Educators, policymakers, and parents alike are focused on ensuring the academic success of the nation's students. These efforts interact with the expanding use of technology, which affects the lives of students both inside and outside of the classroom. Thus, the role that technology plays in education is an evolving area of research that continues…

Debates continue about the access young children have to technological devices, given the increasingly accessible and available technology in most developed countries. Concerns have been expressed by parents/caregivers and researchers, and questions have been raised about possible risks and benefits of these devices on young children who, in some…

Facebook is a popular social networking site. It, like many other new technologies, has potential for teaching and learning because of its unique built-in functions that offer pedagogical, social and technological affordances. In this study, the Facebook group was used as a learning management system (LMS) in two courses for putting up…

Speeding past the Steve Jobs Post-PC Era into the Age of Mobilism, the authors foresee how, by 2015, each and every student in America's K-12 classrooms will be using their own mobile computing device, with those devices engendering the most disruptive transformation in education in 150 years. Classrooms will move from today's "I Teach"…

This article examines the potential of mobile computing and Web 2.0 technology to support knowledge building in formal and informal settings. Desktop-based knowledge building tools have limited affordances of supporting one-to-one access, learning "in situ," and seamless integration in and out of school environments. In this initial…

In this paper, we describe our path for designing an online community of practice for teachers in Singapore, from identifying the current status of professional development to designing an online platform where teachers can share vivid images of their teaching practices with other teachers. To identify current practices in professional…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the usability and interface design of e-learning portal developed for primary schools in Singapore. Design/methodology/approach: Using Singapore-based learning EDvantage (LEAD) portal as a case study, this paper reviews and analyses the usability and usefulness of embedded learning objects (LOs)…

This paper examines how a game-like 3D Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE), Quest Atlantis (QA), is used in an after-school programme to engage a group of 14 academically at-risk primary students in their learning. It adopts an activity theoretical perspective to identify the disturbances and contradictions during the implementation of the…

The use of online learning is growing very fast in universities. Consequently, understanding how to promote student contribution in asynchronous online discussions, which is considered an integral part of online learning, has become increasingly crucial. Previous research has examined how factors, such as instructor facilitation techniques may…

This study aims to investigate how Singapore primary schools use their web sites, what kind of information is contained in the web sites, and how the information is presented. Based on an analysis of 176 primary school web sites, which represent all but one of the country's primary schools, findings indicate that most of Singapore's primary school…

Singapore has many large and educationally valuable digital collections and is planning the development of many more. These digital collections contain historical, cultural and scientific multimedia objects, along with learning objects. At present, school teachers and pupils find it hard to locate many of these resources using traditional search…

This publication presents proceedings from a 1999 conference on higher education reform and quality that involved six countries: China, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States. The first section, "Report of the Six-Nation Higher Education Project," presents "Summary of the Progress of the Higher Education…

The Southeast Asian country of Singapore comprises a main island and numerous islets between Malaysia and Indonesia. Inhabited by Chinese, Malays, Indians, Eurasians, and other ethnic populations, Singapore is a vibrant mix of different cultures and religions. It is also reputed to be the most wired island in the world. This characteristic--along…

The case of Singapore illustrates how well-deployed information technology (IT) can be a change agent in education and national development. IT has been a catalyst and enabler of the shift from didactic, passive instruction to interactive, learner-centered and learner-directed instruction. In technical education in particular, IT has served as a…

This document contains 39 papers and 13 poster presentations from a conference on technological education and national development. The following are among the papers included: "The Future of Technological Education and Vocational Education: UNESCO's (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization's) Perspective" (Adnan…