"Necessity is the mother of invention," as the saying goes, and in this case, it surely was. A telecommuting faculty for a Midwest public university wanted to see a graduate student's presentation as a guest speaker in an instructional technology course on campus. However, this faculty lives in another state, so that was impossible. As a daily…

Most students now have access to devices such as digital cameras and mobile phones that are capable of taking short video clips outdoors. Such clips can be used with powerful ICT tools, such as Tracker, Excel and TI-Nspire, to extract time and coordinate data about a moving object, to produce scattergrams and to fit models. In this article we…

One of the difficulties in learning Chinese characters is distinguishing similar characters. This can cause misunderstanding and miscommunication in daily life. Thus, it is important for students learning the Chinese language to be able to distinguish similar characters and understand their proper usage. In this paper, the authors propose a game…

This paper argues that designing collections of "closed" educational resources (content and technologies) for use by specific student cohorts and collections of open educational resources for use by any "learner" require different design approaches. Learning design for formal courses has been a research topic for over 10 years…

This article proceeds from the position that obsession with technology is a distraction from librarians' true mission and explores how a constellation of emerging information technologies might empower librarians to reconsider their commitment to the technological treadmill and instead turn to a more humanistic orientation. This article presents…

As soon as the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) announced last May that it would be giving all 400 incoming freshmen Apple iPads, a lively debate broke out online at TUAW.com (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) between people who saw it as a marketing gimmick to attract students and others who believed it was an honest attempt to implement a new…

An approach is presented that utilizes a spreadsheet to allow students to explore different means of calculating and visualizing how the charge on peptides and proteins varies as a function of pH. In particular, the concept of isoelectric point is developed to allow students to compare the results of their spreadsheet calculations with those of…

Laboratory instruction is a major component of the engineering and technology undergraduate curricula. Traditional laboratory instruction is hampered by several factors including limited access to resources by students and high laboratory maintenance cost. A photorealistic 3D computer-simulated laboratory for undergraduate instruction in…

Our focus is on the design of systems (pedagogical, technical, social) that encourage mathematical abstraction, a process we refer to as "designing for abstraction." In this paper, we draw on detailed design experiments from our research on children's understanding about chance and distribution to re-present this work as a case study in designing…

This analysis of the literatures on school educational technology leadership addresses definitions of school technology leaders and leadership, their role in educational change, and why schools are now changing as a result of 21st century advancements in technology. The literatures disagree over the definition of educational technology leadership.…

This paper reflects on the current position of virtual learning environments (VLEs) in universities and speculates about likely future directions for e-learning. Using accepted models of technology innovation and looking at current Web trends, it considers the extent to which e-learning is truly embedded in institutions, how Web 2.0 is being used…

"Weblogs" or "blogs" are increasingly visible in higher education settings. Some scholars suggest that blogs are useful because of their reflective nature. However, as this review indicates the research regarding blogs is largely self-report data (surveys, interviews) or content analyses. This review summarizes results of this existing research on…

The concepts of drafting and revision were developed out of process theory and research done in the early 1980s, an era when word processing was not as pervasive or standardized as it is now. This paper reexamines those concepts, drawing on an analysis of two decades of previous college-level studies of writing processes in relation to word…

Although the Internet has revolutionized communication and provided a new educational tools for student learning, it has also created risks and raised ethical issues for students of all grades, as it has created many opportunities for illegal, inappropriate and unsafe behavior among all participants. Increasingly, K12 educators are seeing the need…

This chapter explores the tremendous growth in the use of the Internet to deliver distance education at community colleges. The author examines various definitions of online education, including the types of courses, programs, and degrees available and the types of community colleges that offer greater amounts of online programming. Considerations…