Are university presses ready for their close-up? In a nod to Hollywood, a growing number of trade publishers are producing book trailers to promote new titles. But do video teasers have a role in university-press publishing? What about longer formats? Based on an entirely unscientific poll of publicists at 25 university presses, the answer appears…

In this edition of Perspectives, Reid Cornwell discusses open-access publishing with Peter Suber, senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, senior research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, and currently visiting fellow at Yale Law School. Open access means that scholarly work is freely and openly…

Distance education is an accepted delivery option for education at all levels today. In this environment, education is delivered via one of many course management platforms (CMP), which support a variety of technologies. This provides a great opportunity to apply and test the various facets of Media Richness Theory. This paper describes the result…

The pedagogical experiment performed has proved the increase in the educational efficiency achieved by the students learning from the multimedia version of the handbook on "Experiment in chemistry" at the Faculty of Chemistry, Adam Mickiewicz University. The results of the tests checking the students' and teachers' knowledge have shown…

This paper describes My Science Tutor (MyST), an intelligent tutoring system designed to improve science learning by students in 3rd, 4th and 5th grades (7 to 11 years old) through conversational dialogs with a virtual science tutor. In our study, individual students engage in spoken dialogs with the virtual tutor Marni during 15 to 20 minute…

In a remix of the infamous Hitler meme--taking a scene from the movie, "Downfall" (2005), and adding subtitles appropriate (in this case) for "Kairos" readers--theamishaugur makes a pointed, humorous (to some) commentary on the status of multimodal composition scholars in English departments during job market season.

There has always been a debate around the issue of what it is that improves learning: the instruction itself or the media used for it (Clark 1983; Kozma 1994). It has also been said (Kulik and Kulik 1991; Andrewartha & Wilmot 2001) that computer mediated learning, as opposed to traditional instruction, positively influences the students'…

This paper summarizes how collaborative online projects (COPs) are used to facilitate science content-area learning for English Learners of Hispanic origin. This is a Mexico-USA partnership project funded by the National Science Foundation. A COP is a 10-week thematic science unit, completely online, and bilingual (Spanish and English) designed to…

Researchers, educators, policymakers, and other education stakeholders hope and anticipate that openness and open scholarship will generate positive outcomes for education and scholarship. Given the emerging nature of open practices, educators and scholars are finding themselves in a position in which they can shape and/or be shaped by openness.…

Technology may not be a magic wand, but innovative technology programming can genuinely help children become adept at navigating our increasingly wired world while also helping them develop deductive reasoning, math, and other vital literacy skills. One of the simplest and most powerful tools for technology-based public library programming is…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to first define the "jet principle" of (e-)learning as providing dynamically suitable framework conditions for enhanced learning procedures that combine views from multiple cultures of science. Second it applies this principle to the case of the "Global Studies" curriculum, a unique…

The article explores the use of e-learning in Italian universities. The aim is to understand how the university system has faced this problem or opportunity to date and what weaknesses or developing perspectives may result from multimedia technologies applied to academic teaching management. After a brief review of the current position of Italian…

The authors describe how content-based multimedia search technologies can be used to help learners find new materials and learning pathways by identifying semantic relationships between educational resources in a social learning network. This helps users--both learners and educators--to explore and find material to support their learning aims.…

The paper examined expert literature teachers' coping with a novel textbook, integrating literature with visual arts, which is a particular interdisciplinary case of text-image relations in textbooks. Examination was performed within the framework of teachers' responses to curricular changes and of theory regarding strategies of interdisciplinary…

Background: By rapid developing of the network technology, the internet-based learning methods are substituting the traditional classrooms making them expand to the virtual network learning environment. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of virtual systems on competency-based skills of first-year nursing students.…