OOPSLA’98 Mid-year Workshop on
Training and Education
This OOPSLA Mid-Year Applied Object Technology Workshop will provide a forum for those involved in OO training and education to discuss their challenges and share their insights. Rather than concentrating only on philosophy and presentation of ideas, this workshop will focus on collaboration and discussion with the goal of producing and documenting concrete ideas to meet the challenges of teaching OO.

Those from industry and academia who are involved in object technology training and education are encouraged to attend. Experienced individuals and those new to OO education and training are welcome. The most important qualification is a willingness to discuss problems, share thoughts and ideas and produce results!


Workshop Rationale
It is common knowledge that there is a shortage of individuals educated in object technology. This is due in part to the fact that object technology education is complicated and must extend beyond material concentrating solely on the technology. While industry struggles with the expense of providing training for their employees, universities attempt to find the best ways to add OO education to their curriculums. The driving force behind this workshop centers on three observations:
- The OO training challenges of industry and academia are similar in many cases and different in only a few.
- Concrete solutions to the challenges should be documented so that they can be reused.
- Industry and academia can be better served by working together to meet the challenges of supplying the current and future need for OO developers.


Focus of the Workshop
Although this is a three-day event, it is still not possible to give adequate time to every issue in the large and complicated topic of OO education and training. The leaders of this workshop have discovered through experience that the most successful workshops are ones that have a focus and a goal. Therefore, this workshop will focus on addressing three questions with the goal of documenting the answers to these questions. Three of these are stated below while the fourth is open for suggestions by those who are planning to attend. With this strategy in mind, each position statement should address one or more of the following using concrete and very specific ideas and examples.

Focus questions:

1) What are the influential challenges in OO training and education? What are some potential solutions to these challenges?
2) What are the environmental differences between industry and academic teaching and learning? (e.g. length of course, maturity, experience base, learning styles of students, environmental influence on instructional objectives, etc.) What can be shared and learned from each other’s experiences in these different environments?
3) What are some specific ways industry and academia work together to do a more efficient job of meeting the challenges in OO education and training?
4) Fourth question is open for suggestions -- will be determined and announced prior to the workshop after the majority of position statements have been received.

While examining these questions, discoveries and ideas will surface and be discussed. The final task is to produce a useful and reusable document which clearly summarizes the conclusions of the workshop. This will provide attendees with concrete ideas for improving OO training and education. (Remember, the focus is on concrete solutions for real problems.)


General (tentative) Schedule
 (Specific agenda and action items will be structured after position statements are received by the workshop organizers. The schedule is, of course, open for change if the participants wish.)

First day:
 - Introductions
- Position paper presentations. (Each individual will give a very short presentation followed by a short q&a period. Exact time limit for each presentation will be determined after the number of attendees is known.)
- Focus groups. (Each individual will choose a group addressing one of the four focus questions.)

Second day:
 - Report from the first day focus groups
- Second round of focus groups. (Each individual will choose a different group addressing one of the four focus questions.)
- Report from second day focus groups

Third day:
 - Discussion of conclusions from the previous two days
- Summary of the concrete ideas and preparation of the documentation


Position Statements:
Individuals interested in participating in this workshop should submit a position statement of (2 to 5 pages) defining experiences with teaching object technology. Each statement must:

- address one or more of the focus questions and/or propose a fourth question (the focus question the author is addressing should be clearly stated in the paper)
- include a short statement of the author’s background
- contain, at the beginning of the statement, the author(s) name, affiliation, and contact information (E-mail and voice phone).

Each attendee will be given a short period during the workshop to present his or her statement. A copy of each position statement paper will be made available to all attendees.

In order to facilitate planning, position statement papers must be received no later than July 1. Early submissions are strongly encouraged and will be posted to the web.
Click here to see papers received to date.

Submissions should be made in electronic form preferably in text format. Please submit to:
Susan Burk
Susan_Burk@mail.amsinc.com


Registration Information
Early registration rates end on June 12th.
Click here for booking information.

Click here for further information about all the midyear workshops.

This workshop is located in a beautiful area with a lot of things to do.
Click here for more information about the area.


Organizers:
Susan Burk is a Principal with American Management Systems. She provides instruction and supports the development of course materials for Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, Special Topics in Object-Oriented Analysis, and the use of object-oriented CASE tools. She plays an active role as a consultant and mentor and evaluates object models, model management strategies and facilitates object-oriented planning and analysis worksessions for AMS clients. Her recent presentation on "A Practitioner's Perspective of the UML" was featured at the Connecticut Object-Oriented User's Group (COOUG). She was a college lecturer many years ago (in chemistry) and also worked in non-OO systems development and consulting for a number of years. As an individual who has lived in all three worlds - academia, industry and industrial training, she is keenly interested in ways in which the academic and industrial OO communities can work together to refine and enhance OO education.

MaryLynn Manns is a member of the Computer Science faculty at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. In addition to teaching courses in information systems and object technology, she researches issues in OO education and training. She has published articles on this topic and has been an organizer of various OO teaching and learning workshops at conferences such as OOPSLA, TOOLS, ECOOP, and OT. MaryLynn is currently the Chair of the OOPSLA'98 Educators Symposium.

Donald J. Bagert is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Texas Tech University. His research interests include iconic programming languages and object-oriented design methodologies. He is the editor of the FASE (Forum for Advancing Software engineering Education) electronic newsletter, and has been a member of an advisory committee to the Texas State Board of Professional Engineers, which recently voted unanimously to recognize "the discipline of Software Engineering as having a sufficiently distinct knowledge base to allow licensing for engineers experienced in that knowledge base." Dr. Bagert recently held the workshop "Software Education 2000: Computing at the Crossroads" at the Conference for Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), which brought together many of the academic, professional, and licensing stakeholders in the computing education community, and is the Program Chair for the 1999 CSEE&T. He is also the Co-Director of the proposed Software Engineering Research, Training, and Education Center (SERTEC) at Texas Tech.

Chang-Hyun Jo is an associate professor of Computer Science Department at Kyonggi University, Korea. His teaching and research interests include Object-Oriented Programming, Design and Implementation of Concurrent OO Programming Language, Distributed Computing, etc. He is currently an editor of Korea Information Processing Society, and the Programming Language Track Chair of the ACM SAC'99. He has been served many years as a Korean Delegate to ITU-T SG10 to work for extending OO concepts into the CHILL programming language. Currently he has co-organized the Object-Oriented Technology Study Group in Korea.