Over the past decade, policy discussions about public access computing in libraries have focused on the role that these institutions play in bridging the digital divide. In these discussions, public access computing services are generally targeted at individuals who either cannot afford a computer and Internet access, or have never received formal…

Disparities in educational outcomes exist between students in rural areas as compared to students in urban settings. While there is some evidence that these rural disparities are present in eastern Europe, little is known about young peoples' lives in the rural areas of this region. This paper presents an analysis of science achievement by…

Barely 30 years on from the advent of distance learning as we recognise it today, it has already become uncommon for a learner to embark on a programme of education that does not involve frequent access to the Internet; but if a course does not revolve around the Internet, is it in any way inferior and is the learner disadvantaged? Two of the…

The purpose of this paper is to present the preliminary study findings from an ongoing PhD study. In this paper, the researcher presents the preliminary study that was carried out with a number of schools in England and Northern Cyprus in order to identify the background or big pictures of each country in terms of available ICT tools that are…

Academically underprepared college students, i.e., those identified as needing developmental (remedial) English, mathematics and reading courses in order to maximize their potential for academic success at college-level studies, were provided with the opportunity to rent, for a minimal, subsidized fee, mini-computers bundled with digital course…

The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA; 2000) requires an Internet filtering and public awareness strategy to protect children under 17 from harmful visual Internet depictions. This study compared high school students who went online with the CIPA restriction and college students who went online without the restriction in order to…

The relative ubiquity of computer access and the rapid development of information and communication technology have profoundly impacted teaching and learning at a distance. Relatively little is currently known about the characteristics of those students who participate in distance e-learning courses at the secondary school level. In an effort to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of usability and learnability in learning management systems (LMS) by considering the experiences of information and communications technology (ICT) experts and non-experts in using the LMS of an open-distance university. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses task-based…

This study examined relationships between the after-school literacy activities and test performance of students who passed and students who failed the 2003 administration of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test. It included both students who have been in the Canadian school system for most of their school lives and mostly use English as a…

Innovations in information and communication technologies are changing society, but only 1 in 15 Canadian seniors used a computer at the turn of the millennium (Statistics Canada, 2000). Furthermore, about 1 in 5 Canadian seniors has difficulty hearing, seeing, or communicating. The primary goal of the study was to investigate the relationship…

Community and family involvement in schools is a well-documented antecedent to student success; yet, educators often find it challenging to increase involvement with parents and members of diverse communities. One solution is to use information and communication technology (ICT) as a bridge between schools, families, and the community. This…

This paper presents the evaluation of the program Computers for Education. The program aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. Overall, the program seems to have…

Over the last decade, more and more public and private stakeholders, in developed and developing countries, have been supporting 1:1 initiatives in education (i.e. every child receives her/his own personal computing device). These 1:1 initiatives represent a qualitative move forward from previous educational experiences with ICT, inasmuch as every…

This article explores the effects of the Time To Know program, a comprehensive technology-rich learning environment, on low socio-economic status (SES) students' learning achievements in Mathematics, Hebrew, and English as a Foreign Language (EFL)in Israel. The study is based on the assumption that one of the possible solutions for bridging the…

This report is intended to inform the European Commission's DG Information Society and Media in developing its policies for the period 2010-2020. It is targeted to policymakers with expert knowledge of the field. The report summarises the work conducted in the study: "Policy Options for the Ubiquitous Internet Society". It builds on…