Increasingly, university and college administrators are contracting out their institutions' operational information technology (IT) needs. Specifically, this means moving from an IT system with a server based at the institution with an in house IT support staff to a cloud based system outside the institution where most of the staff resources are…

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are often used to support learning in formal and informal educational contexts. A technology-based educational experience consists of several elements: content, syllabus, roles, sequence of activities, assignments, assessment procedures, etc. that must be aligned with the affordances of the technologies to…

In mid-April, Amazon EC2 services had a small problem. Apparently, a large swath of its cloud computing environment had such substantial trouble that a number of customers had server issues. A number of high-profile sites, including Reddit, Evite, and Foursquare, went down when Amazon experienced issues in their US East 1a region (Justinb 2011).…

Have you ever bought a computer program that you thought would be great for your struggling students, only to find that it did not work on your school computers, or that your students found it difficult to use? Selecting science software for students with learning and other disabilities can be a challenge. This Idea Bank provides a list of…

As a concept, the next-generation catalog (NGC) is not new to librarians, who have been wishing for better OPAC interfaces for their integrated library systems (ILSs). The NGC has been the focus of discussion for more than 5 years now, from the 2006 report of the implementation of Endeca at North Carolina State University, to Marshall Breeding's…

Oral communication skills are essential for engineers today and, as they are included in accreditation criteria of educational programmes, their teaching and evaluation deserve attention. However, concrete aspects as to what should be taught and evaluated in relation to oral communication skills have not been sufficiently established. In this…

Presents a conceptual framework and a coherent method for information-technology design in an organizational context within the participatory-design tradition. The MUST method, developed through projects in Danish and American organizations, is based on thorough participation with users and managers and combines the use of ethnographic techniques…

Traces the history of virtual reality (VR), or cyberspace, and describes some of the research and development efforts currently being carried out in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. Applications of VR in interactive computer-aided design (CAD), the military, leisure activities, spaceflight, teleconferencing, and medicine are…