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Whether bringing a historical event to life or better understanding the mark made by an individual on society, narrative nonfiction and other factually accurate books can lay the foundation for [...]

With the main goal of understanding how and why university physics majors use educational internet resources, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of undergraduate and graduate physics students attending 20 universities across Canada. The survey probes how intensively students at different academic levels rely on various forms of internet resources, such as online texts, videos, and online courses to supplement their physics education. The results imply that the internet can effectively facilitate autonomous, self-driven learning, but submersion into completely online courses is not popular. This report presents the survey results, interpretations, and ideas for how university instructors can take advantage of the growing volume and quality of online physics resources. Key words: physics education research, online resources, university students, autonomous learning, cross-sectional survey. Dans le but de mieux comprendre comment et pourquoi les etudiants universitaires en physique utilisent les ressources educationnelles sur internet, nous avons complete une enquete transversale aupres des etudiants de tous les cycles academiques dans vingt universites a travers le Canada. Cette enquete sonde l'intensite avec laquelle les etudiants des differents cycles academiques comptent sur les sources variees de ressources internet, comme les textes en ligne, les videos et les cours en ligne afin d'ameliorer leur formation en physique. Les resultats montrent qu'internet peut effectivement faciliter l'apprentissage autonome et motive, mais tres peu d'etudiants ne comptent que sur ces sources. Ce rapport presente les resultats et leur interpretation, ainsi que des idees sur les facons dont les enseignants universitaires peuvent profiter de la quantite et de la qualite grandissantes des ressources en ligne sur la physique. [Traduit par la Redaction] Mots-cles: recherche en education de la physique, ressources en ligne, etudiants universitaires, apprentissage autonome, enquete transverse., 1. Introduction The internet and other computer-based technologies offer enormous opportunities to restructure higher education. For the current university students, electronic resources are essential for learning. The internet provides a [...]

A small group of children tag animals in nature photos. A couple of tweens transcribe an artist's 19th-century diary. Teens match historical photos to present-day locations. Student teams classify star [...]

If you ask any child or screenager what their dream job is, the most frequent answer is they want to become a video game designer. As makerspaces have become commonplace [...]

Background: Because of the increasing demand from students to have available to them distance education courses, it is vital to offer students health and physical education distance education courses that meet the their need for a challenging and rewarding educational experience. In this pilot study, we explored the learning experiences of students enrolled in distance coursework in health and physical education methods. We interviewed 14 students participating in the Distance Education Focus Group, who answered 10 semistructured questions pertaining to their satisfaction and achievements in distance education courses. Using qualitative analysis, we identified factors contributing to these students ' satisfaction and academic achievement in distance education. Results: This study provides students and instructors with a better understanding of what is effective distance education instruction from the students 'perspective. Conclusion: This study may result in improved retention of students, increased academic performance, and satisfaction with coursework, from understanding students' perceptions of the methods used for distance education. Knowing what students believe to be important for their learning experience helps health and physical education instructors better prepare for teaching through distance education., Advances in technology have many learning institutions offering online programs to help accommodate the needs of students (Lim, Kim, Chen, & Ryder, 2008). Approximately 63% of academic leaders report online [...]

Social media has become an important venue for building professional learning networks. More and more school librarians employ these flexible, free tools to make connections with colleagues and build a community of practice in the virtual learning environment. In this netnographic case study, the motivations and benefits to co-founders, core group members, and participants in creating and/or participating in a grassroots regionally based Twitter chat group are examined. Data include electronic interviews with key informants, an online survey open to all chat participants, an analysis of chat archives, and field notes. Study results illuminate the value participants place on this social-media delivered professional development experience., Introduction School librarianship is challenging work that requires continuous professional development (PD). Social media is an important and evolving venue for building professional learning networks (PLNs) for school librarians who [...]

This article describes collaboration between a research librarian and application developer at the University of Utah with a teen services librarian at Salt Lake County Libraries. Our group came together as part of the Innovative Librarians Explore, Apply, and Discover-Utah (ILEAD Utah) program. We discuss how we worked together to create and develop a project, the opportunities and difficulties we faced, and offer suggestions for how to build similar partnerships successfully. Keywords: public libraries; academic libraries; school libraries; accessibility; collaboration, Introduction Innovative Librarians Explore, Apply, and Discover (ILEAD) is a leadership institute that allows librarians and information professionals to work together on multi-institution projects that use participatory technology. The program [...]

