This document focuses on the writing skills of college students. The days of students sifting through piles of file cards, producing detailed outlines, and handwriting drafts have slipped into the distant past. Students write quickly and casually with the assistance of technology, and common sense dictates that technology needs to be used to teach…

In this article, I examine distributed scaffolding, an emerging approach in the design of supports for rich learning environments intended to help students develop disciplinary ways of knowing, doing, and communicating. Distributed scaffolding incorporates multiple forms of support that are provided through different means to address the complex…

Business organizations are increasingly adopting collaboration tools to increase communication within the firm. CAMS is a home-grown online collaborative environment which makes heavy use of participant's pictures. Participants, both faculty and students, were asked questions about the benefits and usefulness of pictures in the CAMS collaborative…

This study was designed to examine the current trend and pattern of teachers' concerns about technology integration. Eighty-six in-service teachers in a graduate course participated in the study at a midwestern state university during the summer semester of 2002. The Stages of Concerns (SoC) Questionnaire was used to assess teachers' seven stages…

In the present study, three different pre-school settings were investigated. The dual aim of the study was to analyse the teachers' ways of relating to the computer as a tool in pre-school activity, and to describe the three learning environments focusing upon how the computer was used. Data were collected at three Swedish pre-schools, where one…

In this article, the author touches on the ways that technology can come to the aid of teachers with students who don't speak English. He discusses different word processors that successfully translate foreign text.

Educators have been wrestling with copyright issues for some time. In fact, in developing the S.O.S. for Information Literacy site, the project team had to face the issue with respect to how to handle all those lesson plans in the database and all the images, clipart, and materials that educators upload to the database as support materials for…

The need for designing the next generation of web service-based educational systems with the ability of integrating components from different tools and platforms is now recognised as the major challenge in advanced learning technologies. In this paper, we discuss this issue and we present the conceptual design of such environment, referred to as…

Facilities that accommodate technology are much in demand today and nowhere more so than at colleges and in other learning environments all over the country. But the cry for "high-tech facilities" rings false: Buildings designed simply to look high-tech will be outdated more quickly than ever. It is no surprise that the very best…

Cognizant of the difficulty teachers face in attempting to integrate computers into instructional settings, the authors propose a new technology integration assessment strategy that can guide individual development or be used to track programmatic change. The Technology Integration Assessment Instrument (TIAI) explores seven dimensions of planning…

Laptop computers and Type II applications can provide powerful tools for elementary classrooms, especially if they are combined with authentic instruction. This article provides information and lessons learned from a laptop initiative in an urban elementary school. The goal of the initiative was to develop lesson plans and document techniques that…

While the culture of typical Millennial students, those born after 1978-82, is increasingly recognized as being different1

This article extends the issues and arguments raised in Bernard, Abrami, Lou, and Borokhovski ("Distance Education", 25(2), 175-198, 2004) regarding the design of quantitative, particularly experimental research in distance education. A single experimental, study from the distance education literature is examined from six different perspectives to…

The author addresses the debate over the growing use of technology in early education. Citing a recently released report from the Alliance of Childhood, he argues that technology robs young children of the imaginative play that helps them develop the qualities they will need for future success.

Object-oriented instructional design (OOID) offers the promise of universal access to online instructional materials, increased productivity among trainers and educators, and solutions for individualizing learning. However, it is unclear whether it can fulfill these promises to the degree many envision. As with every new instructional technology,…