Rafael A. Calvo

Teaching - Research - Professional Community - Publications - Projects - Bio

If you need more information about me:	Some of my Roles
contact me at: University phonebook Department of Electrical Engineering J03 The University of Sydney NSW 2006, Australia tel: +61 2 9351 8171 Fax: +61 2 9351 3847 A map to the department and my office is available here Not to be confused with this Rafael Calvo (my dad)	Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering (US equivalent: Associate Professor) Director Web Engineering Group Director for Teaching and Learning - School of Electrical and Information Engineering Coordinator for the E-Commerce and Software Engineering Streams. E-Learning Technology Committee (USyd wide)

Teaching

Year	Semester 1	Semester 2
2010	E-Business Analysis and Design (ELEC3610) ENGG1805 Professional Engineering and IT ENGG5210 Research Methods in Engineering	Object Oriented Application Frameworks (ELEC5619)
Teaching History Awards: School Teaching Excellence Award (2003), Faculty of Engineering Dean's Award for Teaching And Learning (2004), Australasian Association for Engineering Education - Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in Engineering (2008)

Research

I am interested in Learning: how machines learn and how people can learn better with the support of technology.

Three projects currently describe my research interests:

Tools for Learning Through Writing in Engineering Disciplines

Background: Writing can help develop cognitive disciplinary knowledge. To provide a successful learning experience timely feedback is necessary. Providing this feedback to increasing numbers of students poses a major challenge for instructors.
Aims: develop tools for supporting writing activities including automatic feedback, question generation. Process mining is used to explore successful writing processes.
Methods: Language technologies and data mining, web engineering and cloud computing.

Outcomes: Hundreds of students are using the tools and content we built.

Affect-sensitive Learning Technologies

Background. Strong evidence showing that emotions are important in learning, and the development of new sensing and pattern recognition techniques have triggered increasing research into technologies that recognize, adapt, play out emotions.
Aims: 'affective prospecting' where the goal is to use affective LT to understand the relations between linguistic, mental and bodily processes but specifically in the contexts of real learning scenarios, in which subjects have real motivations.
Methods. Pattern recognition, Psychophysiology.

Informing Learning Technologies with Students' Conceptions, Perceptions and Approaches of learning

Background: LT are typically developed following the same methodologies used to develop non-educational software systems. As a consequence, the principles underpinning the design of these systems are not mediated by how the students experience the technologies in pursuit of their learning outcomes
Aims: Inform other the development of LT
Methods: The studies involve in-depth interviews, and the analysis employs a phenomenographic approach in which student conceptions of the activity with the tools are investigated in relation to face-to-face equivalents, perceptions of the tool in general and their academic achievement.

I am looking for students that want to do a thesis on one of these projects

You can have a look at some of my publications and grants.

For more information read my Bio.