Libraries are evolving into learning laboratories or "libratories"--environments where a wide variety of learning activities and projects can take place. Part project space, part design studio, part community meeting and presentation space, and part research and development lab, libraries of the future will have a new alphabet of services--the new…

Video production has come into widespread use in various fields of social science. Visual anthropologists (Pink 2006), psychologists (Webster and Sell 2007), historians (Ferro 2000), and visual sociologists (Newman 2006) have used films and videos to document, to preserve, and to analyze social data. There is no reason to think that the use of…

Restoration ecology is "the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged or destroyed." Restoration can range from returning the system to its "natural" state through to restoring some ecological functionality to a system. The University of Western Australia offers an undergraduate degree in…

Two middle-school teachers incorporated student creation of historical accounts into their history instruction. During these projects, the teachers instructed their students to (1) summarize information presented during classroom instruction on a topic (e.g., the Great Migration) and (2) explain the significance of that topic to the present day.…

The School of Engineering and Design Multidisciplinary Project (MDP) at Brunel University is a one week long project based activity involving first year undergraduate students from across the School subject areas of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Design. This paper describes the main aims of the…

Many school districts are seeing a need to introduce technology education to students at the elementary level. Pennsylvania's Penn Manor School District is one of them. Pennsylvania has updated science and technology standards for grades 3-8, and after several conversations the author had with elementary principals and the assistant superintendent…

Are students more engaged and do they perform better in science if their school encourages them to work on science projects, participate in science fairs, belong to a science-related club or go on science-related field trips--in addition to teaching them the mandatory science curriculum? To find out, PISA (Programme for International Student…

This study was conducted in a middle school math class and investigated the effects of project-based activities on the middle school math students' skill acquisition and intrinsic motivation. After math-related project activities were implemented and completed, an analysis of how the students were affected in the areas of math skills and…

Although project-based learning is a well-known and widely used instructional strategy, it remains a challenging issue to effectively apply this approach to practical settings for improving the learning performance of students. In this study, a project-based digital storytelling approach is proposed to cope with this problem. With a…

Although course management systems (CMSs) were originally designed for teachers to manage their teaching, little interest has been directed at students' learning. Moodle is usually regarded as a CMS. However, how to make full use of its powerful features and design them into learning tools has rarely been investigated. This study investigates two…

This article presents a new approach to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course design. Situated in the context of an English-medium university in Hong Kong, the article describes an undergraduate course in English for science, which focused not only on traditional academic genres but also engaged students in the creation of a multimodal…

The purpose of this investigation was to understand how six students, an alumna, and a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro perceived their space to emerge as leaders in service-learning endeavors, and to gain insight into how universities create that space. The results indicated that providing support, resources, and…

Agile development has received increasing interest both in industry and academia due to its benefits in developing software quickly, meeting customer needs, and keeping pace with the rapidly changing requirements. However, agile practices and scrum in particular have been mainly tested in mid- to large-size projects. In this paper, we present…

This teaching note describes a course, Viewing the World: Visual Inquiry in International Settings, which the author taught in the Czech Republic in 2009. Five students successfully completed the course, which consisted of designing a project, collecting and analyzing visual data, presenting findings, and writing a final report of a qualitative…

This case describes a database redesign project for the United States Department of Agriculture's National Animal Germplasm Program (NAGP). The case provides a valuable context for teaching and practicing database analysis, design, and implementation skills, and can be used as the basis for a semester-long team project. The case demonstrates the…