Nationally, there has been debate on the role of research within higher education and increased interest in the teaching/research nexus. A team of Academic Liaison Librarians at Anglia Polytechnic University was awarded funding to investigate the extent to which learning resources overlap with research resources, whether researcher/teachers…

The Web-based information and communication technology (w-ICT) has become a powerful means for delivery and dissemination of digitised information among the emerging virtual learning and business communities. The w-ICT has engendered a growing cybersphere paradigm to accommodate a huge mass of e-resources cast over the Web. Such abundance of…

This research presents a Web-based learning and instructional system for Pneumatics. The system includes course material, remote data acquisition modules, and a pneumatic laboratory set. The course material is in the HTML format accompanied with text, still and animated images, simulation programs, and computer aided design tools. The data…

Concerns about the potentially dubious nature of online information and users' ability to evaluate it appropriately prompted this research on college students' use of Web-based information, their perceptions of information credibility, and their online verification behaviors. Two studies were conducted to address these issues. Results of the first…

Purpose--The study seeks to further explore the hypothesised link between the increase in mobile phone ownership and use and the reported decline in adolescent smoking. Evidence for the link was gathered by examining perceptions of mobile phone use in the context of social identity and adolescent smoking. Design/methodology/approach--The study…

This paper presents a framework for online collaborative learning, also known as telecollaboration. At the centre of this flexible framework are online collaborative educational experiences where knowledge creation and knowledge in action are the nexus of social, teaching and cognitive presence based on the "Community of Inquiry" model of…

Very often, when using a chat tool where more than one participant is talking simultaneously, it is difficult to follow the conversation, read all the different messages and work out who is talking to whom about what. This problem has been dubbed "Chat Confusion." This article investigates this problem in debate sessions in an online university…

When MIT first announced the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project in the spring of 2001, many people hoped similar projects would proliferate, allowing instructors in less-developed countries to access timely materials to support their teaching--materials that would otherwise never be available to them. This is happening, as part of a quickly spreading,…

With a new wave of campus IT solutions comes a familiar challenge: How does one encourage and help build distributed applications without being overrun by stovepipe solutions? Anticipating significant enrollment growth (5 percent per year) for the next several years, double-digit annual growth in funded research, and little chance that resources…

Edutella is an RDF-based E-Learning P2P network that is aimed to accommodate heterogeneous learning resource metadata repositories in a P2P manner and further facilitate the exchange of metadata between these repositories based on RDF. Whereas Edutella provides RDF metadata repositories with a quite natural integration approach, XML metadata…

Purpose: To explore the use of asynchronous and synchronous text-based communication using the internet as a means of promoting discussion among a knowledge-building community of school students carrying out a science investigation. Design/methodology/approach: Activity theory is used to bring together the various theories associated with the…

Many computer users around the world have access to the latest advances in technology and use of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web). However, for a variety of political, economic, and social reasons, some peoples of the world do not have access to these resources. The educational systems of developing countries have not completely missed the…

Purpose: This paper aims to advance the argument for the transformative potential of e-mentoring for professional women. Design/methodology/approach: Existing mentoring and e-mentoring models are evaluated as the context for the development of an innovative e-mentoring programme for professional women in the UK (Empathy-Edge). The European…

With the advent of English as a global language, the ability to write well in English across diverse settings and for different audiences has become an imperative in second language education programmes throughout the world. Yet the teaching of second language writing is often hindered by the great amount of time and skill needed to evaluate…

This article describes a project that used interactive technology to conduct arena assessments at a distance. Team building, technology requirements, technology employed, observational and quantitative results of assessment comparisons, and future directions are discussed. Real-time distance assessments were performed through the use of network…