Complete thesis - Murdoch University

a learning dialogue (Laurillard, 1993) – in an environment of teaching and learning meaningis negotiated through a dialogue, which is seen to be:discursive – both teacher and learner conceptualisations should be accessible to eachotheradaptive – the focus of the dialogue is based on the relationship between the twoconceptionsinteractive – requiring learner action and teacher feedbackreflective – supportive of the process to link feedback to goalin order to deal with the‘wicked’ problems undertaken in RE – after Simon (1973) RE tasks may be characterisedas having the following ill-structured features: an incomplete and ambiguous specificationof the problem; a lack of stopping rules (to evaluate when a solution has beenreached); many sources of knowledge which cannot be predetermined and may needto be integrated and a lack of an exhaustive list of operations to reach a solution andabsence of a predetermined solution path.Establishing requirements for software-intensive systems is seen to involve, amongst others,the intellectual activities of analysis, specification (synthesis), evaluation and creativity, undertakenin a social setting. The first three of these imply higher order learning, while thelatter is seen to require creativity-enabling environments. These are also discussed in Chapter2.The summary provided by Loucopoulos and Karakostas (1995) supports the conceptual modeldefined by these characteristics:• analysis problems have ill-defined boundaries, structure and a sufficient degree of uncertaintyabout the nature and make-up of the solution• requirements are found in organisational contexts, with associated conflicts, expectationsand demands of the proposed system• the solutions are artificial – they are designed and therefore represent some of manypotential solutions• analysis problems are dynamic – they change while being solved• solutions require interdisciplinary knowledge and skills• the knowledge base of the analyst is constantly evolving392