The Web has caught the attention of many educators as an efficient communication medium and content delivery system. But we feel there is another aspect of the Web that has not been given the attention it deserves. We call this aspect of the Web its "component architecture." Briefly it means that on the Web one can develop very complex…

This article discusses the pros and cons of open source software, such as Linux. It asserts that despite the technical difficulties of installing and maintaining this type of software, ultimately it is helpful in terms of knowledge acquisition and as a beneficial investment librarians can make in themselves, their libraries, and their patrons.…

In this paper, we present two studies designed to help students navigate effectively and learn from a hypertext system, CoMPASS. Our first study ("N" = 74) involved an analysis of students' navigation patterns to group them into clusters, using a "k"-means clustering technique. Based on this analysis, navigation patterns were grouped into four…

As more educators serve as "Web masters" of Web sites for courses, they soon discover that as a site grows it becomes increasingly inconsistent and more difficult to manage. The situation results, to some extent, from the fact that there is a lot learned along the way and the site represents a growing level of expertise. However, it also arises…

An unprecedented amount of information encompassing almost every facet of human activities across the world is generated daily in the form of zeros and ones, and that is often the only form in which such information is recorded. A good fraction of this information needs to be preserved for periods of time ranging from a few years to centuries.…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

Due to the opportunities provided by the Internet, people are taking advantage of e-learning courses and during the last few years enormous research efforts have been dedicated to the development of e-learning systems. So far, many e-learning systems are proposed and used practically. However, in these systems the e-learning completion rate is…

The national science standards, along with prominent researchers, call for increased focus on scientific argumentation in the classroom. Over the past decade, researchers have developed sophisticated online science learning environments to support these opportunities for scientific argumentation. Assessing the quality of dialogic argumentation,…

Research on cognitive modeling of information search and Web navigation emphasizes the importance of "information scent" (the relevance of semantic cues such as link labels and headings to a reader's goal; Pirolli & Card, 1999). This article shows that not only semantic but also structural knowledge is involved in navigating the Web…

Interactive computer simulations with complex representations and sophisticated graphics are a relatively new addition to the classroom, and research in this area is limited. We have conducted over 200 individual student interviews during which the students described what they were thinking as they interacted with simulations. These interviews…

An important issue of the demographic change in the German population is the maintenance and promotion of the employability of aging workforces. However, there are hardly any suitable concepts or usable tools available to realize this goal. Possible approaches should push the individual strengths of the aging workers to the foreground and…

It is proposed that action research is an appropriate methodology for studying wikis, and is akin to research "the wiki way". This proposal is contextualised within the case of Wikiversity, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. A framework for a participative research project is outlined, and challenges and implications of such a…

Over the last decade, the needs of educational organizations have been changing in accordance with increasingly complex pedagogical models and with the technological evolution of e-learning environments with very dynamic teaching and learning requirements. This book explores state-of-the-art software architectures and platforms used to support…

The level of learners' expertise has been used as a metric and diagnostic mechanism of instruction. This metric influences mental effort directly according to the applications of cognitive load theory. Cognitive efficiency, an optimal measurement technique of expertise, was developed by Kalyuga and Sweller to replace instructional efficiency in…

Toward the goal of better e-book design to support early literacy learning, this study investigates analytic tools for examining design qualities of e-books for young children. Three research-based analytic tools related to e-book design were applied to a mixed genre collection of 50 e-books from popular online sites. Tool performance varied…