Larry Johnson has been the CEO of the New Media Consortium (NMC) for nearly a decade, and he has worked in higher education for more than twenty-five years. Before joining NMC, he served in roles that include faculty member, dean, provost, and president. In this interview, he talks about the position of NMC in distance education and the challenges…

While the growing prevalence of Web 2.0 in education opens up exciting opportunities for universities to explore expansive, new literacies practices, concomitantly, it presents unique challenges. Many universities are changing from a content delivery paradigm of eLearning 1.0 to a learner-focused paradigm of eLearning 2.0. In this article, we…

Research on cognitive modeling of information search and Web navigation emphasizes the importance of "information scent" (the relevance of semantic cues such as link labels and headings to a reader's goal; Pirolli & Card, 1999). This article shows that not only semantic but also structural knowledge is involved in navigating the Web…

When examined across studies and fields, navigation research is fragmented and inconsistent. In this article, we argue that this is the result of navigation research having generally been conducted without guidance from an overarching theoretical framework. In order to illustrate our position, we have included results from a very simple…

Lakeland College, a small rural institution on the Canadian prairies, used to face the dilemma of needing a Web presence without having the funds, staff, and technology infrastructure to support it. This article relates how Lakeland's librarian hired ShirWin Knowledge & Learning Systems, Inc., a small software company based in Edmonton,…

E-learning has the potential to offer significant advantages over traditional classroom learning. However, it requires a complete redefinition of the dynamics of interaction between the various actors of a classroom. Moreover, in this context, the authoring of instructional material requires much more time than in traditional learning. Therefore,…

More than a decade ago, the predominant means by which colleges and universities deployed major information systems shifted from in-house development to the acquisition of packaged software. The author of this article suggests, however, that institutionally defined business or academic processes may or may not fit the embedded definition of…