Information Technology Education in the Sri Lankan School System: Challenges and Perspectives
Introduction of Information Technology into the secondary school curriculum in Sri Lanka is a very recent development. The subject General Information Technology (GIT) was included for G.C.E. Advanced Level Examination in 2005 while plans are afoot to introduce Information Technology as a subject for G.C.E. Ordinary Level from 2008. Results of the first GIT examination held in 2005 clearly show poor performance by students. Considering the large amount of money spent for Information Technology e
Digital astronomy in education
What causes seasons? Why day and night durations are so different with seasons alternation? Why the position of the full moon seems directed to the south in summer while it seems directed to the north in winter? It is the purpose of this computer simulation to provide an interactive application, programmed in Java language to explore the issues related to the above questions.
Proposal for convergence of e-learning systems for t-learning
This article presents considerations about viability on reutilize existing web based e- Learning systems on Interactive Digital TV environment according to Digital TV standard adopted in Brazil. Considering the popularity of Moodle system in academic and corporative area, such system was chosen as a foundation for a survey into its properties to create a specification of an Application Programming Interface (API) for convergence to t-Learning characteristics that demands efforts in interface des
The framework for easy intelligent tutor programs creation
In this paper the framework for intelligent tutor programs creation is described. It separates the logical part of tutor program and technical parts like user interface, database connectivity, etc. The intelligent program is built in specially developed graphical tool by means of performing primitive actions to create task model as a graph with states and conditional transitions. So it may be composed by a teacher with base programming skills.
Lifelong learning for the Italian Public Administration: the MarchE-Learning Project
This paper describes a local experience for the development of a framework program to set up a Continuous Learning System for Public Administration employees of Marche Region, in Central Italy. Such program belongs to a greater national program, aimed at modernizing the Italian Public Administration by means of the application of ICTs. This program is also part of Italian participation in the European Unions Lisbon Strategy, aimed at turning Europe into one of the most competitive knowledge-ba
Participatory Design for Developing Web Services Supporting Learning in Communities of Practice: the
The paper aims at showing how Participatory Design contributes to the understanding of learning processes related to Communities of Practice (CoPs) and, at the same time, to the design and implementation of Web Services to support organisational and individual learning in CoPs. This research builds on the European PALETTE project.
Providing feedback in web-based learning
In distance learning supported by LMS, it is extremely important to provide automated or partially automated feedback about learning outcomes to students as well as feedback about the efficiency and quality of teaching and learning to teachers and to management of the institution that provides web-based learning courses. In this article, we present the solutions implemented in the LMS eCampus that are theoretically grounded and have been proved in praxis.
Interactive computer aided learning in social science education: strategies, scenarios, tools, and e
This paper presents the e-learning project Strategies for Networked Learning at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna, its structure, objectives and technological infrastructure. Furthermore, it discusses a blended learning case study and the selected results of an evaluation of blended learning courses conducted within the project. As these evaluations indicate, blended learning scenarios need to be very well planned and evaluated by considering the
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
Mixing video , audio and still photography for actual topics in multimedia demonstrated on a multime
The paper is dealing with the method putting audio, video, still photography together to get the best effect for an normal audience to transport actual problems mainly in visual form without putting to much effort into text.
Effective Teaching and Learning: Using ICT
Findings and recommendations on effective teaching practice - with the aim of providing material for improving the quality of teaching and learning and for informing developments in initial teacher education and continuing development.,Research report for NRDC
The use of a computerized brain atlas to support knowledge-based training in radiology
Trainers of radiologists face the particular challenges of teaching normal and abnormal appearance for a variety of imaging modalities, providing access to a large appropriately-indexed case library, and teaching a consistent approach to the reporting of cases. The computer has the potential to address these issues, to supplement conventional teaching of radiology by providing case-based tutoring and diagnostic support based on a large library of images of normal and abnormal anatomy, fully desc
Task and Interaction Regulation in Controlling a Traffic Simulation
In collaborative problem solving, metacognition not only covers strategic reasoning related to the task but also reasoning related to the interaction itself. The hypothesis underlying this work states that regulation of the interaction and regulation of the task are closely related mechanisms and that their co-occurrence facilitates collaborative problem solving. These assumptions are tested experimentally with a traffic simulator. The results show that co-occurrence of task and interaction regu
Learning to collaborate: Designing collaboration in a 3-D game environment
To respond to learning needs, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) must provide instructional support. The particular focus of this paper is on designing collaboration in a 3-D virtual game environment intended to make learning more effective by promoting student opportunities for interaction. The empirical experiment eScape, which encourages learners to solve problems collaboratively, is also presented. eScape is a design experiment, comprising both the process of designing a collab
An approach to distance learning curriculum appropriation
The work presented aims at supporting distance learning students in their appropriation of a curriculum. We propose an approach that consists in helping students to construct individual projects. We dissociate different aspects (planning, evaluation and regulation) that can be useful for this purpose, propose a technological approach (epiphyte system, ontology-based model) and example of tools currently provided by the Saafir framework.
Regulative support during inquiry learning with
simulations and modeling
Many factors impact learning; the environment and resources available, the domain, how much prior-knowledge a student has, and how well they make use of their metacognitive skills, all of these factors impact new knowledge creation. The series of studies described in this dissertation focuses on the latter; i.e. the metacognitive skillfulness of students. Known collectively as self-regulation, planning, monitoring, and evaluation, when applied appropriately will enhance learning. Students who m
Open Distance Inter-University Synergies Between Europe, Africa and the Middle East (ODISEAME)
The challenge facing new technologies is whether they can contribute to a qualitative step up and to education for all as a process of facilitating the development of creative people with the ability to think critically and to engage in socially relevant decision making. In this paper, we describe a project whose purpose is to develop a learning environment that takes into account current expertise in learning theory in order to facilitate productive collaboration in a way that leads to active c
Designing biases that augment socio-cognitive interactions
This chapter questions the assumption that the best environment for computer-supported collaborative learning is the one that most closely reproduces the features of face-to-face collaboration. Empirical studies have failed to establish the superiority of group interaction with richer media. Instead, the chapter explores media features that do not exist in face-to-face interactions and explains how these features might augment group cognition. The first feature, the persistency of the informatio
Shared conceptualisations in weblogs
In this paper we investigate how conceptualisations can be identified in weblogs using language technology (automated text analysis). We focus on getting a handle on both the concepts bloggers use and the way they think these concepts are related. The analysis of these conceptualisations can then be applied to a single weblog, resulting in a visualisation of potential conceptualisations the blogger wants to share with the outside world. Another type of analysis is to determine the overlap, or sh
Towards educational data mining: Using data mining methods for automated chat analysis to understand
In this paper we investigate the application of data mining methods to provide learners with real-time adaptive feedback on the nature and patterns of their on-line communication while learning collaboratively.We derived two models
for classifying chat messages using data mining techniques and tested these on an actual data set [16]. The reliability of the classification of chat messages is established by comparing the models performance to that of humans. Results indicate that the classificatio
