In order to understand the realistic use and impact of ICT on physics teaching in Ireland, a survey was used to gather information on teacher attitudes, confidence and concerns. Practical problems in the regular use of ICT affect some more than others. Factors such as availability of equipment and time to learn new skills (and interest in those…

We have developed a set of tools for improving online collaborative learning including an automated expert that monitors and moderates discussions, and additional tools to evaluate contributions, semantically search all posted comments, access a library of hundreds of digital books and provide reports to instructors. The technology behind these…

The release of free resources by the education sector has led to reconsideration of how the open approach implied by Open Educational Resources (OER) impacts on the educator and the learner. However this work has tended to consider the replication of standard campus based approaches and the characteristics of content that will encourage other…

Spatial literacy is a new frontier in K-12 education. This article describes a place-based introductory GIS/GPS middle school curriculum unit in which students used measuring tools, GPS units, and My World GIS software to collect physical and spatial data of trees to create a schoolyard tree inventory. Maine students completed "memory…

Social networking and communications tools have become widely used in entertainment and social applications and there is growing interest in their use in formal education applications. Distance education and especially those types that are based on self-paced programming models may be the biggest beneficiaries of the use of these new tools to…

Analyzing the contradictory relation between a media-theoretical and a media-pedagogical point of view, some basic problems regarding a new learning culture using Web 2.0 online tools are discussed. Against this background, data and findings from an empirical investigation (evaluation of an in-service teacher training e-learning project…

This study explores young children's ability to construct and explain adaptive behaviors of a behaving artifact, an autonomous mobile robot with sensors. A central component of the behavior construction environment is the RoboGan software that supports children's construction of spatiotemporal events with an a-temporal rule structure. Six…

This paper reports on one aspect of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded project "Scoping a vision of formative e-assessment", namely on cases of formative e-assessment developed iteratively with the UK education practitioner community. The project, which took place from June 2008 to January 2009, aimed to identify…

The availability of microcomputers and specialty software has dramatically changed the classroom instruction in many areas of business education. In this study, the authors investigated the effectiveness of the technology-enhanced instruction in their classrooms, where they had successfully integrated the use of technology in their courses. The…

The Internet and the World Wide Web have influenced the new approaches taken in teaching and learning at institutions of higher learning. The nature of the courses offered, the geographical spread of the teaching sites as well as the diverse and distributed student population are the catalysts for the changes. These non-traditional, or distant…

Agile methodologies have become increasingly popular among software developers as evidenced by industrial participation at related conferences. The popularity of agile practices over traditional techniques partly stems from the fact that these practices provide for more customer involvement and better accommodate rapidly changing requirements,…

This study examines undergraduate business students' attitude towards and use of Powerpoint[R] slides provided as a supplement to class attendance, textbook reading, and other traditional course resources. A survey of students with six majors (accounting, finance, marketing, management, international business and management information systems)…

The development of both the materials for an intermediate-level hybrid German writing course and the software in a virtual learning environment for the course may be viewed as activity systems. Viewing the individual components of each system as interrelated enables us to conceptualize the complexities of the development process, which goes well…

Protein structures are hard to represent on paper. They are large, complex, and three-dimensional (3D)--four-dimensional if conformational changes count! Unlike most of their substrates, which can easily be drawn out in full chemical formula, drawing every atom in a protein would usually be a mess. Simplifications like showing only the surface of…

As online environments and tools have evolved over the last 15-20 years, their use for role-based learning has expanded. This analysis draws on work for an Australian project that has been sharing and developing knowledge about the use of online role-plays in higher education. We describe the learning needs that online role-play can meet, and give…