This paper reports the findings of a study that explored which characteristics of electronic textbooks correlated with knowledge acquisition by learners of different achievement levels. The study was carried out on 35 units of electronic textbooks that were studied by 19 high-achieving and 19 low-achieving students in four Estonian schools. The…

The creation of the first SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) object offers some challenges and difficulties which go beyond the facilities offered by content generation applications. In particular, the creation of really reusable, searchable learning objects requires a detailed consideration of metadata, where some institutional…

Patrick A. Grant was stolen in April. A thief walked away with a laptop containing the University of Virginia biochemist's name and Social Security number, as well as those of more than 7,000 other professors, staff members, and students. The machine belonged to a university employee who had taken it off campus--and then it was simply taken. The…

Librarians expend considerable resources to develop services and implement new products catering their users' changing needs. Such efforts begs for the involvement of library users in the development and/or beta process. The authors, both academic librarians, realized that much of their online services were underused, so they devised a plan to…

Cloud computing, one of the latest technology buzzwords, is so hard to explain that Google drove a bus from campus to campus to walk students through the company's vision of it. After students sat through a demo at computers set up nearby, they boarded the bus and got free T-shirts. The bus only stopped at colleges that had already agreed to hand…

Among the 100-odd colleges with academic honor codes, plagiarism-detection services raise a knotty problem: Is software compatible with a system based on trust? The answer frequently devolves to the size and culture of the university. Colleges with traditional student-run honor codes tend to "forefront" trust, emphasizing it above all else. This…

Google's first foray onto the web made search simple and results relevant. With its Co-op platform, Google has taken another step toward dramatically increasing the relevancy of search results, further adapting the World Wide Web to local needs. Google Custom Search Engine, a tool on the Co-op platform, puts one in control of his or her own search…

Science education is concerned with the meaningful pursuit of comprehension, knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes. In Vygotskian social constructivist learning, personal interpretation, decision-making and community cooperation fosters long-term understanding and transference of learned concepts. The construction of…

To help teachers get off to a good start, this paper presents the updated "Back-to-School Guide" that is brimming with new-media ideas and resources. It outlines ten tips, along with easy-to-use tools, that will help teachers build their classroom community, survey students to bring out their ideas, and make learning more collaborative. Links to…

Information Gathering is a knowledge construction process. Web learners make a plan for their Information Gathering task based on their prior knowledge. The plan is evolved with new information encountered and their mental model is constructed through continuously assimilating and accommodating new information gathered from different Web pages. In…

On February 9 and 10, 2010, fifty leaders from colleges, universities, corporations, professional associations, and state networks met in Tempe, Arizona, to discuss cloud computing and the impending shift in the mix of where infrastructure, applications, and services are sourced. This group identified a set of actions that colleges and…

Web-based learning resources (WBLRs) have provided teachers with a wide range of new teaching experiences that are not possible in traditional classroom. However, little research has been done as to which approach to WBLRs is suitable to address issues that are pertinent to learning. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to explore the design…

This article presents the concept development, research programming, and learning design of a lexical processing web application, Virtual Vocabulary, which was developed using theories in both cognitive psychology and second language acquisition (SLA). It is being tested with first-year students of German at the University of Victoria in Canada,…

This paper takes a look at how one academic health sciences librarian brought mediated literature searching to the distance RN to BSN nursing students. It takes a look at why Adobe Connect was the webinar software that was selected to deliver online instruction to the students. The article explains how students participated in a pre-class survey…

Searching for relevant information on the web is an important aspect of distance learning. This activity is a challenge for visually impaired distance learners. While sighted people have the ability to filter information in a fast and non sequential way, blind persons rely on tools that process the information in a sequential way. Learning is…