Guru of the Month - David Lowe
 Prof. David LoweB.E. (hons), PhD, GradCert (Higher Educ.), MACM, SMIEEE |  |
David Lowe is the Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning) in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is passionate about teaching, and particularly the role of practice-based engineering education. He has been heavily involved in teaching at all levels (undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional education). He codeveloped and was program director for the innovative Information Systems Engineering graduate programs. He was responsible for setting up the professional education program on Object Technology as part of COTAR, and co-developed the joint UTS-Thomson Masters program in Software Engineering.
He has active research interests in the areas of Web development and technologies, hypermedia, and software engineering. In particular he focuses on Web development processes and web project specification and scoping, and information contextualisation. He has published widely in the area, including several texts (Lowe and Hall, Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach, Wiley, 1999 and Wilde and Lowe, XPath, XLink, XPointer, and XML: A Practical Guide to Web Hyperlinking and Transclusion, Addison-Wesley, 2002).
He is on numerous Web conference committees and journal editorial boards (such as the Journal of Web Engineering and the International Journal of Web Engineering and Technologies) and is the information management theme editor for the Journal of Digital Information. He has undertaken numerous consultancies related to software evaluation, Web development (especially project planning and evaluation) and Web technologies.
He was the recipient of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education 2001 McGraw Hill New Engineering Educator Award, and won the Paul Thistlewaite award for best paper at the 2000 Australian Web Conference.
David can be contacted at david.lowe@uts.edu.au.
David faces our ten questions... (and one of his own)
Preliminary comment: A number of the answers I give below seem contradictory, in that I give the same answer for both best thing and worse thing, and the same answer for both best advice and worst advice. This is primarily because the real picture is never simple. Often you will do something which has very positive outcomes at the same time as having negative consequences. One of the key things which I have learnt is the importance of understanding and leveraging these. Anyway, hopefully you will see what I mean...
1. Why did you become an academic in the first place?
I am passionate about knowledge! How we create it. How we manage it. How we communicate it. How we help others gain knowledge. Becoming an academic just seemed natural, insofar as it allowed me to indulge this passion in very rich ways: teaching lets me share knowledge; educational development lets me explore ways in which we communicate knowledge and facilitate others gaining of knowledge; research lets me participate in the creation of new knowledge, etc. In what other career could I have so directly and so broadly indulged a core interest?
2. Is it still the same?
Definitely. Though my views have matured and evolved, this fundamental motivation remains very strong. Ways in which the expression of this has changed include a stronger interest in education processes themselves. For example, I have become increasingly interested in the role of practice-based education and how it supports contextualised learning - and what this says about how we engage with knowledge. I have also learnt to appreciate much more the challenges imposed by my changing role (from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer / Group Head to Associate Professor / Director of Undergraduate Programs to Professor / Associate Dean). These challenges have helped to push me to learn and change, and help me to learn more about myself.
3. Biggest mistake you've made in your career?
Staying at one institution.
With a few short stints in industry (for a total of 3 years) or overseas
(for a total of 2 years) I have spent all of the last 21 years at UTS. This
has meant that I missed an opportunity to explore the different approaches
taken in different institutions, and to develop a broader network.
4. The big thing you got right
Staying at one institution.
This has allowed me to understand UTS in depth, and to become deeply
involved in the University operations, and therefore develop a depth and
breadth of contributions which otherwise would not have been possible.
I know the question asked for "The" big thing, but there is a second one
worth mentioning: To be willing to be passionate about things, without
becoming dogmatic about them. I have found that I have gained immense
benefit by being willing to argue those things I believe in, but also to
keep an open mind whilst respecting and trying to engage with alternative
views (indeed this is one of the aspects which I believe is central to the
concept of collegiality).
5. Powerpoint or OHP?
Strange question? Either - but only used as prompts, not as a substitute lecture. Too often teaching tools becomes an end rather than a means. Whenever I use "props" of any sort, they remain exactly that. So when I use powerpoint or overheads, they are used simply as an aid (as much to me as to the students) and the real value-add is in the discussion that goes on around them.
