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Professor David Bowers

Profile summary

  • Central Academic Staff
  • Professor of Computing
  • Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
  • School of Computing & Communications
  • david.bowers

Professional biography

After my first lecturing post at UEA, Norwich, where I specialised in teaching database management and programming, I moved to the University of Surrey.  At Surrey, I led the introduction of the undergraduate degree programme in Computing & IT, and served as Course Director for that programme for ten years.

In 2001, I moved to the Open University, and was soon appointed as Programme Director for undergraduate computing, a post I held for over thirteen years until July 2016.  My responsibilities included oversight of the introduction of the first OU named degree in Computing in 2004, and its subsequent merger with the degrees in IT & Computing and Information and Communication Technologies to form the current undergradute degree in Computing & IT. 

After standing down from the role of Programme Director, I then served as Deputy Head of the School of Computing and Communications until October 2018.

Having finally escaped from a succession of leadership and management roles, I have rekindled my research activities in open-field navigation, alongside leading the accreditation workstream for the Insitute of Coding (IoC) from 2018 - 2021. 

Research interests

Over the years, my research interests have focussed on database and semantic modelling, and, more recently, exploring some of the challenges of object-relational database design.

A growing interest, which is now my main focus, is the presentation of navigational information for maritime navigation.  In particular, I am exploring a number of issues related to supporting navigators as they seek to recognise landmarks to aid visual navigation, and how landmarks are used to improve the safety of navigation.

Teaching interests

In addition to contributing to database teaching throughout my career, I have more recently started to teach IT service management, an important but too often overlooked aspect of software development and management.

External collaborations

I am a Fellow of BCS: the Chartered Institute for IT, a Chartered Membership Assessor and an assessor for academic accreditation. Until 2007, I was also responsible for the University Professional Development Scheme for placement students.

I am a professional member of the ACM.

I represent the Open Univesity on the SFIA Council, and I am an accredited SFIA consultant.  I am currently leading a project to develop online assessments on behalf of the SFIA Foundation.

I'm an Ocean Yachtmaster through the Royal Yachting Association, a member of the Royal Institute of Navigation, and - when I get time - I sail my Westerly Oceanlord, O.D.1, which I also used for some of my navigation experiments.

Building on elements of the accreditation standard developed for the IoC, involvement in two ITiCSE working groups enabled me to forge collaborations with US colleagues, exploring the assesment of professional competence, initialy for students on placement.  Our explorations have focused particularly on the relationship between professional competence measured against the SFIA framework and the definition of competence in the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2020 report (CC2020).

Research groups

NameTypeParent Unit
CRC: Software Engineering and DesignGroupFaculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology

Publications

Developing a Competence Assessment which References a Student Portfolio to a Professional Skills Framework (2023-09-11)
Bowers, David S. and Petre, Marian
Interaction Design & Architecture(s), Article 6(57) (pp. 97-114)

Demonstrating the use of a professional skills framework to support the assessment of dispositions in IT education (2023)
Bowers, David S. and Sabin, Mihaela
Education and Information Technologies ((Early Access))

Understanding object-relational mapping: A framework based approach (2009)
Ireland, Christopher; Bowers, David; Newton, Mike and Waugh, Kevin
International Journal on Advances in Software, 2(2/3) (pp. 202-216)

Detecting redundancy in conceptual models (2003)
Bowers, David S.
In: Advanced Conceptual Modeling Techniques: ER 2002 Workshops, ECDM, MobIMod, IWCMQ, and eCOMO, Tampere, Finland, October 7-11, 2002, Revised Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2784) (pp. 275-287)
ISBN : 3540202552 | Publisher : Springer | Published : Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany

A Practical Approach to Assessing IT Professional Skills (2023-10)
Bowers, David; Sabin, Mihaela and Raj, Rajendra K.
In : The 23rd Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE ’23) (11-14 Oct 2023, Marietta, GA, USA)

The Institute of Coding Accreditation Standard: Exploring the Use of a Professional Skills Framework to Address the UK Skills Gap (2023-09-25)
Bowers, David; Hayes, Alan; Prickett, Tom; Crick, Tom; Streater, Kevin and Sharp, Chris
In : The United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER 2023) conference (7-8 Sep 2023, Swansea, UK)

Advancing Computing Education: Assessing CC2020 Dispositions (2022-11-29)
Bowers, David S.; Sabin, Mihaela; Raj, Rajendra K. and Impagliazzo, John
In : 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) (8-11 Oct 2022, Uppsala, Sweden)

Using a Professional Skills Framework to Support the Assessment of Dispositions in IT Education (2022-09-21)
Bowers, David and Sabin, Mihaela
In : SIGITE '22: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (21-24 Sep 2022, Chicago, IL, USA) (pp. 103-109)

Computing Competencies: Mapping CC2020 Dispositions to SFIA Responsibility Characteristics (2022-03-28)
Bowers, David S.; Sabin, Mihaela; Raj, Rajendra K. and Impagliazzo, John
In : 2022 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) (28-31 Mar 2022, Tunis, Tunisia)

Professional Accreditation and Competency-Based Computing Education (2022)
Raj, Rajendra K.; Impagliazzo, John; Aly, Sherif G.; Bowers, David S.; Connamacher, Harold; Kurkovsky, Stan; MacKellar, Bonnie; Prickett, Tom; Samary, Maíra Marques and Stefanov, Krassen
In : 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (11 Jul - 13 Jul 2022, Dublin) (pp. 564-565)

Compass Errors in Mobile Augmented Reality Navigation Apps: Consequences and Implications (2022)
Bowers, David S.
In : SAI Computing Conference 2022 (14-15 Jul 2022, London) (pp. 121-142)

