This study examines results from a survey of architecture faculty across the United States investigating information-seeking behavior and perceptions of library services. Faculty were asked to rank information sources they used for research, teaching, and creativity within their discipline. Sources were ranked similarly across these activities,…

Online laboratories have traditionally been split between virtual labs, with simulated components; and remote labs, with real components. The former tend to provide less realism but to be easily scalable and less expensive to maintain, while the latter are fully real but tend to require a higher maintenance effort and be more error-prone. This…

Information and communication technology are well known rapid growing industry in this decade. That is nearly the same as fast as growth in costs in education. Therefore, many people have been forced to find alternative ways to meet their education needs. Innovations of distance education create a new way to provide learning content, unlimited…

Virtualization enables the ability to consolidate multiple servers on a single physical machine, increasing the infrastructure utilization. Maximizing the ratio of server virtual machines (VMs) to physical machines, namely the consolidation ratio, becomes an important goal toward infrastructure cost saving in a cloud. However, the consolidation…

This column provides background science information for elementary teachers. When the author was young he used to think that the ideal design for a concert hall would contain walls that were composed of sound-absorbing material, like foam or egg cartons or such. He noticed, though, that this was not the case. Most concert halls contain curtains…

Much like its meteorological counterpart, "Cloud Computing" is an amorphous agglomeration of entities. It is amorphous in that the exact layout of the servers, the load balancers and their functions are neither known nor fixed. Its an agglomerate in that multiple service providers and vendors often coordinate to form a multitenant system…

Depending on the evolving technological possibilities, distance and online education applications have gradually gained more significance in the education system. Regarding the issues, such as advancements in the server services, disc capacity, cloud computing opportunities resulting from the increase in the number of the broadband internet users,…

This case study research followed the two-year transition of a medium-sized manufacturing firm towards a service-oriented enterprise. A service-oriented enterprise is an emerging architecture of the firm that leverages the paradigm of services computing to integrate the capabilities of the firm with the complementary competencies of business…

Through relational dialogue, learners shape their identities by sharing information about the world and how they see themselves in it. As learners interact, they receive feedback from both the environment and other learners which, in turn, helps them assess and adjust their self-presentations. Although learners retain choice and personal agency,…

Kunskapsskolan is a chain of independent secondary schools which functions as a comprehensive platform for personalised education, known as the Kunskapsskolan programme (KED). What is special about this programme is that students set their own objectives, work independently and are assessed against their personal academic goals. Kunskapsskolan is…

Learning Management Systems (LMS) collect large amounts of data. Data mining techniques can be applied to analyse their web data log files. The instructors may use this data for assessing and measuring their courses. In this respect, we have proposed a methodology for analysing LMS courses and students' activity. This methodology uses a Markov…

This paper presents a new methodology to develop remote laboratories for systems engineering and automation control courses, based on the combined use of TwinCAT, a laboratory Java server application, and Easy Java Simulations (EJS). The TwinCAT system is used to close the control loop for the selected plants by means of programmable logic…

With increasing demand of mobile devices and cloud computing, it becomes increasingly important to develop efficient mobile application and its secured backend, such as web applications and virtualization environment. This dissertation reports a systematic study of mobile application development and the security issues of its related backend. …

Organizations continue to rely on password-based authentication methods to control access to many Web-based systems. This research study developed a benchmarking instrument intended to assess authentication methods used in Web-based information systems (IS). It developed an Authentication Method System Index (AMSI) to analyze collected data from…

Many geoscientists use modern computational resources, such as software applications, Web services, scientific workflows and datasets that are readily available on the Internet, to support their research and many common tasks. These resources are often shared via human contact and sometimes stored in data portals; however, they are not necessarily…