Six essays, written collaboratively by current and former Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) postdoctoral fellows, explore the contributions that today's academic libraries--as providers of resources, professional support, and space--are making to learning and teaching. Topics include the continuing evolution of the learning…

Learning resources have been created to represent digital units of exchangeable materials that teachers and learners can pull from in order to support the learning processes. They resource themselves. Leveraging the web, one can often find these resources. But what characteristics do they need in order to be easily exchangeable? Although several…

In the paradigm of information society the structure and facts have become flexible and subjective. In the recent social-economic order, IT and communication have taken over the leading role. Distance learning in smart schools is one of the flexible realities in the education field that has crossed the format of the hard and inflexible traditional…

This article reports research into the perceptions and predictions of academic librarians regarding the future role and development of e-books, and e-book collections and services. A number of recent studies reported in the literature review indicate increasing interest in e-books. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 academic…

E-books have been around for more than 10 years but are still a relatively new phenomenon to many librarians and publishers. With the introduction of e-book readers, the e-book has become mainstream, with recent triple-digit annual increases in sales. But what place do they have in the library? In this volume, Sue Polanka brings together a variety…

Young people are often referred to as digital natives, who are familiar with digital technologies such as computers, the Internet and mobile phones for communication, entertainment and accessing information. As a result scholars have called for an educational approach that bypasses the traditional unidirectional lecture teaching style, and applies…

Like many universities worldwide, the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa has joined the open educational resources (OER) movement, making a selection of teaching and learning materials available through its OER directory, UCT OpenContent. However, persuading and then supporting busy academics to share their teaching materials as OER…

With the resources provided by communication technologies, E-learning has been employed in multiple universities, as well as in wide range of training centers and schools. This book presents a structured collection of chapters, dealing with the subject and stressing the importance of E-learning. It shows the evolution of E-learning, with…

International Council for Educational Media-Conseil International des Medias Educatifs (ICEM-CIME) brings together experts from the fields of education, media, IT, and educational media production. Since its formation in 1950, the organization has witnessed and contributed to educational media in an international forum. The 2009 ICEM conference…

Interprofessionalism, an emerging model and philosophy of multi-disciplinary and multi-agency working, has in increasingly become an important means of cultivating joint endeavors across varied and diverse disciplinary and institutional settings. This book is therefore, an important source for understanding how interprofessionalism can be promoted…

Digital repositories can help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to develop coherent and coordinated approaches to capture, identify, store and retrieve intellectual assets such as datasets, course material and research papers. With the advances of technology, an increasing number of Higher Education Institutions are implementing digital…

Given the abundance of open education initiatives that aim to make educational assets freely available online, the time seems ripe to explore the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education. Despite the diversity of tools and resources already available--from well-packaged course materials to simple games, for…

This report is the result of a five-month study; it is comprised of two components: (1) an overview of the current knowledge base regarding how rich media resources, like Teachers' Domain, can support teaching and learning in K-12 schools; and (2) case studies of teachers, technology coordinators and administrators' perceptions and potential use…

Rather than learning and then applying theory to the solution of problems, learners can be provided with stories about others' experiences while designing classroom instruction. However, the usability of case-libraries has not been documented with teachers. In this study, students accessed a case-library of technology integration stories…

Much recent research and funding have focused on building Internet-based repositories that contain collections of high-quality learning resources, often called "learning objects." Yet little is known about how non-specialist users, in particular teachers, find, access, and use digital learning resources. To address this gap, this article…