Web assisted teaching: an undergraduate experience

The emergence of the Internet has created a number of claims as to the future of education and the possibility of dramatically changing the way in which education is delivered. Much of the attention has focussed on the adoption of teaching methods that are solely web-based. We set out to incorporate web-based teaching as support for more traditional teaching methods to improve the learning outcomes for students. This first step into web-based teaching was developed to harness the benefits of web-based teaching tools without supplanting traditional teaching methods. The aim of this paper is to report our experience with web-assisted teaching in two undergraduate courses, Accounting Information Systems and Management Accounting Services, during 2000. The paper evaluates the approach taken and proposes a tentative framework for developing future web-assisted teaching applications. We believe that web-assisted and web-based teaching are inevitable outcomes of the telecommunications and computer revolution and that academics cannot afford to become isolated from the on-line world. A considered approach is needed to ensure the integration of web-based features into the overall structure of a course. The components of the course material and the learning experiences students are exposed to need to be structured and delivered in a way that ensures they support student learning rather than replacing one form of learning with another. Therefore a careful consideration of the structure, content, level of detail and time of delivery needs to be integrated to create a course structure that provides a range of student learning experiences that are complimentary rather than competing. The feedback was positive from both extramural (distance) and internal students, demonstrating to us that web sites can be used as an effective teaching tool in support of more traditional teaching methods as well as a tool for distance education. The ability to harness the positives of the web in conjunction with more traditional teaching modes is one that should not be overlooked in the move to adopt web based instruction methods. Web-based teaching need not be seen as an all or nothing divide but can be used as a useful way of improving the range and type of learning experiences open to students. The Web challenges traditional methods and thinking but it also provides tools to develop innovative solutions to both distance and on campus learning. Further research is needed to determine how we can best meet the needs of our students while maintaining high quality learning outcomes

Using metadata to implement eforms and their associated databases

Web forms (eForms) and databases are at present widely used for data handling in most web applications. While eForms are used for data gathering and display, databases are used for data storage. To connect and interface an eForm to a database, an eForm processor is used. The eForm processor supports data saving, retrieval, update, and delete. In most web applications, eForms, eForm processors, and databases are designed and implemented separately. This leads to two main challenges: One, complexity in the manipulation of eForms and their associated database; and two, difficulty in the reproduction and reuse of existing eForms. To address the above-identified challenges, this thesis proposes the use of metadata in the creation and implementation of both eForms and their associated databases. Our approach comprises a two-part solution: One, modeling domain’s metadata and two, creating a tool, called Delk eForm Creator. To model domain metadata, Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) was used. However, to analyse the tool’s requirement, Putting Usability First (PUF) approach was used. In order to demonstrate the applicability of our solution approach, Delk eForm Creator was used to create a set of Metadata and three specific eForms based on a generic eForm. The created eForms were rendered in different web browsers and used to enter data into the associated databases. It was observed that Delk eForm Creator successfully generated a Generic eForm based on the Domain Metadata. Moreover, three different Specific eForms were successfully generated based on one Generic eForm, thereby leading to a reusable Generic eForm. We conclude that the metadata-based approach of implementing eForms, as proposed in this thesis, is a viable technique to creating eForms and their associated databases. The approach enables users to easily create, maintain, and reuse eForms and databases

A spectral estimation toolkit for Java applications

AbstractThis paper examines the capability, performance, and relevance of a high-performance advanced signal processing toolkit in Java, a programming language for Web-based applications. To demonstrate the simplicity, ease, and application use of the toolkit, a spectral estimation applet has been developed in the Java environment using advanced Internet technologies such as Remote Method Invocation (RMI). This application provides an interactive and visual approach in understanding theoretical concepts of advanced signal processing methods and shows the need to create more application applets to better understand additional concepts in signal and image processing. Furthermore, a toolkit with limited functionality and different framework has been developed for embedded and handheld devices such as cellular phones and palm pilots. This toolkit is also shown to be useful in developing applications MIDlets on those devices

Using Web Pages to Teach Mathematical Modeling: Some Ideas and Suggestions

Mathematical modeling can perhaps be best defined as “the process of scientific inquiry” for mathematics. This is obviously a comfortable mode for teachers of science, but is rarely seen in the mathematics classrooms of today. This paper explores the possibilities of using interactive web pages to help facilitate an understanding of practical applications based mathematics. Because the scientific process is emphasized as the general operating framework, situations where students can hypothesize and experiment, and create data tables are most valuable. Special emphasis is placed on the fact that students and teachers both need to re-conceptualize effective mathematics instruction in order to really embrace a modeling approach

A Web Based Approach to Virtual Appliance Creation, Programming and Management

The Internet and Web technology is advancing at a frantic pace, expanding into almost every aspect of our everyday life. One of the latest scientific activities for the Internet and the Web is the so-called pervasive or ubiquitous computing where networking plays a vital role in its core computational framework. In this, people are able to use the Internet and Web to manage the operation of embedded network devices, services and to coordinate their services in ways that create applications such as smart-homes, smart-offices, smart-cars etc, collectively referred to as intelligent environments. For ordinary people (non technologists) to be able to use this technology, it is required that the interaction between the users and the environment must be as transparent and simple as possible, employing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces wherever possible. A popular approach to empowering users to customise the functionality of their environments is via end-user programming. In this work-in-progress paper we describe an approach based on using a web based GUI to augment earlier work of ours concerning an end user programming paradigm known as Pervasive interactive Programming (PiP), in a way that makes it more flexible and easy to use. By doing this, we present a conceptual model and discuss the issues in developing and using this model. © 2010 IEEE

