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Within large scale educational assessment agencies in the UK, there has been a shift towards assessors marking digitally scanned copies rather than the original paper scripts that were traditionally used. This project uses extended essay examination scripts to consider whether the mode in which an essay is read potentially influences the judgements made about it, employing qualitative and quantitative data-gathering approaches to focus on the annotation practices of readers who are assessing extended essays, and to explore whether this might be affected by mode. The project also gathers evidence about the spatial encoding ability of these readers to suggest that mode-related influences on annotation might influence the ability of readers to comprehend fully the material being read. Examiners had less spatial awareness about the location of script features on screen than on paper; however, annotating on screen might link to both the provision of appropriate annotations and the relative ease with which these are deployed whilst reading. There was also evidence that on-screen annotation could contribute to the development of good mental representations of texts on screen. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

This paper describes how the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) has implemented and applied DSpace as a digital repository for project and programme outputs, including published articles, conference papers, research reports, briefings and press releases. The DSpace repository has become a major element in the user engagement strategy of the programme. The OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative) interface provides a basis for the development of a number of user applications and services for projects and other interested groups, including search interfaces, dynamic web content, RSS feeds and other services. These have also formed the basis of collaboration and communication between the TLRP and other research programmes, indexes and resources. The TLRP aims to enable collaboration between researchers and to foster individual, institutional and sector-wide research capacity. The OAI interface has been used as the basis of data visualisation tools, allowing the identification of distinctive patterns of collaboration across the diverse projects of the programme. The paper will conclude with some reflections on the relevance of the output of these tools to teachers and their practice. (Contains 6 notes, 1 table, and 9 figures.)

UK universities are accepting increasing numbers of students whose L1 is not English on a wide range of programmes at all levels. These students require additional support and training in English, focussing on their academic disciplines. Corpora have been used in EAP since the 1980s, mainly for research, but a growing number of researchers and practitioners have been advocating the use of corpora in EAP pedagogy, and such use is gradually increasing. This paper outlines the processes and factors to be considered in the design and compilation of an EAP corpus (e.g., the selection and acquisition of texts, metadata, data annotation, software tools and outputs, web interface, and screen displays), especially one intended to be used for teaching. Such a corpus would also facilitate EAP research in terms of longitudinal studies, student progression and development, and course and materials design. The paper has been informed by the preparatory work on the EAP subcorpus of the ACORN corpus project at Aston University.

This paper examines the contention that learning environments which use IMS Learning Designs can be created by plugging in different components, using generic service descriptions to create the interface between the Learning Design (LD) and the specific tools. There is an alternative viewpoint which claims that generic service descriptions cannot provide the richness required to fully utilize Learning Design. The paper describes the work performed in the SLeD project by the UK Open University and the Open University of the Netherlands. The SLeD project suggests a compromise between the two viewpoints by using generic service descriptions, but recognizing the nature of the current environment through the use of translators, which interact with specific instantiations of services. (Contains 1 figure.)

This paper describes the development of nQuire, a software application to guide personal inquiry learning. nQuire provides teacher support for authoring, orchestrating, and monitoring inquiries as well as student support for carrying out, configuring, and reviewing inquiries. nQuire allows inquiries to be scripted and configured in various ways, so that personally relevant, rather than off-the-shelf inquiries, can be created and used by teachers and students. nQuire incorporates an approach to specifying learning flow that provides flexible access to current inquiry activities without precluding access to other activities for review and orientation. Dependencies between activities are automatically handled, ensuring decisions made by the student or teacher are propagated through the inquiry. nQuire can be used to support inquiry activities across individual, group, and class levels at different parts of the inquiry and offers a flexible, web-based approach that can incorporate different devices (smart phone, netbook, PC) and does not rely on constant connectivity. (Contains 12 figures and 1 table.)

Most UK universities can trace their current management information systems back to significant investments made in the 1990s, largely fuelled by concerns about the millenium bug and a change from character interfaces to graphical user interfaces following the introduction of the personal computer. It was during this period that institutions also moved away from predominantly in-house developed systems to supplier-led solutions. In essence, two models emerged: (1) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP); and (2) "Best of Breed". The former is a model where an organisation's systems are sourced from one supplier and all aspects are theoretically fully integrated "out of the box". On the other hand, "Best of Breed" approaches are those where institutions select separate systems for each area of functionality according to individual specifications. Whether an ERP or Best of Breed, a university's administrative IT structure typically comprises three core systems: (1) student records; (2) finance; and (3) human resources, as well as a range of other specialist systems supporting the estate, facilities, residences, alumni, planning etc. Each individual system provides a multitude of functions. In this article, the author argues that disaggregation of systems into their component elements is essential to understanding opportunities and enabling efficiencies with new modes of service delivery such as shared services. The author presents examples that demonstrate how technological solutions may be adopted to enable new approaches to managing higher education institutions. A possible four-stage model of how to transition towards different service provision is also offered. The author closes the paper with some final reflections. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)

Learner centred design methods highlight the importance of involving the stakeholders of the learning process (learners, teachers, educational researchers) at all stages of the design of educational applications and of refining the design through an iterative prototyping process. These methods have been used successfully when designing systems employing innovative concepts or technologies. In this paper we describe the design process of Move Grapher, a GPS-enabled, mobile learning application to support the teaching and learning of kinematic graphs in schools and colleges to children aged 15-17. Move Grapher implements a hybrid mode of interaction; besides implementing a graphical user interface, it enables learners to employ an embodied type of interaction as a way of supporting them in generating learning insights. Involving stakeholders and iterative prototyping were important methods in the design process, however, the innovative nature of the technologies employed and the embodied element of the interface had a decisive influence in determining the roles the stakeholders played as well as the nature of the deployed prototypes. (Contains 6 figures.)

