The development of mobile wireless technologies has generated a considerable amount of excitement among practitioners and academics because it results in shifting the academic environment from traditional settings to mobile learning (m-learning) settings. Increasing numbers of institutions of higher education offer courses using mobile wireless…

"Instant Messaging" (IM) and "Presence," which is essentially the ability of being able to detect if other users are logged in on the network and send them messages in real time, has become one of the most popular applications of the Internet, causing people to want to stay connected to the Internet for inordinate amounts of…

Open Source Software (OSS) has introduced a new dimension in software community. As the development and use of OSS becomes prominent, the question of its integration in education arises. In this paper, the following practices fundamental to projects and processes in software engineering are examined from an OSS perspective: project management;…

Many educational institutions have a substantial personal computer (PC) network that can be adapted to provide digital video on demand, as well as PCs that can be used as video on demand clients. To gain insight into the issues involved in using this technology in an educational environment that relies heavily on video, a simple, low cost video on…

This paper presents a specific bottom-up implementation method for getting started with multimedia for instructional support at the personal level. Some minimal top-down design considerations for an institutional multimedia system include: (1) the instructor should be able to take work from/to the desktop to/from the classroom; (2) the capability…

In 1997, 558 Compaq Armada 1510 notebook computers and Canon color bubble-jet printers were distributed to incoming freshman at Grove City College (Pennsylvania) as a part its Information Technology Initiative (ITI). Objectives of the ITI were: (1) to prepare students for excellence in their chosen profession by providing the necessary…

The Teacher as Software Developer is the name of a program integrating technology instruction, curriculum, and field experiences in teacher preparation. In an introductory education course for all undergraduate education students, a required technology lab links to a one-day-a-week prepracticum. Preservice students produce a Web site or…

The work presents a new method to send educational messages in e-learning systems. The communication tools are one of the main characteristics of the virtual formative actions, in addition of the contents and the evaluation. The system must help to motivate the students, mainly those who do not leave the formative action and continue it until the…

A "cognote" system was developed for coding electronic discussion groups and promoting critical thinking. Previous literature has provided an account of the strategy as applied to several academic settings. This paper addresses the research around establishing the inter-rater reliability of the cognote system. The findings suggest three indicators…

This paper gives an overview of MediBook, a joint project of the Medical Department of the University GieBen (Germany) and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Darmstadt University of Technology (Germany) funded by the Hessian Ministry for Science and Arts (HMWK). The basis of MediBook is a formal representation…

This study evaluates the usability of the proposed MOA (mouse-over-abstract) interfaces that could be implemented in Web-based or stand-alone applications. The MOA designs provide users with an abstract that serves as context cues about the information presented in the linked page. The context cues are available in visual and/or audio formats.…

From an instructional perspective, it is conceivable that employing an appropriate hypertext architecture should have the advantage of facilitating learning by representing logically the interrelationships between different units of information contained within the hypertext. Furthermore, there would, however, appear to be a sound theoretical…

Education delivery systems have evolved from content delivery mechanisms to collaborative environments. The next step in this evolution is to provide greater support for asynchronous learners, those that progress through course material with little or no support from the instructional team. The integration of Web technologies with artificial…

WQ is a Web-based system that reflects some of the ideas found in WebQuests. This paper analyzes the characteristics that make the WebQuests so popular and determines which of their components give them the greatest educational value. The WQ system, which the authors have implemented, presents sites to be browsed and searched. It allows students…

A group of 20 students in a self-contained kindergarten classroom was selected to receive enrichment using computer software. Of those 20, 10 were randomly selected to use "Bailey's Book House" on a Macintosh computer. "Bailey's Book House" and the Macintosh computer were considered to be the newer models. The other 10 students used "First Letter…