No matter how many car washes or bake sales schools host to raise money, adding funds to their coffers is a recurring problem. This perpetual financial difficulty makes expansive technology purchases or changes seem like a pipe dream for school CIOs and has education technologists searching for ways to stretch money. In 2005, state K-12 school…

Like any infrastructure technology, Virtual World (VW) platforms provide affordances that facilitate some activities and hinder others. Although it is theoretically possible for a VW platform to support all types of activities, designers make choices that lead technologies to be more or less suited for different learning objectives. Virtual World…

The question of how to present cultural heritage resources in a way that attracts potential users is becoming important in our ever-changing world. This paper describes MOSAICA system--a web 2.0-based toolbox, dedicated for the preservation and presentation of cultural heritage. This paper also describes an evaluation study that examined MOSAICA…

Evaluation of methods and techniques for conversational and multimodal spoken dialogue systems is complex, as is gathering data for the modeling and tuning of such techniques. This article describes MushyPeek, an experiment framework that allows us to manipulate the audiovisual behavior of interlocutors in a setting similar to face-to-face…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on the emergence of social media and their adoption as a critical element in knowledge management strategy. Social media are defined as the collection of software tools and web-based applications that are personalized, that is, that communications identify individuals by name and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into the use of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 technologies so that librarians can combine open source software with user-generated content to create a richer discovery experience for their users. Design/methodology/approach: Following a description of the current state of integrated library…

The widespread use of the Internet and the World Wide Web led to the availability of many platforms for developing dynamic Web application and the problem of choosing the most appropriate platform that will be easy to use for undergraduate students of web applications development in tertiary institutions. Students beginning to learn web…

This study examines player activity in a game-based virtual learning environment as a means toward evaluating instructional and game design. By determining the goals embedded in project development and the availability and structure of in-game activities, the first part of this research highlights opportunities for players to engage with learning…

Parts 1 and 2 of this series described the educational value of experimental three-dimensional (3D) chemical structures determined by X-ray crystallography and retrieved from the crystallographic databases. In part 1, we described the information content of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) and discussed a representative teaching subset of…

Although both experiential learning and Web 2.0 tools focus on creativity, sharing, and collaboration, sparse research has been published integrating a Web 2.0 paradigm with experiential learning in marketing. In this article, Web 2.0 concepts are explained. Web 2.0 is then positioned as a philosophy that can advance experiential learning through…

Students write papers in many of their courses to improve their writing skills and to foster an active attitude toward learning. Every year, they hand in hundreds of papers for teachers to assess. This stream may get polluted in two ways: by simple copying from Internet sources and by the exchange of text fragments between students. These…

Should an intelligent software tutor be polite, in an effort to motivate and cajole students to learn, or should it use more direct language? If it should be polite, under what conditions? In a series of studies in different contexts (e.g., lab versus classroom) with a variety of students (e.g., low prior knowledge versus high prior knowledge),…

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, and client-server type storage and computation outsourcing constitute some of the major applications that the next generation cloud schemes will address. Since these applications are just emerging, it is the perfect time to design them with security and privacy in mind. Furthermore, considering the high-churn…

"Necessity is the mother of invention," as the saying goes, and in this case, it surely was. A telecommuting faculty for a Midwest public university wanted to see a graduate student's presentation as a guest speaker in an instructional technology course on campus. However, this faculty lives in another state, so that was impossible. As a daily…

The work presented here demonstrates the feasibility of using the single-mode fibers of an optical Internet network to deliver visible light between separate laboratories as a way to perform remote spectroscopy in the visible for teaching purposes. The coupling of a broadband light source into the single-mode fiber (SMF) and the characterization…