Learning object repositories are a shared, open and public space; however, the possibility and ability of personal expression in an open, global, public space is crucial. The aim of this study is to explore personal spaces in a big learning object repository as a facilitator for adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) into teaching practices…

Open educational resources (OER) are a global phenomenon that is fast gaining credibility in many academic circles as a possible solution for bridging the knowledge divide. With increased funding and advocacy from governmental and nongovernmental organisations paired with generous philanthropy, many OER repositories, which host a vast array of…

The Internet Age has seen the emergence of richly annotated image data collections numbering in the billions of items. This work makes contributions in three primary areas which aid the management of this data: image representation, efficient retrieval, and annotation based on content and metadata. The contributions are as follows. First,…

Geographically related queries form nearly one-fifth of all queries submitted to the Excite search engine and the most frequently occurring terms are names of places. This paper focuses on digital libraries and extends the basic services of existing library management systems to include new ones that are dedicated to geographic information…

The availability and use of computers in teaching has seen an increase in the rate of plagiarism among students because of the wide availability of electronic texts online. While computer tools that have appeared in recent years are capable of detecting simple forms of plagiarism, such as copy-paste, a number of recent research studies devoted to…

Teachers and students increasingly enjoy unprecedented access to abundant web resources and digital libraries to enhance and enrich their classroom experiences. However, due to the distributed nature of such systems, conventional educational research methods, such as surveys and observations, provide only limited snapshots. In addition,…

In today's world of instant everything, everyone has been exposed to some form of Web 2.0 technology, and higher education is not exempt from its long reach. Libraries of all types are incorporating Web 2.0 features to attract users as well as to showcase library services. The Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) has become more user-friendly with…

With the increasing wealth of information on the Web, information integration is ubiquitous as the same real-world entity may appear in a variety of forms extracted from different sources. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised algorithms that are naturally integrated in a scalable framework to solve the entity resolution problem,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to make a scientific contribution to web information retrieval (IR). Design/methodology/approach: A multiagent system for web IR is proposed based on new technologies: Hierarchical Small-Worlds (HSW) and Possibilistic Networks (PN). This system is based on a possibilistic qualitative approach which extends the…

With the increase in available educational data, it is expected that Learning Analytics will become a powerful means to inform and support learners, teachers and their institutions in better understanding and predicting personal learning needs and performance. However, the processes and requirements behind the beneficial application of Learning…

The purpose of this study is to examine exemplary science teachers' level of computer use, their knowledge/skills in using specific computer applications for science instruction, their use of computer-related applications/tools during their instruction, how often they required their students to use those applications in or for their science class…

Web site usage statistics are a widely used tool for Web site development, but libraries are still learning how to use them successfully. This case study summarizes how Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale implemented Google Analytics on its Web site and used the reports to inform a site redesign. As the main campus library at…

Three hosted federated search tools, Follett One Search, Gale PowerSearch Plus, and WebFeat Express, were configured and implemented in a school library. Databases from five vendors and the OPAC were systematically searched. Federated search results were compared with each other and to the results of the same searches in the database's native…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a computational approach and a toolset to infer spatial displacements as they occur in route narrative documents and report on first experiments done to produce computer-aided learning (CAL) applications and instructional design editors that exploit the inferred georeferenced itineraries.…

Considers how reliable research can be conducted using a mutating phenomenon like the Web. Explores how reliably Web sources can be documented. Suggests that researchers should cite digital articles in databases where possible and consider avoiding references to online journals with print editions. (SG)