This article reports the findings of a demonstrator project to evaluate how effectively Immersive Virtual Worlds (IVWs) could support problem-based learning. The project designed, created and evaluated eight scenarios within "Second Life" (SL) for undergraduate courses in health care management and paramedic training. Evaluation was…

The advent of information technology has enabled firms to collect significant amounts of data about individuals and mine the data for developing their strategies. Profiling of individuals is one common use of data collected about them. It refers to using known or inferred information to categorize the type of an individual and to tailor specific…

Current data mining (DM) technology is not domain-specific and therefore rarely generates reliable, business actionable knowledge that can be used to improve the effectiveness of the decision-making process in the banking industry. DM is mainly an autonomous, data-driven process with little focus on domain expertise, constraints, or requirements…

The objective of this work is to examine the efficacy of natural language processing (NLP) in summarizing bibliographic text for multiple purposes. Researchers have noted the accelerating growth of bibliographic databases. Information seekers using traditional information retrieval techniques when searching large bibliographic databases are often…

Keeping up with today's rapid technological changes reveals itself vividly in the changing ways people attempt to gather information. This article describes a survey conducted by the Weinberg Memorial Library at the University of Scranton which analyzed the information retrieval strategies employed by a cohort of undergraduate students. The…

This article highlights four cognitive processes key to online reading comprehension and how one might begin to transform existing think-aloud strategy models to encompass the challenges of reading for information on the Internet. Informed by principles of cognitive apprenticeship and an emerging taxonomy of online reading comprehension…

The dopaminergic system is implicated in depressive disorders and research has also shown that dopamine constricts lexical/semantic networks by reducing spreading activation. Hence, depression, which is linked to reductions of dopamine, may be associated with increased spreading activation. However, research has generally found no effects of…

Repeated retrieval enhances long-term retention, and spaced repetition also enhances retention. A question with practical and theoretical significance is whether there are particular schedules of spaced retrieval (e.g., gradually expanding the interval between tests) that produce the best learning. In the present experiment, subjects studied and…

Question answering systems have frequently been explored for educational use. However, their value was somewhat limited due to the quality of the answers returned to the student. Recent question answering (QA) research has started to incorporate deep natural language processing (NLP) in order to improve these answers. However, current NLP…

Library anxiety has been cited as one factor affecting academic performance, but library use is only part of obtaining information for academic needs. This paper expands the concept of library anxiety to "information anxiety" by an examination of the information behavior of black graduate students when using a variety of information resources,…

The research investigated whether a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)-based approach to image retrieval can map pixel intensity into a smaller concept space with good accuracy and reasonable computational cost. From a large set of M computed tomography (CT) images, a retrieval query found all images for a particular patient based on semantic…

Purpose: The paper aims to explore the performance of redundancy and novelty mining in the business blogosphere, which has not been studied before. Design/methodology/approach: Novelty mining techniques are implemented to single out novel information out of a massive set of text documents. This paper adopted the mixed metric approach which…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the issues surrounding the cataloguing of maps in archives and libraries. An investigation into appropriate metadata formats, such as MARC21, EAD and Dublin Core with RDF, shows how particular map data can be stored. Mathematical map elements, specifically co-ordinates, are…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the goals of institutions that are currently developing and delivering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and to assess the current evidence as to whether these goals are being met. A qualitative study was conducted comprising interviews of 83 individuals across 62 institutions including public and…

Due to the rapid advances in computing and sensing technologies, enormous amounts of data are being generated everyday in various applications. The integration of data mining and data visualization has been widely used to analyze these massive and complex data sets to discover hidden patterns. For both data mining and visualization to be…