Field trips are an important component of upper undergraduate and graduate-level science courses, especially in the fields of biology, geoscience, and environmental science. Field trips can provide a new perspective to a course's content and quality. Science field trips can facilitate active student learning, yet often can be constrained by time, safety, distance, expense, and great physical exertion. For these reasons, virtual field trips (VFT) have become increasingly popular for the past decade. This paper evaluates instructor perceptions on VFT as part of their teaching tools, and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of using VFT from the perspectives of college science instructors., Introduction Field trips and field observations are a fundamental part of some college-level biological, geoscience, and environmental science courses (Lei, 2010). Field trips help bridge formal and informal learning, and [...]

We are often asked 'What is the difference between a library and a learning commons?' and, 'So what? What difference does it make?' The first book introducing the concept was [...]

This past spring I had the opportunity to visit a small K-8 school located a mere thirty miles from the nearest population center. I was in need of directions and [...]

Increasingly, teacher leadership is being recognized as an essential ingredient in education reforms; however, few teachers consider themselves leaders. Becoming a leader is not just acquiring knowledge and skills for leadership, but developing a new professional identity. As teachers become leaders, however, this identity might put them at risk with dominant school culture where norms of egalitarianism, isolation, and seniority persist. Luehmann emphasizes the value in offering safe spaces in which teachers can take risks as they 'try on' new identities. We utilized an online environment to support ninth-grade science teachers in the development of common perspectives, commitments, and visions for teacher leadership as they implemented a new freshman physics curriculum. Our findings illustrate the potential benefits of blogging in terms of providing identity resources and opportunities for identity work. Specifically, by participating in pedagogical transactions, social interactions, and intellectual deliberations via blogs, teachers were supported in their efforts to be leaders in their classrooms, schools, and districts. Keywords professional development, weblogs, teacher leadership, secondary science education, Increasingly, teacher leadership is recognized as an essential ingredient in education reform (York-Barr & Duke, 2004). This is perhaps best illustrated in the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Math and [...]

INFOhio, working with partner agencies, places the school library at the center of the statewide initiative to eliminate an identified information-literacy skill gap. The gap is illustrated by a 2010 [...]

Online courses are proliferating rapidly for children and teens. What is driving this virus in education? Does online learning really have anything to do with learning? Students are dropping out [...]

This study investigated how an online community of teachers engaged in professional development using collaborative Web (Web 2.0) technologies. This community of practice (COP) consisted of world language (WL) teachers using the microblogging platform, Twitter. The study approached teacher learning from a sociocultural perspective. Its central questions were as follows: What are the characteristics of this CoP of WL educators on Twitter? How do those characteristics relate to or reflect teacher learning? With a qualitative, netnographic approach, data sources included over a year of participant observation, nine interviews with community members, and numerous online documents from blogs, wikis, and other sources. Findings demonstrated how the domain, community, and practice characteristics of this online CoP could also be linked to sustained and significant teacher learning. The study concludes with considerations for the future of similar online communities. Keywords qualitative research, teacher learning, technology, professional development, inservice education, Collaborative Web technologies, often referred to with the term Web 2.0, are interactive, read-and-write Internet technologies, encompassing social networking, blogging, microblogging, media sharing, and other forms of connecting via the [...]

Introduction With the proliferation of technological innovations, especially information and communication technologies, there is a rapidly increasing trend for universities to offer online courses (Tallent-Runnels, Thomas, Lan, Cooper, Ahern, Shaw, [...]

The study aims at introducing the features of the computerized educational games in sciences at the elementary school in Jordan according to the specialists in teaching science and computer subjects, through answering some questions such as: What are the features of the computerized educational games in sciences at the elementary schools in Jordan in the perspective of specialists in teaching science and computer? Can these features vary according to the major of the specialist, or his contact with this kind of games? The study sample consisted of 160 specialists in teaching science and computer, as for the data analysis, frequencies, percentage rates, and indications were used, in addition to the use of Two-Way Anova tests for variance analysis of factorial design (2X2), Welx Lambda values calculation for the One-Way Variances tests, if needed. This study reached to several results: the participants enjoy a high awareness level with the features of the computerized educational games, and believe that it is important to insert these features in games' design, but they showed no interest in the features of explorative learning and creative learning. It also unveiled the lack of differences of statistical signs in the individuals' estimations of the computerized educational games' features, owing to the specialization, or to the interaction between the academic specialization and the exposure to training in the computerized educational games designing field; while there are differences that can be attributed to the training exposure, and for the benefit of those who engaged in the training. According to the study's results, researchers recommend executing training programs for the teachers and the computerized educational experiences designers on the composition tools which fall under the building programs of computerized educational games., Introduction Formal science teaching in the class room does not exceed one fifth of the school day of the students in the best conditions, while the 'informal' science learning outdoors [...]

