The cloud has become a widely used term in academia and the industry. Education has not remained unaware of this trend, and several educational solutions based on cloud technologies are already in place, especially for software as a service cloud. However, an evaluation of the educational potential of infrastructure and platform clouds has not…

Current E-Learning technologies primarily follow a data and metadata-centric paradigm by providing the learner with composite content containing the learning resources and the learning process description, usually based on specific metadata standards such as ADL SCORM or IMS Learning Design. Due to the design-time binding of learning resources,…

Montana State University (MSU) Libraries (where the authors serve as web services librarian and digital initiatives librarian, respectively) is perhaps unique because it has no current periodicals room due to lack of space. As a result, finding current journals for research is difficult for its patrons, who do not always know how or where to…

Despite the last few years' growth in awareness of open-source software in schools and the potential savings it represents, its widespread adoption is still hampered. Randy Orwin, technology director of the Bainbridge Island School District in Washington State and a strong open-source advocate, cautions that installing an open-source…

Universities can offer eLearning 2.0 tools and services to learners while obtaining clear benefits from releasing the control over some learning content. This means a shift from the institution centred and monolithic model of traditional virtual learning environments (VLEs) to a more heterogeneous and open model. This article tries to plot an…

It is proposed to establish an Integrated Distance Education System in India by designing modern technology based information communication network, connecting all its ODL (Open and Distance Learning) institutions to the headquarters of the ODL system in India. The principle roles to be performed by such a system have been discussed; according to…

Prior research has highlighted the educational benefit of enabling students to participate in collaborative learning activities. Developing technology that extends the physical boundaries of the classroom and enables students to engage in meaningful collaborative learning activities outside class time can be of significant value. For any…

Supporting efficient data access in the mobile learning environment is becoming a hot research problem in recent years, and the problem becomes tougher when the clients are using light-weight mobile devices such as cell phones whose limited storage space prevents the clients from holding a large cache. A practical solution is to store the cache…

The concept of today's cloud computing may date back to 1961, when John McCarthy, retired Stanford professor and Turing Award winner, delivered a speech at MIT's Centennial. In that speech, he predicted that in the future, computing would become a "public utility." Yet for colleges and universities, the recent growth of pervasive, very high speed…

Wikis are one of the newest features of Web 2.0. This article describes the implementation of a project in a marketing course in which students created an interactive textbook using wiki software. Several surprises encountered along the way are described, and the unique problem of grading individual contributions to a wiki is discussed. The author…

This article presents an argument for the use of networked interactive whiteboards (NIWBs) in regional Australian higher education and identifies new pedagogies for this context. Most Australian universities operate multiple campuses, and many use video conference facilities to deliver courses across these sites. For students at remote video…

Current technology enables schools to provide remote or virtual computing labs that can be implemented in multiple ways ranging from remote access to banks of dedicated workstations to sophisticated access to large-scale servers hosting virtualized workstations. This paper reports on the implementation of a specific lab using remote access to…

How do you dynamically customize the programming language available in a context within an existing system, without changing the underlying system? This dissertation introduces a language design approach that addresses this problem. The basic idea is to structure programs as systems of multiple interacting levels of abstraction, where all of the…

Targeted email attacks to enable computer network exploitation have become more prevalent, more insidious, and more widely documented in recent years. Beyond nuisance spam or phishing designed to trick users into revealing personal information, targeted malicious email (TME) facilitates computer network exploitation and the gathering of sensitive…

Information systems educators must balance the need to protect the stability, availability, and security of computer laboratories with the learning objectives of various courses. In advanced courses where students need to install, configure, and otherwise manipulate application and operating system settings, this is especially problematic as these…