Evaluating Wiki as a tool to promote quality academic writing skills
In this study we investigated undergraduate teacher trainees' use of wikis, focusing on the use of shared spaces to communicate ideas and generate course specific content. We explored how students, through such activities, were to able to improve their academic writing skills. We discuss writing as a social practice and discuss how wikis might promote better academic writing. With data derived from student discussion boards and a post-module e-mail questionnaire (N=35) our findings indicate that
An Interactive Virtual Global Cultural Course: Building a Real Time Cost Effective Global Collaborat
A virtual collaborative environment was created at East Carolina University, using videoconference technology via regular internet to bring students from 18 different countries, 2 at a time, to the same classroom in real time to learn about each otherÂ’s culture. Students from two countries are partnered one on one,, they meet for 4-5 weeks, and submit a joint paper. Then the same process is repeated for two other countries. Lectures and student discussions are managed with pre-determined topics
Transforming classroom teaching & learning through technology: Analysis of a case study
The paper discusses the results of a research project based on the field testing of a course aimed at developing arithmetic problem solving skills in primary school pupils. The course was designed to incorporate e-learning techniques, including the use of ARI@ITALES authoring tools. These tools allowed the integration in the course of constructivist activities based on interaction with a set of different microworlds. The aims of the project were twofold: to analyse how the adopted approach and t
Special Session OER: Integrating OER and Instructional Design – Towards a more holistic view
Instructional Design (ID) has been introduced as a fundamental approach to design learning environments with a strong focus on media usage. In this regard, recent transformations in the realm of ICT have gained an increasing influence on learning and teaching practices, thus challenging conventional methods. Advocators of sophisticated web-based tools such as Weblogs, Wikis, or e-portfolios which are at the heart of the “Open Educational Resources (OER”) movement proclaim a new dimension of le
Patterns Instruction in Software Engineering
The paper deals with a training system with a client-server architecture created for students who are learning to design and implement object-oriented software systems with reusable components, and also targeting those users who wish become accustomed with (or improve their skills related to) software design. The paper briefly presents the design patterns which are to be found in the software library, as well as the manner of applying them. The user of such a system has five types of patterns at
Designing and application of E-portfolio for teacher training
Portfolio is not just a magic word but it is mandatory for everyone in today's free market. Some companies started their own portfolios for employee assessment. Other has them for optimization purposes or even education. Each of us first encounter portfolio in schools. Big books with grades and other useful data were in them. In the teacher education we also have portfolios and the most important is teacher training portfolio. Based on this portfolios employees decide who to hire or not. With th
CAS for Mathematics E-Learning - a European Perspective
We report on activities and progress in a European (Comenius 2.1) project "LTMLearning Tools for Mathematics" that creates multilingual learning units on the basis of Mathematica and M@th Desktop. A customized user-interface based on palettes is optimized for use in class, and notebooks provide associated math content with a strong emphasis on visualization. The multilingual nature of the learning units makes them useful for transnational school collaboration projects, as has been demonstrated i
Real remote physics experiments across Internet - inherent part of Integrated E-Learning
Implementation of the real remote experiments across the Internet into teaching process, up till now not available, enables introduction of Integrated e-Learning, composed of three components: the real remote experiments across the Internet, the simulation applets and the electronic interactive textbooks. We present here the prospective remote laboratory system with data transfer using Intelligent School Experimental System (ISES) as hardware and ISES WEB Control kit as software. This approach e
E-Learning Strategies in Academia-Industry Knowledge Exchange
The information and communication technologies are transforming the way people learn. E-learning system not only provides new possibilities for personalized learning at home or workplace, but also reduces the requirements of the expensive classroom training and introduces new innovative forms of knowledge transferring. In this paper, we describe an e-learning platform developed during the first year of the CoMSON European project.
