In April 2013, Florida will commemorate Juan Ponce de Leon's historic voyage. Yet Ponce de Leon's arrival was, in several important ways, not just the beginning of Spain's presence in Florida, but in North America as a whole. Today, the historical Spanish influence on America is palpable--in culture, language, politics, and more. This year marks…

Collaborative design empowers learning management system (LMS) providers and end users (online students) to develop a vibrant teaching and learning community. Successful periodic collaborations utilizing collaborative web tools between these two pivotal groups can produce the next series of eLearning platforms that are fertile grounds for…

An influential theory of spatial navigation states that the boundary shape of an environment is preferentially encoded over and above other spatial cues, such that it is impervious to interference from alternative sources of information. We explored this claim with 3 intradimensional--extradimensional shift experiments, designed to examine the…

"I found it!" Addison proudly proclaimed, as she used an iPhone and Global Positioning System (GPS) software to find the hidden geocache along the riverbank. Others in Lisa Bostick's fourth grade class were jealous, but there would be other geocaches to find. With the excitement of movies like "Pirates of the Caribbean" and…

Passenger collaboration offers a potential compensatory strategy to assist older drivers who have difficulty driving in unfamiliar areas (wayfinding). This article describes a survey of 194 healthy, community-dwelling older drivers and their regular passengers to investigate how passengers assist drivers, and to identify the characteristics of…

Radar is a technology that can be used to detect distant objects not visible to the human eye. A predecessor of radar, called the telemobiloscope, was first used to detect ships in the fog in 1904 off the German coast. Many scientists have worked on the development and refinement of radar (Hertz with electromagnetic waves; Popov with determining…

This paper presents two interactive visualization tools for learning management systems (LMS) in order to improve learning and teaching in online courses. The first tool was developed at the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory (IISLab) at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT). The tool is used to analyse students' activity from…

This article reports on a case study, using a think-aloud approach (Boren & Ramey, 2000; Jaspers, Steen, van den Bos & Geenen, 2004; Kilsdonk et al., 2016), to investigate how different types of audiences interpret ePortfolios. During recorded viewing, students, instructors, and business professionals narrated their experience of reading…

This paper focuses on the outcomes of a project funded by the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Office at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC). Students were recruited to design a new navigational architecture for the Moodle pages of the Language Centre. They received some training on the key principles of distributive learning and…

Barber, Donnelly & Rizvi (2013): "An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead" addresses some significant issues in higher education and poses some challenging questions to open and distance learning (ODL) administrators, policy makers, and of course to ODL faculty in general. Barber et al.'s paper does not…

The occurrence of spontaneous recovery in human spatial memory was assessed using a virtual environment. In Experiment 1, spatial memory was established by training participants to locate a hidden platform in a virtual water maze using a set of four distal landmarks. In Experiment 2, after learning about the location of a hidden platform, the…

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to…

In this paper, we propose a visual saliency algorithm for automatically finding the topic transition points in an educational video. First, we propose a method for assigning a saliency score to each word extracted from an educational video. We design several mid-level features that are indicative of visual saliency. The optimal feature combination…

IT's tough being a digital sign these days. Everyone wants a piece of action. From announcements to advertisements, menus to broadcasts, digital signs provide dynamic messaging tailored to locations and circumstances. With the advent of wayfinding technology, today's digital signs can serve up customized directions around campuses and all of…

The current study examined phonetic convergence when talkers alternated roles during conversational interaction. The talkers completed a map navigation task in which they alternated instruction Giver and Receiver roles across multiple map pairs. Previous studies found robust effects of the role of a talker on phonetic convergence, and it was…