As recently as ten years ago, it may have seemed like science fiction to imagine collaborative spaces on the Internet. Today, collaborative websites have proliferated: (1) blogs; (2) social networking; (3) image sharing; (4) video sharing; (5) open educational resources; and (6) popularity websites. Another type is called a wiki, an online…

Students now have at their disposal a range of Web 2.0 authoring forms such as audio and video podcasting, blogging, social bookmarking, social networking, virtual world activities and wiki writing. Many university educators are interested in enabling students to demonstrate their learning by creating content in these forms. However, the design…

Many current (online) help systems fail because users refuse to use them or, even if they do so, they do not perceive them as helpful. There is an obvious gap between the intentions of the help content authors and the achievement of objectives concerning the perceived usefulness by help users. Problems may be divided into psychological and…

This paper examines the effective deployment of conversational agents in virtual worlds from the perspective of researchers/practitioners in cognitive psychology, computing science, learning technologies and engineering. From a cognitive perspective, the major challenge lies in the coordination and management of the various channels of information…

In this column, the author compares and contrasts the most popular scripting languages that are used to create truly dynamic service-oriented Web sites, building a conceptual framework that be can used as a starting point for specific server-side library projects.

This article describes how driven Web sites help schools and districts maximize their IT resources by making online content more "self-service" for users. It shows how to set up the capacity to create data-driven sites. By definition, a data-driven Web site is one in which the content comes from some back-end data source, such as a…

This paper describes an action research, school situated project conducted with partnership funding from Learning and Teaching Scotland, Scottish Qualifications Authority and Becta, the UK government's agency for communications technology in education. Based on "e-scape" (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments),…

With the rapid advance of stand-alone e-learning systems, we believe a sharable and interoperable portal platform capable of integrating various existing learning systems is critical for the future development of e-learning systems. We highlight two problems as the root causes for current ineffective sharing of learning resources: learning object…

This paper describes an experimental study which has been carried out at the Near East University using the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) together with two types of Web-Based Collaborative Tools (CTs): Standard CT and Advanced CT to create a virtual learning environment to teach programming languages. The aim of this study was to find…

The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) used to create Web pages is an attractive alternative to the proprietary authoring software currently used to produce multimedia content for CD-ROMs. Discusses advantages and limitations of HTML as a nonproprietary and cross-platform CD-ROM authoring system, and the more general advantages of HTML as a data…

With the development of XML Web Services, the Internet could become an integral part of and the basis for teaching computer science and software engineering. The approach has been applied to a university course for students studying introduction to computer science from the point of view of software development in a stateless, Internet…

Purpose: To identify cases related to design of ICT platforms for industrial alliances, where the use of Ontology-driven architectures based on Semantic web standards is more advantageous than application of conventional modeling together with XML standards. Design/methodology/approach: A comparative analysis of the two latest and the most obvious…

Recent advances in genomics and structural biology have resulted in an unprecedented increase in biological data available from Internet-accessible databases. In order to help students effectively use this vast repository of information, undergraduate biology students at Drake University were introduced to bioinformatics software and databases in…

Using modeling languages is essential to the construction of educational systems based on software engineering principles and methods. Furthermore, the instructional design is undoubtedly the cornerstone of the design and development of educational systems. Although several methodologies and languages have been proposed for the specification of…

This study is a third in a series of studies that examined students' information seeking and problem solving behaviors while interacting with one of two types of web-based representations of an ill-structured instructional design case: hierarchical (tree-like) and heterarchical (network-like). A Java program was used to track students' hypermedia…