Conference Papers

To Gauge an Understanding of How Boundaries are Perceived in Ireland by Landowners

Daragh O'Brien et al. — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:45:11 PDT

Recent anecdotal evidence from property professionals indicates that there has been a significant increase in boundary disputes in Ireland since the phased publication of the Land Registry digital map in 2005. There is a need to investigate this development in order to confirm or refute this trend and attempt to identify the issues causing these disputes. There is an absence of detailed information on the causes and types of boundary disputes within the Irish Legal system. This project aims to address this lack of information by collecting comprehensive information on a range of case studies over the past 5 years and determine the incidence of these types of disputes. The cost to all parties to these disputes will also be estimated to inform policy makers of the effectiveness of the current system. An electronic questionnaire on boundaries in general, was carried out to gauge the perception and context in which property boundaries are perceived in Ireland by landowners. Initial results from this first questionnaire show that 32% and 38% of landowners in urban and rural areas respectively have issues with their boundaries, and 22% of landowners did not know whether their property is registered in Land Registry or in Registry of Deeds. A second questionnaire, currently in progress, intends collecting information on specific boundary dispute cases to determine the issues causing these disputes and identify the various types of disputes within this litigation category. This study hopes to inform the need for policy reform of the Land Administration System for land tenure in Ireland.

Harnessing Developments in Technology and Merging them with new Approaches to Teaching: a Practical Example of the Effective use of Wikis and Social Bookmarking Sites in 3rd Level Professional Education

Avril Behan et al. — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 02:01:24 PDT

While innovations such as Problem-Based Learning and elearning have informed pedagogical practice on the Geomatics honours Bachelor of Science degree programme at the Department of Spatial Information Sciences, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Ireland, few attempts have been made to date to harness technological developments and merge them with new approaches to teaching. However, the recent conceptual change in authoring and usage of the World Wide Web from relatively static to fully interactive (Read-Write Web) provided an opportunity to embrace a change in technology as a means of modifying teaching practice to create a more student-centred environment. This paper describes a project currently running at the DIT, with 2nd year students on the aforementioned four-year honours degree programme in Geomatics, where the students are required to use Web 2.0 sites for social bookmarking (www.delicious.com) and wiki creation (www.pbwiki.com) to enable collaborative research and writing, in the context of a module on introductory level remote sensing. No prior knowledge of wikis or social bookmarking sites is expected and instruction in the usage of these tools is an integral part of the task. The students have been divided into small groups of four or five, given specific and independent tasks to accomplish, and given full autonomy in how elements of the task were subdivided. This particular arrangement has resulted in the emergence of a number of interesting organisational strategies within the groups, the practical details of which will be discussed during this paper. Through appropriate weighting of this task within the overall module students have been given the opportunity to become accustomed to the new form of teaching and learning, with its potential for confusion or misinterpretation caused by unfamiliarity, without needing to worry about potentially significant assessment penalties. The usage of online sites, which are accessible to the students only through unique logins or identifiers, has made individual assessment within groups significantly easier and more successful than was previously possible. Initial student feedback has been very positive, indicating that this method of learning is seen as interesting, challenging and effective, and that it is very fair in ensuring that non-contributing group members are not carried; a matter which is of significant concern to many hard-working students.

Evaluation of the Role of an Intensive Induction Project in Enhancing the First Year Experience

Avril Behan et al. — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 02:01:22 PDT

In line with increasing global efforts to improve the first year experience of 3rd level education Dublin Institute of Technology’s School of Spatial Planning undertook, in both 2007 and 2008, a 2-day Deep-End Induction project. With the introduction of modularisation in Ireland’s Institutes of Technology opportunities arose for the identification of overlaps and synergies between programmes. Within the authors’ School three honours Bachelor of Science degrees in Geomatics, Spatial Planning and Environmental Management are taught annually. The Geomatics graduates are mainly engaged in the production of maps and models on national, regional and local scale as well as the management of spatial data in Geographic Information Systems and through appropriate Land Management processes. The Environmental Managers and Spatial Planners are prime users of these datasets. All three student groups benefit from the development of an understanding of each of the other disciplines and this led to the introduction of basic modules in each of the three subject areas, delivered jointly to the three cohorts during semester one of the first year. Experience in the first year of joint delivery of modules (2006) indicated that students had difficulty understanding the relevance of these modules and the reasoning behind the joint delivery. It was also found that few students mixed outside their own cohort even when scheduled in cross-disciplinary teams for assignments and practical work. In an effort to address this issue staff developed an induction project which placed students from the three programmes into teams and tasked them with the design of a route for a high-voltage power line. The students were given a detailed briefing (both en masse and in separate cohorts to explain the specific role of each professional in the design team), were provided with a range of online Irish mapping, environmental and planning tools, and were required to design, visit and evaluate two possible routes to match specific natural, social, engineering or landscape criteria between defined start and end locations. The deliverables were a brief report and a presentation proposing one of the designed routes. The presentation was made to the full cohort of students and staff from across the school and was delivered as if at a Planning Consultation meeting, with each group in turn taking the role of the design team trying to convince an audience of interested local parties of the benefits of their proposal. The real outcomes, however, were the introduction of students to their cohort and the wider grouping of students across the school, to the related disciplines of Spatial Planning, Environmental Management and Geomatics, to a range of tools (both educational, such as the Webcourses VLE, and subject specific), to staff at the school and to some 3rd level teaching methods. Feedback from students indicated that they found the project to be a success, both from social and educational perspectives, with the Geomatics students seeing less educational and more social relevance, possibly because of the specific topic chosen for investigation. Current anecdotal evidence has shown better mixing between cohorts during joint practical and project work. The authors also intend to carry out a further evaluation of results of the induction project when the students have completed one full stage (2 semesters) of their programmes.