Describes areas where faculty members can aid students in making intelligent use of the Web in their research. Differentiates between subject directories and search engines. Describes an engine's three components: spider, index, and search engine. Outlines two misconceptions: that Yahoo! is a search engine and that search engines contain all the…

Describes the card sort technique that was used by Cornell University to help determine how users would organize a set of concepts to be included in an online digital library help system. Presents Cornell's experiences as a case study with detailed instructions for conducting and evaluating the card sort technique. (Contains 13 references.)…

Examines the efficiency of the Imen-Delphi (ID) technique as an electronic procedure for conferencing that helps participants clarify their opinions and expectations regarding preferable and possible futures. Describes an electronic version of the original ID procedure and tested its efficiency among a group of experts on virtual reality and…

Describes a system that automatically classifies e-mail messages in the HUMANIST electronic discussion group into one of four classes: question, response, announcement, or administrative. The system's ability to accurately classify a message was compared against manually assigned codes. Results suggested that there was a statistical agreement in…

Describes the University of Texas at Austin's undergraduate writing center and its in-progress "virtual writing center." Discusses the problems and pitfalls of writing online, such as online identity and how face to face conversation turns are arranged. Compares the advent of computer technology with the ancient Hittites' beginnings in…

Describes emerging metadata practice and standards. Gives an overview of the environments in which metadata is used, before focusing on metadata for information resources. Outlines an approximate typology of approaches and explores different strands of metadata activity. Discusses trends in format development, metadata management, and use of…

The probabilistic retrieval model developed in this paper incorporates the relationships of descriptors. A learning model is proposed to figure out the relationships incrementally. Each time retrieval results are available, the method identifies in the relevant documents the descriptors that designate the concepts specified by the query…

Discusses educators' difficulty with interactive online assessment even though educational technology has a broad use in secondary and higher education instruction. Describes a program that enables instructors to create their own online assessment with complete control over the content and structure of questions. (Contains 23 references.) (YDS)

Reports results of surveys of graduate students involved in online class discussions that show a preference for face-to-face experiences in spite of positive reactions to online discussions. Online discussions were perceived as valuable additions to in-class discussions, rather than as an acceptable substitution for them. (Author/LRW)

These articles describe the experiences of the Johns Hopkins University library in digitizing their collection of sheet music; motivation for buckets, Smart Object, Dumb Archive (SODA) and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), and initial experiences using them in digital library (DL) testbeds; requirements for archival institutions, the National…

Presents an online multicultural database developed by the Centre for Educational Research and Educational Policy (CEREP), a part of the network of Education Policy Units in South Africa. Highlights include technology and education policy in South Africa, the history of CEREP, organizing principles of the database, and description of database…

Describes a collaborative software system that allows students from distant schools to share claims derived from their concept maps. Sharing takes place by accessing The Knowledge Soup, a repository of propositions submitted by students and stored on a computer server. Students can use propositions from other students to enhance their concept…

Presents seven myths about online learning that discourage its expansion. These myths revolve around the purported inadequacies of online learning, the limits imposed by for-profit ventures, and the damage that virtual colleges will do to their traditional counterparts. (SLD)

Discusses online help systems in application software design and describes two experiments in which adult computer novices learned to use experimental graphics software by task-based exploration. Topics include operative help; function-oriented help; effects on learning performance; schemata; mental models; and implications for the design of…

Discusses interface issues related to challenges of instruction facilitation and student participation and performance in an Internet-accessible online course. Topics include creating a learning metaphor, including the course syllabus; navigation processes, including interaction style; and usability evaluation by students. (Author/LRW)