Adult learners with low literacy skills compose a highly heterogeneous population in terms of demographic variables, educational backgrounds, knowledge and skills in reading, self-efficacy, motivation etc. They also face various difficulties in consistently attending offline literacy programs, such as unstable worktime, transportation…

A "user interface" is the part of an interactive system that bridges the user and the underlying functionality of the system. But people sometimes forget that the best interfaces will provide a platform to optimize the users' interactions so that they support and extend the users' activities in effective, useful, and usable ways. To look at it…

Given the pace of innovation, not only in the gadget market but in how social media is changing society, the future isn't what it used to be, which is to say, it is not that far off, out of reach, and "gee whiz" tomorrow. The planning horizon has moved closer than ever. And far-off eventualities are here and gone before you know it. In this…

The purpose of this article is to present the existing practice-based and empirically based literature on teaching technology to seniors to determine a) what kind of research has been conducted to assess the effectiveness of teaching technology to seniors, b) what biases must be dismantled for younger computer trainers to teach older ones, c) what…

Reinveting the Internet is not easy. Researchers working on a federally supported effort to design a replacement recently had to go back to the drawing board. They now think the best way to do it is to try several "best ways" instead of searching for just one--and to invite help from social scientists rather than just self-described computer…

This article is the fourth in a series of articles published annually by "Computers in Libraries" surveying integrated library systems and services (ILSs). The purpose of the annual survey is to enable comparison of the ILSs that are available. ILS vendors are in constant pursuit of an ever-changing, consistently vague definition of what the…

Personalization of user interfaces for browsing content is a key concept to ensure content accessibility. In this direction, we introduce concepts that result in the generation of personalized multimodal user interfaces for browsing XML content. User requirements concerning the browsing of a specific content type can be specified by means of…

Software for text processing and presentation design is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find a good solution for collaborative writing of technical course material, allowing the creation of high quality lecture notes and presentation slides from a single source. This article presents a new editing framework…

The last time this author wrote about open source (OS) software was in last September's 2004 issue of Computers in Libraries, which was devoted to making the most of what you have and do-it-yourself solutions. After the column appeared, she received an e-mail from David Dorman of Index Data, who believed that she had done OS products a disservice…

This article describes the design and formative evaluation of a Web-based tool that supports curriculum developers in constructing competence maps. Competence maps describe final attainment levels of educational programs in terms of--interrelated--competencies. Key requirements for the competence-mapping tool were validity and practicality.…

The current paper examines the design process that led to an unusually successful interactive tutorial for older people. The paper describes the issues that make designing for older people different. These include differences between the designer and the target population and the difficulty that older people have in interacting with low-fidelity…

Motivated by a consideration of the machine-mediated nature of human interaction in web-based tutoring, we propose the construction of artificial expressions, displays which reflect users' felt bodily experience, to support the development of greater empathy in remote interaction. To demonstrate the concept of artificial expressions we have…

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…