carr:	I think you can road, I'm sure you can road map whole courses. The idea, we're doing it in, that's the BCom. It's called the Commerce road map and the idea is, again for students to show them the whole course, an overview of their whole course. Now they've got overviews already… well they've got some overviews. If you go look in the Handbook or look it up …or wherever you look it up online. You can, you get majors, you get the Dean, a message from the Dean saying what the course is all about. So they get some structure already but they don't get the nitty gritty detail. So this is the idea. You take your BCom and you drill down, you see the themes, oh, here's an accounting major or here is a marketing major or here is an IS major and you can drill then down to your unit. That's the content. The actual aim, that's done. That is more or less in the handbooks any way, that structure, that's the majors and the discipline groups but what's most interesting about the BCom road map was mapping out not the content, not the specific content of units but generic skills. Now that's much harder to show in individual units, unless individual units are about team work ah, it will be harder to get that in at the unit level. So at the course level though what we are trying to do is show to students a theme, a concept is,…, graduate attribute, generic skills, right. That's one theme. This is important in your course. You're are going to learn about all sorts of generic skills. What are they? And you drill down and oh, here's a list o 20 or so whatever there are generic skills, like team work, communications skills, writing skills, oral presentation skills, problem solving skills, creativity. I mean you know what I mean. There's a big long list of generic skills. You then drill down even further. Let's look at presentation skills, so you go down to, into communication skills, drill down even further into presentation skills. Now what you see there is at the bottom level, when you get down to the drill down you see a list of, now the idea is, we haven't quite pulled this one off, there's no resources or very few resources are actually at this level in this road map. What it does is only point off to existing resources and the existing resources are on the whole, the resources, the activities and the assignments, whatever they are in the existing units. So at that level you drill down, all the way down to oral presentation skills. We might have a few resources there like, what's it all about, learning objectives, what you should be able to do, a student should be able to do by the time they graduate. They should be able to do a half hour presentation structure well, all that sort of stuff. There might be, we have got check lists at that level. We've got maybe self review tests, that sort of stuff but the main thing if you want to learn students, if you want to see how these skills are going to be developed across your degree, here are the units where there are some activities, or some assessment or it's taught or discussed or maybe in tutorials wherever, it's discussed in MMH299. It's discussed in whatever other units work with oral presentation skills which are not very many. I picked on a bad example there because that's probably at the moment, one unit. Writing skills, report writing skills, that's developed in many units across the whole course. So there'd be a, you know that matrix there, there's a matrix of common, a matrix with down the side are all of the attributes and across the top are all the units in the course and for each one of them you give a score of how much each one, each unit, contributes to oral presentation skills say. Then you add up your rows to get a total for each skill. That's a fairly, there's nothing wrong with that, it's a good first cut at quantifying how the skills are developed and showing you how the skills are developed. The road map, BCom road map is a visual version of that matrix with a little bit more detail, rather than just a three or a two or something describing for students how their skills are developed across the whole course.
Inter:	Rodney, I guess finally, and there are many threads that can be pulled together, many threads indeed but I think it's always interesting for those of us who have got the opportunity of observing our teenage children using technology at the ages of 15 or 16 to speculate on what they're going to bring to university education not too far down the track and we're talking about, well it is now and it'll only going to get stronger and I think your talking about younger people, you know, being immersed in video games, the visual you've mentioned, ipods, mobile phones, the internet, the web to get critical breaking information and use DVD's. This is their world and many things you've said in the whole interview, I guess form a view about the emerging higher education student and the best way of facilitating their learning or teaching them. I just sort of wonder whether you might be able to reflect on much of what you've said in terms of some key observations about the changing nature of students and of teaching in higher ed. and the types of teaching and learning environments we've got to create and run, including digital environments to give them a very good education into the future
Carr:	Students now days, we were brought up with TV too, and that sort of visual, rather than, as I said before, I'm not a great reader and I think that all that's happening now is we're seeing more and more students coming through that are not great readers. They are much more visual. They want to listen to things, they want to watch things. They want to experience things, rather than just sitting and reading it. I find it difficult to read. There are still voracious readers around, thank God, I'm not one of them though, unfortunately and I think a lot of our students are like that now. So a lot of this came from internal and I could see this is how I am. I won't pick up text books and read them either, students won't, a lot of students are like that. That's what they're like now, they'll play computer games and that's just what people are brought up like. It's not everybody but it's certainly more people, we're seeing more people like that. We've just got to cater for them and give them learning resources that are more suited. A lot of the Hot Copy simulations, now that's really a very important tool. Now those types of things are really critical because that's what students will want. They will want to click on things and if it looks like a game they might use it and they might actually learn something but we can't do a Hot Copy in 320 units across Business and Law. There's, we just can't do it, we haven't got the resources. Give us 20 years and we might be able to do it but we can't do it now. This road mapping gives a quick, like it is quite quick, I think like I think we're doing MAA201 and I've estimated it's going to take 2 days, 2 full days to road map up a unit and make it look interesting. Make it; it's not really doing an awful lot to the content, we're not playing with the content we're just making it look sexy for students, well in many ways. I think we can do it in 2 days. We can make an electronic study guide with links, you know, all working, so it looks good in 2 days. Now that's, Hot Copy type. It's nothing like a Hot Copy but it's something that we can role out across a lot of units quickly and make them, I wouldn't do it with all units. You asked the question before that I don't think I answered, the question; is this appropriate for all units? I don't think it is but it's dammed close to all units. All units have got a structure. Road mapping is a quick way of providing, getting, rolling out all of the units quickly in a form that is not a huge change in content but it's making it look something interesting and different for students. It's a bit of a market, I think it might have a marketing role to play. If we could roll out a BCom road map. All universities have got the same structure, the same information, the same units. Everybody knows about generic attributes, it's nothing new. If we can make it look new we might attract some more students. Now, international, not domestic students, international. We have got to have something to give them, a CD Rom. Here have a CD Rom, this is your course if you come to Deakin University, here is your course, here's a road map, here is a CD. Give them a buck, you know. I'll produce 2 million of these things if that's what it's going to, it's not an expensive operation to produce these CD Roms and hand them to all high school kids or hand them out at international recruitment drives or give them to the agents to hand out. Whatever is needed, I think they might have, it's just, it looks different from what other universities have got and we can roll it out quickly for all units which is something that we can't do Hot Copy with quickly. We'll do Hot Copy with a slow link, that's great, that's much, much, much, richer because you're adding simulations, really much richer, and all the extra files, the audio files, the video files, all that sort of stuff. They take a lot of effort to do, they are; you can do them slowly. Another thing that this road mapping does is once you've got the structure, if you want to call it quits and don't do a particular simulation or add in a link to a particular video file or you haven't got the time to make the files you don't have to do it. MAE201 has got a very simple road map with basically no links to, that might have a link out to an Excel file, I don't think they've got one of those this time, that's next iteration, creating all of that. We can get something out quickly to all, that covers many units and makes them look interesting to students, I hope.
Inter:	Thank you Rodney.
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