COGNITIVE SCIENCE IMPROVE COMMUNICATION WITHIN INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

摘要

I like to teach and I like to see my students understand and experience the feeling that something becomes clear and understandable (almost "obvious"). I teach how they should analyse enterprises and perform information systems development (ISD). These are complex tasks and very often the methods provided do not lead the students to this enlightening experience. How could I improve their learning to help them witness this experience? My university have used object-orientation (OO) since 1990 to model structures and concepts within a business or enterprise. OO business analysis is quite different from earlier approaches of information systems modelling, like functional or structured modelling. The traditional perspectives of modelling are often based on different sciences, like natural and computer sciences and social and economic sciences. The view that object-oriented modelling takes when modelling enterprises, has not enough support in these sciences. The lack of human aspects in the ISD arena is the main reason why I base my models in this paper on theories within cognitive science and pedagogic sciences. We have added cognitive science on top of object-orientation and called this new perspective Object Thinking (OT). This name was introduced when we started the Object Thinking research project.