Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

RFCs, MOOs, LMSs: Assorted Educational Devices\ud

This paper discusses implicit social consequences of four basic internet protocols. The results are then related to the field of computer-assisted teaching. An educational on-line community is described and compared to the emerging standard of web-based learning management.\u

Responding to Climate Change: The Economy and Economics - Part of the Problem and Solution

The Climate Change Starter’s Guide provides an introduction and overview for education planners and practitioners on the wide range of issues relating to climate change and climate change education, including causes, impacts, mitigation and adaptation strategies, as well as some broad political and economic principles. The aim of this guide is to serve as a starting point for mainstreaming climate change education into school curricula. It has been created to enable education planners and practitioners to understand the issues at hand, to review and analyse their relevance to particular national and local contexts, and to facilitate the development of education policies, curricula, programmes and lesson plans. The guide covers four major thematic areas: 1. the science of climate change, which explains the causes and observed changes; 2. the social and human aspects of climate change including gender, health, migration, poverty and ethics; 3. policy responses to climate change including measures for mitigation and adaptation; and 4. education approaches including education for sustainable development, disaster reduction and sustainable lifestyles. A selection of key resources in the form of publication titles or websites for further reading is provided after each of the thematic sections

Information systems for interactive learning: Design perspective

This paper aims to present and discuss educational issues and relevant research to universities and colleges in the Arabian Gulf Region. This include cultural, students’ learning preferences and the use of information and communication technology. It particularly focuses on interactive learning through the consideration of learning styles. It explores the sequential-global learning styles profile of undergraduate students as part of a continuous research in Information Systems design with a particular focus on the design of Interactive Learning Systems (ILSs). A study to examine the learning style profile of undergraduate students in a cohort of Management Information Systems at a UAE university has been conducted, and a discussion and recommendations on how these findings can be reflected on the design of ILSs are provided

What is the problem to which interactive multimedia is the solution?

This is something of an unusual paper. It serves as both the reason for and the result of a small number of leading academics in the field, coming together to focus on the question that serves as the title to this paper: What is the problem to which interactive multimedia is the solution? Each of the authors addresses this question from their own viewpoint, offering informed insights into the development, implementation and evaluation of multimedia. The result of their collective work was also the focus of a Western Australian Institute of Educational Research seminar, convened at Edith Cowan University on 18 October, 1994. The question posed is deliberately rhetorical - it is asked to allow those represented here to consider what they think are the significant issues in the fast-growing field of multimedia. More directly, the question is also asked here because nobody else has considered it worth asking: for many multimedia is done because it is technically possible, not because it offers anything that is of value or provides the solution to a particular problem. The question, then, is answered in various ways by each of the authors involved and each, in their own way, consider a range of fundamental issues concerning the nature, place and use of multimedia - both in education and in society generally. By way of an introduction, the following provides a unifying context for the various contributions made here

Peripatetic electronic teachers in higher education

This paper explores the idea of information and communications technology providing a medium enabling higher education teachers to act as freelance agents. The notion of a ‘Peripatetic Electronic Teacher’ (PET) is introduced to encapsulate this idea. PETs would exist as multiple telepresences (pedagogical, professional, managerial and commercial) in PET‐worlds; global networked environments which support advanced multimedia features. The central defining rationale of a pedagogical presence is described in detail and some implications for the adoption of the PET‐world paradigm are discussed. The ideas described in this paper were developed by the author during a recently completed Short‐Term British Telecom Research Fellowship, based at the BT Adastral Park

The limits and possibilities of ICT in education

I will begin this article by clarifying the concept of Educational Technology and its related terms. I will then go on to analyse the more conclusive results of research in this field in order to describe the projects in which I have been involved, where technology was used to produce innovation. This article does not mention any cognitive or educational “revolutionary experience”, since this would surpass the limits of what technology is capable of accomplishing. Part of the education of the new generations has to be conservative, i.e., the experience and knowledge constructed by earlier generations has to be passed down. Disciplinary knowledge is an exemplary condensation of human effort and talent. How can technology support the transmission and acquisition of such knowledge? Besides being capable of using technology, should the new generations not also have a rational and educated discourse on the subject? Is this not the role of the school also? These are some of the main issues I wish to address