"Second Life" (SL) is a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world, and educational institutions are adopting SL to support their teaching and learning. Although the question of how 3D learning spaces should be designed to support student learning and engagement has been raised among SL educators and designers, there is hardly any guidance or…

This article details the process of upgrading and expanding an existing academic medical library intranet to include a wiki, blog, discussion forum, and photo collection manager. The first version of the library's intranet from early 2002 was powered by ColdFusion software and existed primarily to allow staff members to author and store minutes of…

With the growth of Web 2.0 library intranets in recent years, many libraries are leaving behind legacy, first-generation intranets. As Web 2.0 intranets multiply and mature, how will traditional intranet best practices--especially in the areas of planning, implementation, and evaluation--translate into an existing Web 2.0 intranet infrastructure?…

A thorough review of the research relating to Human-Computer Interface (HCI) form and content factors in the education, communication and computer science disciplines reveals strong associations of meaningful perceptual "illusions" with enhanced learning and satisfaction in the evolving classroom. Specifically, associations emerge…

Communication underwater is challenging because of the inherent characteristics of the media. First, common radio frequency (RF) signals utilized in wireless communications cannot be used under water. RF signals are attenuated in such as way that RF communication underwater is restricted to very few meters. As a result, acoustic-based…

Boundary units of an organization uniquely experience the tension between adaptation to environmental variation and maintaining stable outcomes for the rest of the organization. In our world of just-in-time supply chain systems, lot-sizes of one, lean manufacturing and an increasing focus on services, traditional forms of buffering such as queuing…

This report discusses findings and implications of a study commissioned by the College Board to inform the development of the Voluntary Framework of Accountability for Community Colleges. CCRC researchers identified the performance indicators that states are already using for their community colleges and interviewed state higher education…

Existing research on context and context awareness has broadly focused on the technical aspects of context acquisition and interpretation of users' surroundings, also called physical or sensor-based context. Such an approach has lacked from reconciling the perception of real-world context exhibited by humans, also known as user context, and…

The purpose of the course presented here is to introduce freshmen to embedded systems using LEGO Mindstorms, under an ANSI-C programming environment. The students build their own LEGO robots, make programs for them using ANSI-C, and operate them. By creating these LEGO robots, the students become more motivated, learning the basic concepts of…

This article introduces Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), a specification for data sharing among educational software applications that has grown to 10 disparate software applications. This new version (code name Columbus) is likely to give districts more vendors to choose from--maybe a lot more--because it will be arriving with a profound…

Computer games are now becoming ways to communicate, teach, and influence attitudes and behavior. In this article, we address the role of humor in computer games, especially in support of serious purposes. We begin with a review of the main theories of humor, including superiority, incongruity, and relief. These theories and their…

At Santa Clara University (SCU), Vice Provost for Information Services and CIO Ron Danielson led the design and construction of the campus's 194,251-square-foot Harrington Learning Commons, Sobrato Technology Center, and Orradre Library, a single building opened in March 2008. Danielson and his team were responsible for describing design goals,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to make a scientific contribution to web information retrieval (IR). Design/methodology/approach: A multiagent system for web IR is proposed based on new technologies: Hierarchical Small-Worlds (HSW) and Possibilistic Networks (PN). This system is based on a possibilistic qualitative approach which extends the…

This article takes a renewed look at the concept of "affordance." It points out that the concept is being used within the CSCL community in ways which signify an underlying disagreement concerning the exact ontological nature and epistemological status of an "affordance." Such disagreement, it is argued, is a problem for both design and empirical…

The interoperability of educational systems, encouraged by the development of specifications, standards and tools related to the Semantic Web is limited to the exchange of information in domain and student models. High system interoperability requires that a common framework be defined that represents the functional essence of educational systems.…