Complete thesis - Murdoch University

to technical problems that resembled the rationalist approach to socio-economic problemspropagated by the labour movement. However, Mulder (2006) notes that engineers sometimesfailed to recognise that the issue at stake was not always a scientifically/mathematicallysolvable optimisation problem, but a choice between irreconcilable norms and values.By the late 1960s philosophers such as Habermas (1972) criticised the ideological characterof science-based technology – successful technologies were seen to challenge society and affectit as a whole, and a deep understanding of the motives and desires of people that would berelating to the new technology, developed through interaction, was critical. However, thebasic features of most engineering training programmes have hardly been challenged sinceEngineering Schools were established (Mulder, 2006). In general this education is based on anormative professional education curriculum, in which students first study basic science, thenthe relevant applied science (Waks, 2001), so that learning may be viewed as a progression toexpertise through task analysis, strategy selection, try-out and repetition (Winn and Snyder,1996).As Waks (2001) explains, in this normative model of professional education science provides arational foundation for practice [original emphasis], with practical work at the last stage ofthe curriculum, where students are expected to apply science learned earlier in the curriculumto real-life problems.Other approaches to educating software developers also modelled scientific and engineeringmethodologies, with their focus on process and repeatability. Benson (2003) notes that,within the emerging IS discipline of the 1970s, while the research and publications areasowed much to the social sciences, its practice relied heavily on scientific, mathematic andengineering disciplines, with many of the practitioners migrating from engineering and manufacturing.IS academics were also migrants to the discipline, with an overwhelming majorityhaving qualifications in other disciplines, most often computer science. He suggests that currentIS curricula in practice (as opposed to emerging model curricula) continue to show aheavy dependency on the thinking of the 1980s and 1990s.Later sections in this chapter will examine how RE-related components of BoKs and modelcurricula are defined in various IT specialisations (in particular SE, IS and CS). How theseare made available to the learner may be determined from introductory, tertiary studies leveltexts. Iivari (1991) and Checkland and Holwell (1998) suggest these are an embodiment ofthe current wisdom in a field or discipline, its common conceptualisations, and provide bothan account of the field in a straightforward way and a condensed presentation of the bodyof accepted theory. These are discussed in the next section. Although there are importantassumptions made in this approach (discussed in Chapter 3), for simplicity’s sake it is the44