The purpose of this study was to determine students' perceptions of learning gains when using the one-minute paper. Thirty-one students from the Physical Therapy (PT) and Nurse Anesthesia (NA) programs [...]

A new generation of consumer and tech savy college students have forever altered the method and degree of interaction between faculty and student. The purpose of the article is to [...]

This article reports the findings of a study to examine the practicality and efficacy of using tablet computers in the Higher Education classroom. Students in a senior level teacher preparation [...]

Beyond high-tech gadgets and iPad apps lies the simple connection among content, context, computing, and learning. The teacher librarian plays a unique role in helping teachers and students apply technology [...]

The way the 1st graders hurtle toward their computer workstations, you'd think they were headed out to recess. It's an unseasonably warm winter morning in San Jose, California, and the [...]

What can happen when girls from completely different backgrounds are given a place to read and write together? Poughkeepsie Day School (PDS), May 19, 2007, 3:30 p.m.: I pace under [...]

ABSTRACT This review of eLearning is divided into three sections: the first charts the evolution of eLearning from early correspondence courses to the current computer mediated approaches to distributed learning. [...]

Effective online instructional practices may be applied to online and blended college courses. Carefully orchestrated online discussions support learning well beyond the limited face-to-face course time. Students gain greater depth [...]

Several analyses are conducted to explain the application of the Web 2.0 writing technologies in providing more advantageous practices, as well as conceptions of collaborative writing. New strategies for an effective way of teaching collaborative writing in classrooms are also explained.

Introduction Social media are becoming a critical part of communication in everyday lives and are a common form of communication for many students in and outside of school. Accordingly, English [...]

Multiagent systems are inherently associated with their distributivity, which enforces a great deal of communication mechanisms. To effectively arrive at meaningful solutions in a vast array of problem-solving tasks, it becomes imperative to establish a sound machinery of reconciling findings which might form partial solutions to an overall problem. In this paper, we focus on a broad category of problems of collaborative data analysis realized by a collection of agents having access to their individual data and exchanging findings through their collaboration activities. Such problems of data analysis arise in the context of building a global view at a certain phenomenon (process) by viewing it from different perspectives (and thus engaging various collections of attributes by various agents). Our goal is to develop some interaction between the agents so that they could form an overall perspective, where the knowledge available locally is shared and reconciled. The underlying format of knowledge built by the agents is that of information granules and fuzzy sets in particular. We develop a comprehensive optimization scheme and discuss its two-phase nature in which the communication phase of the granular findings intertwines with the local optimization being realized by the agents at the level of the individual datasite and exploits the evidence collected from other sites. We show how the mechanism of fuzzy granulation realized in the form of a well-known fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering can be augmented to support collaborative activities required by the agents. For this purpose, we introduce augmented versions of the original objective function used in the FCM and derive algorithmic details. We also discuss an issue of optimizing the strength of collaborative linkages, so that the reconciled findings attain the highest level of consistency (agreement). The presented experimental studies include some synthetic data and selected data sets coming from the Machine Learning repository. Index Terms--Collaborative agents, data analysis, fuzzy clustering, information granules.

ABSTRACT The analysis of the interactions that occur among participants in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) experiences has become a major research topic in this field. Interaction analysis (IA) methods and [...]

Widespread adoption of Web technologies, particularly in professional and educational areas, has motivated new research efforts with the objective of designing new interaction mechanisms based on Web technologies. Within this framework, collaborative Web browsing (cobrowsing) aims at extending currently available Web browsing capabilities in order to allow several users to "browse together" on the Web. Such a browsing paradigm can have many useful applications, for instance, in e-learning, for collaboratively searching and retrieving documents, and for online assistance (helpdesk). A cobrowsing system should provide all the facilities required for allowing users to establish and release, in a very simple and flexible way, browsing synchronization relations as well as interactions with continuous media presentations embedded within Web pages. This paper presents the design, modeling, and implementation of the cobrowsing system called CoLab. CoLab provides all the functionalities required for allowing users to collaboratively browse the Web, and a first experimental version of the tool has been implemented and is fully operational. Index Terms--Collaborative Web browsing, continuous media, synchronization.

Abstract The computer-supported Project Work classroom learning environment discussed in this paper represents a paradigm shift from teacher-centered to student-centered teaching and learning in Singapore schools. Besides the face-to-face weekly […]

The applicability of semantic network representation to discussions through a prototype named CollectiveThought is demonstrated and an empirical study comparing linear and semantic network discussion representation in terms of communication process and communication outcome variables is conducted to test some of its potential benefits. The results show that semantic network representation leads to a higher level of contextualization (communication process) and mutual understanding (communication outcome).