As teachers and students increasingly dwell in a digital world, Wikipedia is a powerful presence. While it is wise to plan and teach cautiously with respect to Wikipedia, the author believes that teachers need to acknowledge its stronghold in students' lives and teach correspondingly. That is, social studies teachers must provide opportunities for…

This article describes a simulation activity that can be used to help students see that the estimator "S" is a biased estimator of [sigma]. The activity can be implemented using either a statistical package such as R, Minitab, or a Web applet. In the activity, the students investigate and compare the bias of "S" when sampling from different…

Introduction: A way to find out how scientific thinking in children develops is to focus on the processes that are involved. As such, scientific thinking can be seen as a particular form of problem solving in which the problem solver selects a strategy from the space of possible experiments that can reveal the cause of an event. Notwithstanding…

In a first course of general relativity, it is usually quite difficult for students to grasp the concept of a geodesic. It is supposed to be straight (auto-parallel) and yet it "looks" curved. In these situations, it is very useful to have some explicit examples available which show the different behaviour of geodesics. In this paper, we present…

Planning and implementing teacher professional development is a process of engaging in organisational learning and change. Yet our planning and implementation of professional development is at times a series of one-off sessions and can be quite ad hoc. This paper argues that teacher learning takes place not only through formal sessions but also…

Audience response systems (ARS) are gaining popularity in multiple areas of education. Although its usefulness has been well reported, no study has investigated the accuracy of the technology. The purpose of this study was to validate ARS by assessing three key aspects: signal transmission from the keypad to the receiver, capture of a proper…

Most universities use Information Systems (IS) to perform their daily administrative activities (student enrollment, data files, accountancy, etc.), and an integrated Learning Management System (LMS) to support teaching and learning. However, although a lot of effort has been put into deploying these computerized systems, the data that they…

Extant studies generally recognise that virtual community building is an effective marketing programme for forging deep and enduring affective bonds with consumers. This study extends previous research by proposing and testing a model that investigates key mediating processes (via trust, satisfaction and identification) that underlie the…

How may historians best express history through computer games? This article suggests that the answer lies in correctly correlating historians' goals for teaching with the capabilities of different kinds of computer games. During the development of a game prototype for high school students, the author followed best practices as expressed in the…

Video connects sight and sound, creating a composite experience greater than either alone. More than any other single technology, video is the most powerful way to communicate with others--and an ideal medium for sharing with others the vital learning occurring in music classrooms. In this article, the author leads readers through the process of…

Introduction: Information encountering (finding information while searching for some other information), is a type of opportunistic discovery of information that complements purposeful approaches to finding information. The motivation for this paper was to determine if the current models of information literacy instruction refer to information…

When target-defining features are specified in advance, attentional target selection in visual search is controlled by preparatory top-down task sets. We used ERP measures to study voluntary target selection in the absence of such feature-specific task sets, and to compare it to selection that is guided by advance knowledge about target features.…

This paper describes emergent learning and situates it within learning networks and systems and the broader learning ecology of Web 2.0. It describes the nature of emergence and emergent learning and the conditions that enable emergent, self-organised learning to occur and to flourish. Specifically, it explores whether emergent learning can be…

This study examined the influence of classroom-script structure (high vs. low) during computer-supported collaborative inquiry learning on help-seeking processes and learning gains in 54 student pairs in secondary science education. Screen- and audio-capturing videos were analysed according to a model of the help-seeking process. The results…

A general systematic approach is proposed for the numerical calculation of multi-equilibrium problems. The approach involves several steps: (i) the establishment of balances involving the chemical species in solution (e.g., mass balances, charge balance, and stoichiometric balance for the reaction products), (ii) the selection of the unknowns (the…