The purpose of this study was to explore the codependencies of the social and technical structures that yield Wikipedia the website and Wikipedia the community. In doing so, the research investigated the implications of such a sociotechnical system for the maintenance of the project and the emergence of collective intelligence. Using a theoretical…

For decades, African American students, nationwide, have consistently scored much lower on math and reading achievement tests than their European counterparts, creating what is known as the "White-Black Achievement Gap". The purpose of the research was to determine if self regulated learning and communal learning contexts, either…

This study provides insights with regard to the types of cognitive processes that are involved in the formation of mental models and the way those models change over the course of a semester in novice programmers doing a design task. Eight novice programmers participated in this study for three distinct software design sessions, using the same…

This dissertation investigates the relationship between storytelling and information in the narration of geographic space. While storytelling has historically shaped our understanding of geography, modern practices in data collection, cartography, and geographic visualization enable one-way forms of representation that remove the negotiation and…

Technology has become more of a necessity for everyday use. It not only plays a crucial role in everyday use, it is also vital in the educational arena. Since the advent of the current technology age, technology has become an important educational tool in U.S. schools. Spending on technology. for K-12 education in the United States has jumped, and…

USM piloted the Math Zone in Spring 2007, a computer-based program in teaching MAT 101 and MAT 099 in order to improve student performance. This research determined the effect of the re-design of MAT 101 on student achievements in comparison to a traditional approach to the same course. Meanwhile, the study investigated possible effects of the…

As the number of publications in the biomedical field continues its exponential increase, techniques for automatically summarizing information from this body of literature have become more diverse. In addition, the targets of summarization have become more subtle; initial work focused on extracting the factual assertions from full-text papers,…

The problem: The problem addressed in this study was to examine how teacher attitudes towards software applications affect student achievement in the classroom. Method: A correlational study was conducted, and 50 fourth and fifth grade teachers who taught in the Santee School District, were administered a survey assessing their attitudes…

Rapid growth in eBusiness has made industry and commerce increasingly dependent on the hardware and software infrastructure that enables high-volume transaction processing across the Internet. Large transaction volumes at major industrial-firm data centers rely on robust transaction protocols and adequately provisioned hardware capacity to ensure…

This study was a mixed-method, quasi-experimental investigation that evaluated the implementation of the "Rally to Read" remediation program, designed by the Center for Learning and Development (CLD), as a Tier 3 intervention method within the Response to Intervention (RTI) process. This study compared the progress of a Tier 3 student group on…

This investigation is an exploratory study of the use of a metacognitive software tool in a social supportive learning environment. The tool combined metacognitive knowledge and regulation functionality embedded within the content of an eight week online graduate education course. Twenty-three learners, who were practicing teachers, used the tool.…

Three decision consistency and accuracy (DC/DA) methods, the Livingston and Lewis (LL) method, LEE method, and the Hambleton and Han (HH) method, were evaluated. The purposes of the study were: (1) to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of these methods, especially when their assumptions were not well satisfied, (2) to investigate the "true"…

Server virtualization enables a physical computer to support multiple applications logically by decoupling the application from the hardware layer, thereby reducing operational costs and competitive in delivering IT services to their enterprise organizations. IT organizations continually examine the efficiency of their internal IT systems and…

The Internet Age has seen the emergence of richly annotated image data collections numbering in the billions of items. This work makes contributions in three primary areas which aid the management of this data: image representation, efficient retrieval, and annotation based on content and metadata. The contributions are as follows. First,…

Many software development projects fail because they do not meet the needs of users, are over-budget, and abandoned. To address this problem, the user requirements elicitation process was modified based on principles of Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry, commonly used in organizational development, aims to build organizations, processes,…