PictoPal is the name of a technology-supported intervention designed to foster the development of emergent reading and writing skills in four and five year old children. Following the theoretical underpinnings and a brief description of PictoPal, this article describes how children worked with the technology; how the intervention elicited their…

The constructivist learning environment was designed on three perspectives: pedagogical, social and technological. A group of 24 trainee teachers used the environment and participated in the formative evaluation. Results showed that the trainee teachers liked the design specifications and perceived the learning environment to be useful. The…

This paper reports our implementation and evaluation of a wireless handheld learning environment used to support a clinical nursing practicum course. The learning environment was designed so that nursing students could use handhelds for recording information, organizing ideas, assessing patients, and also for interaction and collaboration with…

Reviews three geography and history CD-ROMs: "GeoSafari Platinum Edition," a multimedia game on history, geography, and science; "Destination: Time Trip USA," which allows students to create an interactive electronic book while exploring a fictional town; and "SkyTrip America," with which students fly across America, reviewing maps, time lines,…

This theme issue presents nine articles that describe the availability of various types of computer software for use by patrons in academic, public, school, and special libraries. Topics discussed include selection and evaluation, cataloging and classification, physical access including circulation, copyright and other legal considerations,…

The emergence of "the electronic age,/electronic cottages/the electronic world" has affected the whole world; particularly the emergence of computers has penetrated everyone's life to a remarkable degree. They are being used in various fields including education. Recent advances, especially in the area of computer technology have…

This software is prepared within a project by pre-service teachers for K-8 students in Turkey in order to teach the subject "How do we perceive our environment" found in the scope of science in a more visual and concrete manner. The software is designed in a way that it will cover all the behavioral objectives of the subject in question…

Increasingly, mobile technologies are used to gather diary data in basic research and clinical studies. This article considers issues relevant to the integration of electronic diary (ED) methods in clinical assessment. EDs can be used to gather rich information regarding clients' day-to-day experiences, aiding diagnosis, treatment planning,…

This study investigated the effects of several elements of instruction (objectives, information, practice, examples and review) when they were combined in a systematic manner. College students enrolled in a computer literacy course used one of six different versions of a computer-based lesson delivered on the web to learn about input, processing,…

Discrete-trial training (DTT) relies critically on implementation by trained tutors. We report three experiments carried out in the development of "DTkid"--interactive computer simulation software that presents "SIMon", a realistic virtual child with whom novice tutors can learn and practise DTT techniques. Experiments 1 and 2 exposed groups of…

Purpose: The paper's purpose is to promote the use of modern technologies such as multimedia packages to engineering students. The aim is to help them to learning in their learning, visualization, problem solving and understanding engineering concepts such as in mechanics dynamics. Design/methodology/approach: TAPS packages are developed to help…

This article chronicles the experience of two writers working in digital technologies to write fiction. One writer, the author of the article, describes how her experience writing with the software "Storyspace" influenced her writing of print fiction, changing her processes and challenging her notions of genre. The other writer, a 16-year-old…

The data for 104 software projects is used to develop a linear regression model that uses function points (a measure of software project size) to predict development effort. The data set is particularly interesting in that it violates several of the assumptions required of a linear model; but when the data are transformed, the data set satisfies…

Today, as difficult as it is for large institutions to keep software and hardware up-to-date, the challenge and expense of keeping up is only amplified for smaller colleges and universities. In the area of data-driven decision-making (DDD), the challenge can be even greater. Because smaller schools are pressed for time and resources on nearly all…

Unlike conventional models of software development, the open source model is based on the collaborative efforts of users who are also co-developers of the software. Interest in open source software has grown exponentially in recent years. A "Google" search for the phrase open source in early 2005 returned 28.8 million webpage hits, while…