Research on ICT in K-12 schools e A review of experimental and survey-based studies in computers & education 2011 to 2015

International audienceWhat is the role of a journal? Is it to follow the research or lead it? For the former, it is to serve as an archival record of the scholarship in a field. It can serve to permit the research community to engage with each other via the written record. But, for the latter, it can serve the research community by pointing out gaps in the research based on the archival record. This review is intended to do just that

Academics' use of courseware materials: A survey

Learning technology has yet to enter the mainstream of higher education. The UFC-funded Teaching and Learning Technology (TLT) programme is attempting to change this by sponsoring projects concerned with courseware production and delivery. These efforts could be thwarted if the Not Invented Here syndrome prevents the use of technology-based teaching and learning materials outside the originating departments. To gain a clearer understanding of why academics have been rejecting much existing courseware, and to establish the extent of the Not Invented Here syndrome, we carried out a survey of 800 academics in eight UK universities. The survey proved to be exceptionally revealing

Computer-Aided Palaeography, Present and Future

The field of digital palaeography has received increasing attention in recent years, partly because palaeographers often seem subjective in their views and do not or cannot articulate their reasoning, thereby creating a field of authorities whose opinions are closed to debate. One response to this is to make palaeographical arguments more quantitative, although this approach is by no means accepted by the wider humanities community, with some arguing that handwriting is inherently unquantifiable. This paper therefore asks how palaeographical method might be made more objective and therefore more widely accepted by non-palaeographers while still answering critics within the field. Previous suggestions for objective methods before computing are considered first, and some of their shortcomings are discussed. Similar discussion in forensic document analysis is then introduced and is found relevant to palaeography, though with some reservations. New techniques of "digital" palaeography are then introduced; these have proven successful in forensic analysis and are becoming increasingly accepted there, but they have not yet found acceptance in the humanities communities. The reasons why are discussed, and some suggestions are made for how the software might be designed differently to achieve greater acceptance. Finally, a prototype framework is introduced which is designed to provide a common basis for experiments in "digital" palaeography, ideally enabling scholars to exchange quantitative data about scribal hands, exchange processes for generating this data, articulate both the results themselves and the processes used to produce them, and therefore to ground their arguments more firmly and perhaps find greater acceptance

"Revolution? What Revolution?" Successes and limits of computing technologies in philosophy and religion

Computing technologies like other technological innovations in the modern West are inevitably introduced with the rhetoric of "revolution". Especially during the 1980s (the PC revolution) and 1990s (the Internet and Web revolutions), enthusiasts insistently celebrated radical changes— changes ostensibly inevitable and certainly as radical as those brought about by the invention of the printing press, if not the discovery of fire.\ud These enthusiasms now seem very "1990s�—in part as the revolution stumbled with the dot.com failures and the devastating impacts of 9/11. Moreover, as I will sketch out below, the patterns of diffusion and impact in philosophy and religion show both tremendous success, as certain revolutionary promises are indeed kept—as well as (sometimes spectacular) failures. Perhaps we use revolutionary rhetoric less frequently because the revolution has indeed succeeded: computing technologies, and many of the powers and potentials they bring us as scholars and religionists have become so ubiquitous and normal that they no longer seem "revolutionary at all. At the same time, many of the early hopes and promises instantiated in such specific projects as Artificial Intelligence and anticipations of virtual religious communities only have been dashed against the apparently intractable limits of even these most remarkable technologies. While these failures are usually forgotten they leave in their wake a clearer sense of what these new technologies can, and cannot do

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10