This paper reports on an aspect of the EC funded Argunaut project which researched and developed awareness tools for moderators of online dialogues. In this study we report on an investigation into the nature of creative thinking in online dialogues and whether or not this creative thinking can be coded for and recognized automatically such that…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

With the development of e-learning technology, many specifications of instructional design have been proposed to make learning activity sharable and reusable. With the specifications and sufficient learning resources, the researches further focus on how to provide learners more appropriate learning activities to improve their learning performance.…

Purpose: At many universities, web lectures have become an integral part of the e-learning portfolio over the last few years. While many aspects of the technology involved, like automatic recording techniques or innovative interfaces for replay, have evolved at a rapid pace, web lecturing has remained independent of other important developments…

Self-testing is a means to check learning effect. Besides time-space restriction, there are many deficiencies in traditional offline self-testing. With the development of information technology, learners can have self-testing on the Internet. Self-testing on Internet, namely, web-based self-testing, overcomes time-space limitation of traditional…

This paper examines the effective deployment of conversational agents in virtual worlds from the perspective of researchers/practitioners in cognitive psychology, computing science, learning technologies and engineering. From a cognitive perspective, the major challenge lies in the coordination and management of the various channels of information…

Portals are taking off on campuses nationwide. According to "Campus Computing 2006," the Campus Computing Project's survey of 540 two- and four-year public and private colleges and universities across the US, portal deployment for four-year public residential universities jumped from 28 to 74 percent of responding institutions between the…

An important issue of the demographic change in the German population is the maintenance and promotion of the employability of aging workforces. However, there are hardly any suitable concepts or usable tools available to realize this goal. Possible approaches should push the individual strengths of the aging workers to the foreground and…

E-Learning is a vast and complex research topic that poses many challenges in every aspect: educational and pedagogical strategies and techniques and the tools for achieving them; usability, accessibility and user interface design; knowledge sharing and collaborative environments; technologies, architectures, and protocols; user activity…

Purpose: Social navigation is an emerging trend for navigation in hypermedia. With social navigation, users can be guided through large volumes of learning content by cues which integrate the browsing history of past users. Earlier papers have shown that social navigation is suitable for navigation not only in classic hypermedia but also in…

The "Technology Outlook Australian Tertiary Education 2013-2018: An NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis" reflects a collaborative research effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and Open Universities Australia to help inform Australian educational leaders about significant developments in technologies supporting teaching,…

Discusses the inherent benefits and difficulties when a university information technology department decides to build customized portals for students, faculty, and staff and alumni. (GR)

The Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) support creation of a novel type of tutors called example-tracing tutors. Unlike other types of ITSs (e.g., model-tracing tutors, constraint-based tutors), example-tracing tutors evaluate student behavior by flexibly comparing it against generalized examples of problem-solving behavior. Example-tracing…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) that employ a model-tracing methodology have consistently shown their effectiveness. However, what evidently makes these tutors effective, the cognitive model embedded within them, has traditionally been difficult to create, requiring great expertise and time, both of which come at a cost. Furthermore, an…

Electronic examination systems, which include Internet-based system, require extremely complicated installation, configuration and maintenance of software as well as hardware. In this paper, we present the design and development of a flexible, easy-to-use and secure examination system (e-Test), in which any commonly used computer can be used as a…