Recent advances in genomics and structural biology have resulted in an unprecedented increase in biological data available from Internet-accessible databases. In order to help students effectively use this vast repository of information, undergraduate biology students at Drake University were introduced to bioinformatics software and databases in…

Using modeling languages is essential to the construction of educational systems based on software engineering principles and methods. Furthermore, the instructional design is undoubtedly the cornerstone of the design and development of educational systems. Although several methodologies and languages have been proposed for the specification of…

In this paper, we present an ontology to represent the semantics of the IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) specification, a meta-language used to describe the main elements of the learning design process. The motivation of this work relies on the expressiveness limitations found on the current XML-Schema implementation of the IMS LD conceptual model. To…

The author introduces some basic dynamic programming techniques, using examples, with the help of the computer algebra system "Maple". The emphasis is on building confidence and intuition for the solution of dynamic problems in economics. To integrate the material better, the same examples are used to introduce different techniques. One covers the…

Finite-state methods are finding ever increasing use among linguists as a way of modeling phonology and morphology and as a method for manipulating and modeling text. This paper describes a suite of very simple finite-state tools written by the author that can be used to investigate this area and that can be used for simple analysis.

Talk-radio podcasts, such as "Absolutely Intercultural," which are not overtly pedagogical, can be much more than passive, extended listening practice. This paper describes two examples in which teachers have used the "Absolutely Intercultural" podcast and discusses the different levels of involvement possible with podcasts from listening to…

Interaction with parents and family members continues to increase college campuses across the nation. This article describes best practices for communicating with and programming for parents and family members of enrolled students. These include orientation, electronic outreach and communication, parent-family weekends, younger siblings events,…

Central State University (Ohio), under a contract with Nichols Research Corporation, has developed a World Wide web based workshop on high performance computing entitled "IBN SP2 Parallel Programming Workshop." The research is part of the DoD (Department of Defense) High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The research…

A considerable amount of experiences in teaching object-oriented concepts using the Java language have been reported to date, some of which describe language pitfalls and concrete learning difficulties. In this paper, a number of additional issues that have been experienced as difficult for students to master, along with approaches intended to…

Instructors teaching beginning programming classes are often interested in exercises that involve processing photographs (i.e., files stored as .jpeg). They may wish to offer activities such as color inversion, the color manipulation effects archived with pixel thresholding, or steganography, all of which Stevenson et al. [4] assert are sought by…

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been progressing over the past 5 years toward the institution of Direct Broadcast Satellite Radio (DBS-R) which would institute a new type of radio service. The FCC refers to the service as Satellite DARS (Digital Audio Radio Service), and it would provide reliable, high-fidelity satellite-delivered…

This paper discusses the use of ontologies and their applications to assessment. An ontology provides a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated among people and computational systems. The ontology captures one or more experts' conceptual representation of a domain expressed in terms of concepts and the relationships…

Schools in two New York State counties are creating Web home pages with little money or technical expertise. Approaches to Web page construction include using commercially developed software (like Pagemaker or Claris Works); trying out downloaded shareware programs; using an online service (America Online, Prodigy, or Compuserve); and programming…

Presents a method for augmenting a Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) document repository with database functionality. Introduces an implementation method for a complex-object modeling technique, and describes interface techniques tailored for text databases and concepts for a Structured Document Database Management System (SDDBMS)…

Discusses how to translate your data from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to other formats. Explores key features and concepts of tools that address this problem and relates the problem to the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL) standard. Also investigates translation problems and the roles of SGML and DSSSL in…