Speech technology--especially automatic speech recognition--has now advanced to a level where it can be of great benefit both to able-bodied people and those with various disabilities. In this paper we describe an application "TalkMaths" which, using the output from a commonly-used conventional automatic speech recognition system, enables the user to dictate mathematical expressions in a relatively straightforward way. These then get converted into electronic formats, so that they can be embedded in a document and/or displayed in an editor or web browser. This process can be used for preparing teaching material, assignments, or entering mathematical content for online tests. Our system does not require the user to have extensive knowledge of the syntax of any markup language or mathematical document specification language, so that learning to use it should be relatively straightforward for non-specialists. The way in which our system analyses, converts and encodes the spoken mathematical expressions is a novel approach. (Contains 4 figures.)

This paper describes a multi-user role-playing environment, referred to as "e-drama", which enables groups of people to converse online, in scenario driven virtual environments. The starting point of this research, is an existing application known as "edrama", a 2D graphical environment in which users are represented by static cartoon figures. Tools have been developed to enable integration of the existing "edrama" application with several new components to support avatars with emotionally expressive behaviours, rendered in a 3D environment. The functionality includes the extraction of affect from open-ended improvisational text. The results of the affective analysis are then used to: (a) control an automated improvisational AI actor--EMMA (emotion, metaphor and affect) that operates a bit-part character in the improvisation; (b) drive the animations of avatars using the Demeanour framework in the user interface so that they react bodily in ways that are consistent with the affect that they are expressing. Finally, we describe user trials that demonstrate that the changes made improve the quality of social interaction and users' sense of presence. Moreover, our system has the potential to evolve normal classroom education for young people with or without learning disabilities by providing 24/7 efficient personalised social skill, language and career training via role-play and offering automatic monitoring. (Contains 12 figures, 5 tables, and 1 footnote.)

Interactive television (iTV) is a new media technology that has great potential for supporting second language learning, particularly for independent adult learners. It has many characteristics demanded by modern second language (L2) learning theories and is technologically quite sophisticated. However, in order for it to succeed it needs to fit in with these learners' approaches to media use in language learning. While there is an extensive literature on many other aspects of language learning and teaching, particularly in classroom settings, we know surprisingly little about the independent adult language learner's attitudes and approaches to learning and to technologies for supporting it. In this paper, we describe a project to develop language learning via interactive television (iTV) where a focus group study has been used to elicit the attitudes of potential users in order to direct the design process using a use-case scenario. We present the design implications that emerged from the focus group, broadly suggesting the use of mobile phone in conjunction with iTV to facilitate informal language learning from up-to-date authentic materials broadcast on television. (Contains 3 figures.)

There is a growing commitment within science centres and museums to develop exhibitions that engender new forms of participation that contribute to the public's understanding of science. Information and communication systems play an important role in this regard, enabling new forms of 'interaction' with and around exhibits. In this paper we consider how visitors respond to these exhibits and explore the forms of interaction that arise within these new exhibition areas. The analysis addresses the ways in which these so-called 'interactives' create highly constrained sequences of action that prioritize the individual user while undermining the opportunities for co-participation and collaboration. It examines the ecologies of participation that arise with, around and within different types of exhibit and exhibition. The paper suggests that many 'interactive' exhibits rely upon a model of 'interaction' and the 'user' that pervades computer-based systems, a model that has been subject to sustained criticism over some years. In other words, the paper points to the ways in which 'interactivity' is conflated with social interaction and how the seemingly innovative and entertaining exhibits may fail to engender the coparticipation and collaboration that is seen as critical to learning and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In safety critical systems, error detection and recovery can be equally important to error prevention. The design of adequate sensors and alarms, along with the provision of appropriate system feedback are imperative for detecting failures and their causes and controlling them before they compromise safety. In many cases, design must facilitate communication and cooperation between different groups or departments during error handling or fault resolution efforts. Formal inquiries into several National Health Service (NHS) adverse events concluded that poor error handling was a contributory cause to wider system failures. In particular, problems such as software bugs and computer interface deficiencies in immunology, pathology, radiology and other diagnostic services have gone undetected for periods of months and even years, contributing to hundreds and even thousands of misdiagnoses, and subsequently several adverse patient outcomes. This paper will present the findings of three analyses of similar UK incidents where laboratory or radiology errors went undetected for long periods of time, and once detected, communication breakdowns and organizational complications resulted in prolonging the incident time frames in systems that are highly time critical. The analysis has been conducted with an approach that focuses on the error handling activities that took place. The approach is an adaptation of STEP, which has been integrated with the ‘error recovery framework’ to describe the sequence of events from error detection to error correction (ER-STEP). The findings of the analysis conducted along with recommendations for improving laboratory error handling will also be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During 2001-2002 a union database of holdings of biomedical journals in a number of higher education and research institutes in London was created. The project was one of several funded through the British Library's Co-operation and Partnership Programme. This paper describes the practical steps involved in designing the database (using Microsoft Access software), collecting the data and developing an appropriate Web-based search interface. The technical and human problems involved in a collaborative project such as this are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the difficulties in dealing with the information quality (IQ) in Great Britain. It mentions that the failure in the identification of a multipurpose nature of information and missing the opportunity to address the development of a method for IQ are some of the reasons behind the difficulties. It suggests that interfaces that facilitate the interactive selection of purposes for the evaluation of IQ can be designed through a bi-categorical approach.