Professional Competencies in Computing Education (2021-12)
Raj, Rajendra; Sabin, Mihaela; Impagliazzo, John; Bowers, David; Daniels, Mats; Hermans, Felienne; Kiesler, Natalie; Kumar, Amruth N.; MacKellar, Bonnie; McCauley, Renée; Nabi, Syed Waqar and Oudshoorn, Michael
In : ITiCSE 2021: 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (26 Jun - 1 Jul 2021, Virtual Event Germany) (pp. 133-161)

Towards a 21st Century Personalised Learning Skills Taxonomy (2021-04-21)
Ward, Rupert; Philips, Oliver; Bowers, David; Crick, Tom; Davenport, James; Hanna, Paul; Hayes, Alan; Irons, Alastair and Prickett, Tom
In : IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (Educon 2021) (21-23 Apr 2021, [Online] Vienna)

Toward Practical Computing Competencies (2021)
Raj, Rajendra K.; Sabin, Mihaela; Impagliazzo, John; Bowers, David; Daniels, Mats; Hermans, Felienne; Kiesler, Natalie; Kumar, Amruth N.; MacKellar, Bonnie; McCauley, Renée; Nabi, Syed Waqar and Oudshoorn, Michael
In : Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2 (26 Jun 2021-1 Jul 2021, Virtual Event) (pp. 603-604)

Gamification of Team Interaction in a distance learning environment (2020-01-09)
Bowers, David S. and Nelson, Matthew
In : CEP 2020: Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Computing Education Practice 2020 (9 Jan 2020, Durham, United Kingdom)

Augmented Reality Smartphone Compasses: Opportunity or Oxymoron? (2019-09)
Bowers, David
In : Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2019 International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC '19 Adjunct) (9-13 Sep 2019, London)

Software design as multiple contrasting dialogues (2019-08-29)
Petre, Marian; van der Hoek, André and Bowers, David S.
In : Psychology of Programming Interest Group 30th Annual Conference (28-30 Aug 2019, Newcastle University)

Designing a better accreditation standard to promote graduates' employability (2019)
Bowers, David S
In : Advance HE STEM Conference 2019 (30-31 Jan 2019, Birmingham UK)

Workshop: The IoC Accreditation Standard (2019)
Bowers, David
In : Institute of Coding Conference 2019 (10-13 Mar 2019, Manchester)

Aligning Competence Hierarchies with Bloom's Taxonomies: Changing the focus for computing education (2019)
Bowers, David; Petre, Marian and Howson, Oli
In : Koli Calling '19 Proceedings of the 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (21-24 Nov 2019, Koli, Finland)

Mobile AR: Promising innovation or misplaced trust? (2019)
Bowers, David
In : International Navigation Conference 2019 (19-21 Nov 2019, Edinburgh)

Including IT service management in the Computing curriculum: a caricature approach. (2018-01-11)
Bowers, David and Morse, David
In : Computing Education Practice (11-12 Jan 2018, University of Durham)

"It's only a computing project – so there can’t be any ethical issues…" (2018-01-11)
Bowers, David
In : Computing Education Practice (11-12 Jan 2018, University of Durham)

Exposing the myth: object-relational impedance mismatch is a wicked problem (2015-05-24)
Ireland, Christopher and Bowers, David
In : DBKDA 2015, The Seventh International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (24-29 May 2015, Rome, Italy) (pp. 21-26)

Intentacles: wearable interactive antennae to sense and express emotion (2013-04-27)
Petre, Marian; Bowers, David; Baker, Thomas; Copcutt, Ed; Lawson, Adam; Martindale, Adam; Moses, Ben and Yan, Yige
In : ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2013 Apr 27 - May 02, Paris, France) (pp. 2861-2862)

Exploring the essence of an Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch: a novel technique based on equivalence in the context of a framework (2011-01-23)
Ireland, Christopher; Bowers, David; Newton, Michael and Waugh, Kevin
In : DBKDA 2011, The Third International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (23-28 Jan 2011, St. Maarten, The Netherlands Antilles) (pp. 65-70)

Exploring the Use of Mixed Abstractions in SQL:1999 - A Framework-based Approach (2010-04)
Ireland, Christopher; Bowers, David; Newton, Mike and Waugh, Kevin
In : The Second International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (11-16 Apr 2010, Menuires, France)

A classification of object-relational impedance mismatch (2009-03)
Ireland, Christopher; Bowers, David; Newton, Mike and Waugh, Kevin
In : First International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (DBKDA) (1-6 Mar 2009, Cancun, Mexico)

Nurturing the acorn: helping a small software company onto the CMM ladder (2001)
Bowers, D.S.
In : Proceedings UKAIS (UK Academy for Information Systems) 2001 (18-20 Apr 2001, Portsmouth, UK)

The IoC Accreditation Standard – Statements of Alignment (2021-02-26)
Bowers, David
The Open University & The Institute of Coding

The Institute of Coding Accreditation Standard (2021)
Bowers, David and Sharp, Christopher
The Institute of Coding, UK.

Analysis of accreditation approaches in the Computing sector (2019-07-15)
Bowers, David S. and Howson, Oliver
The Open University, Milton Keynes.

Audio Navigation: Using Spatial Audio In Ubiquitous Interfaces (2004-05-10)
Day, Robert; Holland, Simon; Bowers, David and Dil, Anton
Department of Computing, The Open University

Using Spatial Audio in Minimal Attention Interfaces: Towards An Effective Audio GPS Navigation System (2004-03-11)
Day, Robert; Holland, Simon; Bowers, David and Dil, Anton
Department of Computing, The Open University