Professors Michael Twidale and Preben Hansen present as international guest lecturers for Information Science Postgraduate module

Posted on October 01, 2021

Professors Michael Twidale and Preben Hansen presented as international guest lecturers for the Information Science postgraduate students on the Knowledge Management module on 29 September 2021 via a virtual session.

Professors Twidale and Hansen’s lecture discussed agile research methods and the underlying philosophy behind agile software development in the context of doing research. Some key points of discussion included:

  • How/why agile research methods work in software development
  • How/why agile research methods might sometimes work in doing research
  • Challenges to the use of agile methods
  • 12 Underlying principles of the agile manifesto/philosophy
  • Agile methods are adaptive rather than predicative
  • The messiness of doing research can be support by the underlying principles of agile research methods
  • Aspects of agile that are promising with reference to the difficulties of doing research 
  • Examples of applying agile research methods to the iterative design of research questions during a PhD exercise
  • Note the value of studying agile for doing research
  • Propose an agile research manifesto
  • List some agile approaches for doing research
  • Agile methods are people-orientated rather than process-orientated

Prof. Twidale’s short personal biography reads as follows:

Michael Twidale is a Professor in the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is the director of the PhD Program. His research interests are at the intersection of computer supported cooperative work, computer supported collaborative learning, human computer interaction, and sociotechnical systems design. Current projects include studies of informal social learning of technology, ubiquitous learning, the intersection of search, learning and creativity, data quality, designing data for the very long term, museum informatics, and agile research methods. He is interested in how people learn technologies, how they succeed, fail, struggle, tinker, innovate, appropriate, help their friends and try to search for solutions online.

Prof. Hansens’s short personal biography reads as follows:

Preben Hansen is a Docent and Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden. His main research focus is on the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, and Information Behavior. Preben’s research focuses on the human in the center, interacting with the surroundings through various digital systems, services, objects and tools. His recent research deals with Gesture and distance-driven Interaction (with Dr Xiangdong LI) and Agile Research Methods (with Prof. Mike Twidale) and Collaborative Information Searching (with Dr Tina Du). He has published more than 120 academic articles/papers in journals and conferences and 3 edited books. He has served as chair at several ACM conferences like ACM CHIIR, ACM DIS, ACM/IEEE JCDL, TPDL and iConference. He has been a special issue editor for Journal of Information Science on Searching as Learning (2016) and special issue editor for IEEE Computer on Collaborative Information Seeking (2014). 

We are grateful for Professors Twidale and Hansen for making themselves available to our postgraduate students, for a very insightful and fascinating lecture!

- Author Anneke Nel

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