Reviews

Web‐Teaching ‐ A Guide to Interactive Teaching for the World‐Wide Web by David W. Brooks, New York: Plenum, 1997. ISBN: 0–306–45552–8. Paperback, 214 pages. $30

Electronic Resources and Academic Libraries, 1980-2000: A Historical Perspective

published or submitted for publicatio

Chapter 1 : Learning Online

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

E-Learning in Postsecondary Education

Over the past decade postsecondary education has been moving increasingly from the class room to online. During the fall 2010 term 31 percent of U.S. college students took at least one online course. The primary reasons for the growth of e-learning in the nation\u27s colleges and universities include the desire of those institutions to generate new revenue streams, improve access, and offer students greater scheduling flexibility. Yet the growth of e-learning has been accompanied by a continuing debate about its effectiveness and by the recognition that a number of barriers impede its widespread adoption in higher education

University students' perspective on blended learning

This research project aimed to explore students’ perspective on an appropriate mix of online and-face-to-face activities in a master’s programme in library and information science at an Australian university. Identifying aspects that students evaluate as supportive, challenging and efficient in their learning is important for the design of an appropriate mix in blended learning courses. Twenty-three master’s students responded to a questionnaire containing 40 open-ended and closed questions. Applying both statistical and content analysis provides a deeper understanding of students’ responses. Students like the flexibility and the convenience of online learning, but also the possibilities of face-to-face interaction with teachers and peers for building personal learning networks. Students expect an equal quality of learning delivery and criticised the quality of online participation and lecture recordings. Blended learning is an approach that supports a range of learning styles and life styles

Coming Out of the Dungeon: Mathematics and Role-Playing Games

After hiding it for many years, I have a confession to make. Throughout middle school and high school my friends and I would gather almost every weekend, spending hours using numbers, probability, and optimization to build models that we could use to simulate almost anything. That’s right. My big secret is simple. I was a high school mathematical modeler. Of course, our weekend mathematical models didn’t bear any direct relationship to the models we explored in our mathematics and science classes. You would probably not even recognize our regular gatherings as mathematical exercises. If you looked into the room, you’d see a group of us gathered around a table, scribbling on sheets of paper, rolling dice, eating pizza, and talking about dragons, magical spells, and sword fighting. So while I claim we were engaged in mathematical modeling, I suspect that very few math classes built models like ours. After all, how many math teachers have constructed or had their students construct a mathematical representation of a dragon, a magical spell, or a swordfight? And yet, our role-playing games (RPGs) were very much mathematical models of reality — certainly not the reality of our everyday experience, but a reality nonetheless, one intended to simulate a particular kind of world. Most often for us this was the medieval, high-fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), but we also played games with science fiction or modern-day espionage settings. We learned a lot about math, mythology, medieval history, teamwork, storytelling, and imagination in the process. And, when existing games were inadequate vehicles for our imagination, we modified them or created new ones. In doing so, we learned even more about math. Now that I am a mathematics professor, I find myself reflecting on those days as a “fantasy modeler” and considering various questions. What is the relationship between my two interests of fantasy games and mathematics? Does having been a gamer make me a better mathematician or modeler? Does my mathematical experience make me a better gamer? These different aspects of my life may seem mostly unconnected; indeed, the “nerd” stereotype is associated with both activities, but despite public perception, the community of role-players includes many people who are not scientifically-minded. So we cannot say that role-players like math, or math-lovers role-play, because “that is simply what nerds do.” To get at the deeper question of how mathematics and role-playing are related, we first need to look at the processes of gaming, game designing, and modeling

The Tutor's Role

This chapter addresses three questions about being an effective online tutor: 1. Why do we still think that online tutoring can principally draw its basis from face-to-face group processes and dynamics or traditional pedagogy? 2. Does the literature tell us anything more than we would make as an intelligent guess? 3. Do we really know what an ‘effective’ online tutor would be doing? The OTiS participants have gone some way to answering these questions, through the presentation and discussion of their own online tutoring experiences. Literature in this area is still limited, and suffers from the need for timeliness of publication to be useful. Intelligent guesses are all very well, but much better as a source of information for online tutors are the reflections and documented experiences of practitioners. These experiences reveal that face-to-face pedagogy has some elements to offer the online tutor, but that there are key differences and there is a need to examine the processes and dynamics of online learning to inform online tutoring

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research