Flexible RNA design under structure and sequence constraints using formal languages

The problem of RNA secondary structure design (also called inverse folding) is the following: given a target secondary structure, one aims to create a sequence that folds into, or is compatible with, a given structure. In several practical applications in biology, additional constraints must be taken into account, such as the presence/absence of regulatory motifs, either at a specific location or anywhere in the sequence. In this study, we investigate the design of RNA sequences from their targeted secondary structure, given these additional sequence constraints. To this purpose, we develop a general framework based on concepts of language theory, namely context-free grammars and finite automata. We efficiently combine a comprehensive set of constraints into a unifying context-free grammar of moderate size. From there, we use generic generic algorithms to perform a (weighted) random generation, or an exhaustive enumeration, of candidate sequences. The resulting method, whose complexity scales linearly with the length of the RNA, was implemented as a standalone program. The resulting software was embedded into a publicly available dedicated web server. The applicability demonstrated of the method on a concrete case study dedicated to Exon Splicing Enhancers, in which our approach was successfully used in the design of \emph{in vitro} experiments.Comment: ACM BCB 2013 - ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics (2013

Web-based Software Integration for Dissemination of Archival Images: the Frontiers of Science Website

The Frontiers of Science illustrated comic strip of 'science fact' ran from 1961 to 1982, syndicated worldwide through over 600 newspapers. The Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the University of Sydney in association with Sydney eScholarship, digitized all 939 strips. We aimed to create a website that could disseminate these comic strips to scholars, enthusiasts and the general public. We wanted to enable users to search and browse through the images simply and effectively, with an intuitive and novel viewing platform. Time and resource constraints dictated the use of (mostly open source) code modules wherever possible and the integration and customisation of a range of web-based applications, code snippets and technologies (DSpace, eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), OmniFormat, JQuery Tools, Thickbox and Zoomify), stylistically pulled together using CSS. This approach allowed for a rapid development cycle (6 weeks) to deliver the site on time as well as provide us with a framework for similar projects

Collab-Hub: A system for creating collaborative telematic music performances with web-based instruments and creative development platforms

Collab-Hub is a networking tool for sharing data across the internet for multimedia collaboration. Through CollabHub, web audio applications, custom hardware controllers/instruments, and digital instruments created for embedded and desktop computers can all be designed around a single framework, providing a unified approach to creating multi-modal networked experiences. In this talk, we discuss the design of the Collab-Hub system and provide examples of using it to create interaction layouts between web-based instruments/interfaces and digital musical instruments designed in Max and Pure Data. We also showcase custom APIs for developing audiovisual software clients in Unity and hardware clients through Arduino. An analysis of pertinent historical precedents highlights the advantages Collab-Hub provides to artists who may not have experience developing collaborative projects between browsers and desktop software or may be entirely new to designing telematic and remote performance environments. A showcase of works created with Collab-Hub (featuring networked interactivity across the internet, digital instrument design through the aforementioned creative development platforms and the WebAudio API, and multimodal art technologies) demonstrates the wide variety of artistic endeavors made possible through the framework

Methods and techniques for generation and integration of Web ontology data

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.Data integration over the web or across organizations encounters several unfavorable features: heterogeneity, decentralization, incompleteness, and uncertainty, which prevent information from being fully utilized for advanced applications such as decision support services. The basic idea of ontology related approaches for data integration is to use one or more ontology schemas to interpret data from different sources. Several issues will come up when actually implementing the idea: (1) How to develop the domain ontology schema(s) used for the integration; (2) How to generate ontology data for domain ontology schema if the data are not in the right format and to create and manage ontology data in an appropriate way; (3) How to improve the quality of integrated ontology data by reducing duplications and increasing completeness and certainty. This thesis focuses on the above issues and develops a set of methods to tackle them. First, a key information mining method is developed to facilitate the development of interested domain ontology schemas. It effectively extracts from the web sites useful terms and identifies taxonomy information which is essential to ontology schema construction. A prototype system is developed to use this method to help create domain ontology schemas. Second, this study develops two complemented methods which are light weighted and more semantic web oriented to address the issue of ontology data generation. One method allows users to convert existing structured data (mostly XML data) to ontology data; another enables users to create new ontology data directly with ease.In addition, a web-based system is developed to allow users to manage the ontology data collaboratively and with customizable security constraints. Third, this study also proposes two methods to perform ontology data matching for the improvement of ontology data quality when an integration happens. One method uses the clustering approach. It makes use of the relational nature of the ontology data and captures different situations of matching, therefore resulting in an improvement of performance compared with the traditional canopy clustering method. The other method goes further by using a learning mechanism to make the matching more adaptive. New features are developed for training matching classifier by exploring particular characteristics of ontology data. This method also achieves better performance than those with only ordinary features. These matching methods can be used to improve data quality in a peer-to-peer framework which is proposed to integrate available ontology data from different peers

An Approach Towards Classifying and Navigating RDF data based on Pattern Structures

International audienceWith an increased interest in machine processable data, more and more data is now published in RDF (Resource Description Framework) format. This RDF data is present in independent and distributed resources which needs to be centralized, navigated and searched for domain specific applications. This paper proposes a new approach based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to create a navigation space over semantic web data. This approach uses an extension of FCA and takes RDF triples and RDF Schema present on several independent sources and provide centralized access over the data resulting from several resources. Afterwards, SPARQL queries can be posed over this navigation space to access these distributed resources from one platform for information retrieval purposes