The digital age has freed information from the restrictive hierarchies of traditional cataloging methods, notably Dewey. Although libraries still deal with the challenge of physical books, online content is a different matter. Thanks to the unregulated, grassroots cataloging effort known as tagging, the Web presents a glorious chaos of…

This paper describes the Generic Automated Marking Environment (GAME) and provides a detailed analysis of its performance in assessing student programming projects and exercises. GAME has been designed to automatically assess programming assignments written in a variety of languages based on the "structure" of the source code and the correctness…

Several years ago, the author began exploring the use of digital film and video as an art-making media when he took over instructing the video computer art class at the high school where he teaches. He found numerous ways to integrate a variety of multimedia technologies and software with more traditional types of visual art processes and…

Recently, R. D. Stoel, F. G. Garre, C. Dolan, and G. van den Wittenboer (2006) reviewed approaches for obtaining reference mixture distributions for difference tests when a parameter is on the boundary. The authors of the present study argue that this methodology is incomplete without a discussion of when the mixtures are needed and show that they…

The explosive growth of the Internet has made the knowledge and skills for creating Web pages into general subjects that all students should learn. It is now common to teach the technical side of the production of Web pages and many teaching materials have been developed. However teaching the aesthetic side of Web page design has been neglected,…

North Carolina State University may never build another computer lab. Instead the university has installed racks of equipment in windowless rooms where students and professors never go. This article describes a project called the Virtual Computing Lab. Users enter it remotely from their own computers in dormitory rooms or libraries. They get all…

Within the scope of this study, the effectiveness of two kinds of instructional support was evaluated with regard to the learner's interests. Two versions of a simulation program about the respiratory chain were developed, differing only in the kind of tasks provided for instructional support: One version contained problem-solving tasks, the other…

We adopt the Web 2.0 paradigm as a mechanism for preparing, editing, delivering and maintaining educational content, and for fostering ongoing innovation in the online education field. We report here on the migration of legacy course materials from "PowerPoint" slides on CD to a fully online delivery mode for use in the "Swinburne Astronomy…

This article discusses the use of the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) as a tool for the development of ICALL and NLP applications. It outlines a paradigm shift in software development, which is mainly influenced by projects such as the Free Software Foundation. It looks at standards that have been proposed to facilitate the…

A variety of free and commercial software applications designed to detect plagiarism from Internet sources has appeared in recent years. However, their effectiveness and impact on student behaviour has been assumed rather than confirmed. The study presented here explores the responses and perceptions of a group of first year students at an Irish…

Reflective practice, or reflection, is considered such a vital component of the learning process that strategies and supporting tools warrant continued research in the learning sciences. Reflection has been defined as "deliberating on experience" (Pennington, 1995, p. 47), "an activity or process in which experience is recalled,…

This article re-examines the much maligned piechart and provides justification for its use. It identifies common pitfalls when drawing piecharts in Microsoft Excel and offers advice on how to avoid them. (Contains 6 figures and 5 tables.)

Things are failing everywhere. A few years ago, several large companies disappeared almost overnight in a series of scandals. This year, the mortgage industry imploded. More recently, stalwart financial and insurance corporations have been dropping like flies. Failures happen on a smaller scale too. Recently, the all-caps word "FAIL" became a…

This paper describes some computer-based activities to bring the study of charged particle optics to undergraduate students, to be performed as a part of a one-semester accelerator-based experimental course. The computational simulations were carried out using the commercially available SIMION program. The performance parameters, such as the focal…

In this article, the author explores how to use "PowerPoint" to support the mathematics itself, not just to "present" but actually to "enhance" learning. For the purposes of this article, she has explored three tools: colour, animation and hyperlinks. (Contains 1 note.)