Exploitation of Croquet CVE Platform for supporting Collaborative e-Learning Environments
This paper reviews the features of five 3 dimensional networked virtual environments which support collaborative learning applications, through the comparison of the tools and services they offer. Following that, we justify our choice of platform, which is the Croquet platform, and discuss design and implementation issues. Finally we present the results of the evaluation process of the virtual environment we developed, which consisted of the participation of twelve postgraduate students who comp
Learning through investigative games and internet on-line activities
Internet is an important phenomenon in our society and already become one of the mostly used media around the world. In human history this is the first media, which is broadly used in so little time. Obviously, it plays an important role also in the life of our children. They use it for communication with each other (chat, email), they use it for finding new information to school, and they search the web or even create their own websites. The investigative games on internet are competitions, thr
A User-Friendly Sign Language Chat
The introduced concept of a gesture based sign language chat enables the communication of hearing impaired people over networks, including concerns regarding low throughput and bandwidth characteristics. Existing applications handle that task not appropriate, since either high bandwidth networks are necessary or the extensibility of the vocabulary is complicated for untrained users. Thereby our approach facilitates existing image recognition techniques for the determination of gestures which are
New Learning Methodologies and Tools for Corporate
E-Learning
While e-learning has become accepted in large companies as a standard option for training, most corporate e-learning has not produced the hoped-for performance improvement. Yet elearning has a tremendous amount of unrealized potential to provide high-quality, educationally-sound, engaging training that improves employeesÂ’ performance. Corporate elearningÂ’s lack of success seems to be due to the dearth of widely-publicized methods to teach skills needed by corporate employees, and by the percei
Implementing Blended Learning for 1000 Mechanical Engineering Students
The module Techniques of Programming of the RWTH Aachen University is one of five case studies within the EU funded project Blend-XL – Finding a Balance in Blended Learning with eXtra Large Students Groups. During the project the module changed from a face-to-face module into a blended learning one. Therefore a blended learning concept has been developed which includes a special virtual learning environment. With the help of the blended learning concept the main problem areas of this module, th
Conceptions en santé animale et tutorat assisté par ordinateur
Le travail présenté a été effectué dans le cadre de la validation d'un système expert en santé animal développée par l'INRA. Les conceptions d'éleveurs sont analysées en situation de résolution de problème en élevage porcin afin de les confronter avec celles formalisées dans le système expert porcidact.
Can Language and Culture Go Hand in Hand?
Cross- Linguistic Influence in the L2 Acquisition Process
Can Language and Culture go Hand in Hand? Using examples of Japanese as L1 and English as
L2, we seek to demonstrate how transfer and interference from oneÂ’s native language can impact expression in a language being acquired. We make some suggestions as to how to tackle transfer and interference, and briefly discuss the potential of further research to this effect in CALL.
Implementing the Challenge Based Learning in Classroom Scenarios
Our Challenge Based Learning (CBL) method can be described as a special form of problem-based learning, in which the problems are of realistic, open-ended nature. Additionally, CBL contains features of experiential and project-based learning approaches. CBL is supported by the provision of Digital Experimentation Toolkits (DExTs) which comprise materials, initial instructions, references to web resources and specific software tools. Within the COLDEX project, a number of remote sites which gener
Collaborative Writing in a Computer-integrated Classroom for Early Learning
This paper describes a collaborative experiment with a special software application supporting the acquisition of initial reading and writing skills embedded in a computer-integrated environment for young children. The NIMIS project has set up three Computer-integrated Classrooms across Europe with appropriate "roomware" environments, i.e. furniture, hardware and software to support early learning. Here, we present a collaborative writing task facilitated by a shared workspace system, that has b
Computer Supported Interaction Analysis of Group Problem Solving
Collaboration is widely regarded as beneficial for learning. Collaboration is the mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve a problem together. It has been conclusively argued that a focus on the process of collaboration is necessary in order to understand the value of working together with peers for learning. In accordance with the approach of open distributed learning environments (ODLEs), we have developed a framework system for computer-supported cooperative learning
Toward Cognitive Tutoring in a Collaborative, Web-Based Environment
A potentially powerful way to aid in the authoring of intelligent tutoring systems is to directly leverage student interaction log data. While problem-solving data has been used in the past to guide the development of tutors, such data has not been used as a means to directly construct an initial tutoring system model. We propose an approach called bootstrapping novice data (BND) in which a problem-solving tool is integrated with tutor development software through log files and that integration