6. Best Advice you ever received?
When asked to do something, always say yes!
Basically, the single greatest aspect which has helped me to be successful
has been always to accept challenges, and to say yes whenever someone asked
me to do something or to become involved in something. Many, many times this
opened up unexpected doors. A corollary to this is that I have always gone
looking for ways to contribute and to become involved. Whilst sometimes you
end up out of your depth, you learn to swim rather quickly.
7. Worst advice you ever received?
When asked to do something, always say yes! (see the above point) This has meant that I have ended up with some heavy workload - but these have brought immense value as well. I have also ended up with lots of half-finished things - though over time I think you develop an ability to know intrinsically when something is good enough, and when you are just spending too much time making it perfect (something engineers should know!) This has both an up-side (wonderful to be involved in so many interesting projects) and a down-side (frustration at not really seeing anything through in as much detail as you would like).
8. Biggest challenge you've overcome?
I can split this into a professional challenge and a personal challenge.
Professionally - I've been incredibly fortunate. There have been very few
major challenges, other than the ongoing one of managing work / time etc.
i.e. trying to juggle many different things. Probably the one that, whilst
not necessarily the most technical difficult, has created the most grey
hairs has been learning how to manage inter-personal relationships. This has
become more complex as my role has changed, and I have moved increasingly
into a position where I have had a significant effect on other peoples
activities. This has been particularly difficult given the pressures that
all Universities are under in terms of resourcing constraints and trying to
find the right balances between teaching, research and other activities.
Personally - in 1997 I was diagnosed with cancer and spent a year in
treatment. Whilst this might appear to have little to do with work
challenges, it did help me to learn how to prioritise things much more
effectively. And what is important to one person (in any context) can be
trivial to someone else, and vice versa. This can be crucial both in
understanding how to motivate students to learn, and also how to support
change in any work environment. Oh, and a side consequence of the cancer was
that I lost my voice for over a year. Amazing what you learn when you have
to listen for a change!
9. How?
Hmmm - think I might have answered this above.
10. What advice would you give to new academics?
Be balanced! Research on its own can provide great benefits, but you become
isolated from understanding what knowledge is really all about. Teaching on
its own is fulfilling, but can become sterile (and will lead to a career
dead-end). You need to learn how to keep these balanced. And for this, by
far the most significant aspect is that it is crucial to set boundaries, and
religously adhere to them. It is very easy to let teaching dominate
eveything and to use it as an excuse as to why research has faded away. It
is also possible (though not quite so easy) to become preoccupied with
research for its own sake. Certainly the only way I made progress was to
ensure that I had times set aside which were "research times" and they were
sacrosanct.
Learn to juggle. One crucial skill I have strongly cultivated is the ability
to task-switch rapidly - to spend 5 minutes doing email, then 10 minutes
marking essays, then 20 minutes in a meeting, then 5 more minutes of email,
then ...
Be persistent! I must have had any number of grant applications knocked
back, or papers rejected. It is important to keep trying. Eventually the
progress starts to pick up.
Select a good mentor. Someone who can be honest with you, and who you trust
to provide sound advice is crucial. This doesn't need to be someone you work
with closely, but it certainly should be someone who you respect and from
whom you can learn.
11. And finally, any favourite quotes.
Well, several:
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter de necessitatum", William of Occam (c
1350)
Or paraphrasing, always assume the simplest explanation - don't go
looking for Machiavellian explanations. Even if they exist, you probably
don't want to know.
"We live by information, not by sight.", Baltasar Gracian, The Art of
Worldly Wisdom (1647)
"We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to
reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than
can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it
multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the
accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of
knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and
political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now
practise and endure. But we let "I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor
cat in the adage." We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we
know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the
poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more
than we can digest.", extract from: Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of
Poetry
Or paraphrasing, get some perspective!
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Last Updated Monday June 21st, 2004