The development of educational computing in the last two decades has been largely uncritical and the field is dominated by technocentric approaches. With few notable exceptions, sociologists of education have not directly addressed educational computing. As a result, the social, political and cultural origins and implications of educational…

The rapid growth in the use of the Internet in recent years has in large part been due to the interest in and use of the World Wide Web. A reader can, in principle, locate and access information related to a specific query from servers located anywhere in the world. The ability to embed multimedia files into Web documents (in either HTML or HTF)…

Examines possible reasons for a gender bias toward males and against females studying computing at the secondary school level in Scotland. Recommendations for improvement are provided for the following areas: (1) access to the curriculum, (2) course design, (3) teachers' attitudes and teaching styles, (4) language, (5) assessment issues, and (6)…

Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) aims at describing educational resources in order to allow better reusability and retrieval. In this article we show how additional inference rules allows us to derive additional metadata from existing ones. Additionally, using these rules as integrity constraints helps us to define the constraints on LOM elements,…

The objective of this paper is to introduce a standards-based model for adaptive e-learning and to investigate the conditions and tools required by authors to implement this model. Adaptation in the context of e-learning is about creating a learner experience that purposely adjusts to various conditions over a period of time with the intention of…

The DIN Didactical Object Model extends the approaches of existing Educational Modeling Languages introducing specifications for contexts and experiences. In this paper, we show how the Didactical Object Model can be used for sharing didactical expertise. Educational Modeling Languages change the design paradigm from content orientation towards…

This work designs and implements a virtual digital signal processing laboratory, VDSPL. VDSPL consists of four parts: mobile agent execution environments, mobile agents, DSP development software, and DSP experimental platforms. The network capability of VDSPL is created by using mobile agent and wrapper techniques without modifying the source code…

Customer-Driven Development is a technique from the software development method called extreme Programming (XP) where customers (most importantly including end users of all levels) are closely involved in the software design and redesign process. This method of producing software suitable for customers has been adapted to help in the production of…

This paper introduces "Collage", a high-level IMS-LD compliant authoring tool that is specialized for CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning). Nowadays CSCL is a key trend in e-learning since it highlights the importance of social interactions as an essential element of learning. CSCL is an interdisciplinary domain, which…

The nature of the World Wide Web poses considerable challenges for the scholar or student who wishes to identify and locate Web resources of use to research. In contrast to the Web, the traditional library can be seen as a well-defined and organized physical space. An awareness of the successes, challenges and on-going projects involving library…

This paper presents a reference framework to describe educational material. It introduces the PALO Language as a cognitive based approach to Educational Modeling Languages (EML). In accordance with recent trends for reusability and interoperability in Learning Technologies, EML constitutes an evolution of the current content-centered…

Primary school learners' first encounters with mathematics in a traditional learning environment often create lifelong "math phobia."(Papert 1980) The situation in a country emerging from an oppressive education system designed to educationally disempower the majority of the population is much worse. The typical scenario in a previously…

The construction of a very fast network backbone between all Scottish universities, in conjunction with the formation of a common core curriculum for Scottish medical schools teaching child health, has provided the schools with an opportunity to provide collaborative, computer assisted learning (CAL) across the World Wide Web, delivered by a…

This set of papers offers insights into some of the major developments in the field of classification and knowledge organization, and highlights many of the fundamental changes in views and theories which have taken place during the last 40 years. This document begins with a series of reminiscences from former delegates of the first International…

This paper describes the results of our efforts with regard to the design and implementation of an educational digital video library using MPEG-4 and the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). The aim of our work is to integrate MPEG-4 encoding, full text indexing, high-resolution streaming, and SMIL, not only for delivering on-line…