Surfing or still drowning? Student nurses’ Internet skills

A study into student nurses’ ability to use the Internet was published in Nurse Education Today in 2004. This paper repeats the research with a cohort of students starting their pre-registration programme in a UK university in 2007. In 2004 students were reported as having poor Internet skills, and as not being frequent users of the Internet. In this study students were found to have significantly better ability to carry out basic tasks and significantly higher levels of Internet use. Their ability to apply these skills to more complex information literacy tasks however had not increased, with more than half of all students saying they found far too much irrelevant information when searching for specific information on the Internet. The earlier study found that skills and age were not related, which appears to still be the case. The need for these skills is increasing as education, lifelong learning, and patient information are all increasingly drawing on the developing Internet. Nurse education however is not integrating the skill and knowledge base essential to support this into pre-registration programmes, and the evidence suggests that this will not happen without active management

Collaborative practices using computers and the internet in science classrooms.

Investigations that allow for students to self-direct their inquiries in science classrooms involve building on existing understanding, problem solving and reasoning. The process of explaining complex problems means that students work with multiple sets of data including online resources and information from the Internet. Outcomes of such activities are often in written form, frequently prepared on the computer, representing a collage of negotiated ideas. This article presents primary science classroom investigations about changes of state and landforms and argues that inscription practices were shaped by the functional and social affordances students imbued with the computer and information from the Internet. Findings from the qualitative study with a year 7 teacher, Clara, and her students illustrate how the Internet provided social and collaborative opportunities for scientific meaning making. The argument is made that access to the computer and information from the Internet can open up and constrain opportunities for social thinking and inscription practices. Talking, thinking and composing were observed to constitute the nature of science inquiries as a collaborative effort of meaning making

The relationship of (perceived) epistemic cognition to interaction with resources on the internet

Information seeking and processing are key literacy practices. However, they are activities that students, across a range of ages, struggle with. These information seeking processes can be viewed through the lens of epistemic cognition: beliefs regarding the source, justification, complexity, and certainty of knowledge. In the research reported in this article we build on established research in this area, which has typically used self-report psychometric and behavior data, and information seeking tasks involving closed-document sets. We take a novel approach in applying established self-report measures to a large-scale, naturalistic, study environment, pointing to the potential of analysis of dialogue, web-navigation – including sites visited – and other trace data, to support more traditional self-report mechanisms. Our analysis suggests that prior work demonstrating relationships between self-report indicators is not paralleled in investigation of the hypothesized relationships between self-report and trace-indicators. However, there are clear epistemic features of this trace data. The article thus demonstrates the potential of behavioral learning analytic data in understanding how epistemic cognition is brought to bear in rich information seeking and processing tasks

Corporate Learning Preparing the Implementation of Corporate Strategy

Abstract: At present there are needs to transform how organizations develops their human resources, to be more technological savy, efficient and implement alternative approach such as e-learning. Cor-porate e-learning provides the option for organizations to holds training anywhere, anytime and for anyone. By maximizing these facilities, organizations should be able to distribute training and critical information to multiple locations easily and conveniently. Thus, ensuring access of human capital development from work or even from home. This paper discusses the Electronic Learning Circles in FETA Learning Network in the light of corporate learning theory. According to the paper, the benefits of e-Learning are as follows ; 1) the substantial saving of resources from the elimination of travel ex-penses; 2) just-in-time access to timely information; 3) the creation of higher retention of content through personalized learning for the employees; 4) corporate e-Learning improve collaboration and interaction between students and lecturers; 5) online training is less intimidating than instructor-led courses.Key Words: corporate learning strategy, e-learning, cost efficient training, human capital developmentAbstrak: Sekarang ini kebutuhan suatu organisasi dalam transformasi pengembangkan sumber da-ya manusia, untuk lebih melek teknologi, efisien, adalah dengan alternatif  penerapan menggunakan pendekatan seperti e-learning. Corporate e-learning memberikan pilihan bagi organisasi untuk melaku-kan pelatihan di mana saja, kapan saja dan untuk siapa saja. Dengan memaksimalkan fasilitas ini, or-ganisasi mampu mendistribusikan pelatihan dan informasi penting untuk beberapa lokasi dengan mudah dan nyaman. Sebuah organisasi dapat memastikan akses dalam pengembangan sumber daya manusia dari tempat kerja atau bahkan dari rumah. Tulisan ini membahas Siklus Pembelajaran Elektronik pada Jaringan Belajar di Badan Pendidikan dan Pelatihan Keuangan tentang corporate learning theory. Hasil menunjukkan bahwa manfaat dari e-learning adalah sebagai berikut. 1) Penghematan besar sumber daya dari penghapusan biaya perjalanan. 2) Just-in-time akses ke informasi yang tepat waktu. 3) Tempat penyimpanan konten yang lebih besar untuk pembelajaran pribadi bagi karyawan. 4) Corporate e-learning meningkatkan kolaborasi dan interaksi antara mahasiswa dan dosen. 5) Pe-latihan online kurang mengintimidasi daripada program yang dipimpin oleh instruktur.Kata kunci: strategi pembelajaran perusahaan, e-learning, biaya pelatihan yang efisien, pengembang-an sumber daya manusi

Web literacy practices of teacher education students and in-service teachers in Greece : a comparative study

In the expanding context of new literacies and multiliteracies, the abilities to know how to locate, to evaluate and to exploit Web information resources in order to construct knowledge, are acknowledged as extremely important worldwide. Current literacy curricula should encourage the development of such abilities, and  their successful implementation requires teachers themselves to be properly prepared. The present study reports the web searching and evaluating practices for educational purposes employed by both pre-service and in-service teachers. Data was collected via an anonymous online questionnaire. The comparative study  exhibis teachers' web practices with the purpose of identifying aspects of web literacy that require attention when designing and implementing relevant educational initiatives. According to the research findings, both pre-service and in-service teachers are based almost exclusively on popular search engines to locate web information resources, and they choose such resources without examining their wider context. In order to evaluate web information resources, they consider mainly morphological and design elements, rather than content features such as their origin and credibility. The findings raise the potential of applying critical literacy principles on the Web so that teachers can approach it critiquely.[1] when using its resources in educational settings. [1] learn to think “critiquely” (a word coined by James Paul Gee), that is, not merely consume information but also “understand and critique systems of power and injustice in a world that [people] will see as simply economically inevitable" (Gee, 2000: 62).: In the expanding context of new literacies and multiliteracies, the abilities to know how to locate, to evaluate and to exploit Web information resources in order to construct knowledge, are acknowledged as extremely important worldwide. Current literacy curricula should encourage the development of such abilities, and  their successful implementation requires teachers themselves to be properly prepared. The present study reports the web searching and evaluating practices for educational purposes employed by both pre-service and in-service teachers. Data was collected via an anonymous online questionnaire. The comparative study  exhibis teachers' web practices with the purpose of identifying aspects of web literacy that require attention when designing and implementing relevant educational initiatives. According to the research findings, both pre-service and in-service teachers are based almost exclusively on popular search engines to locate web information resources, and they choose such resources without examining their wider context. In order to evaluate web information resources, they consider mainly morphological and design elements, rather than content features such as their origin and credibility. The findings raise the potential of applying critical literacy principles on the Web so that teachers can approach it critiquely.[1] when using its resources in educational settings. [1] learn to think “critiquely” (a word coined by James Paul Gee), that is, not merely consume information but also “understand and critique systems of power and injustice in a world that [people] will see as simply economically inevitable" (Gee, 2000: 62)

The Think-Aloud approach: A Promising Tool for Online Reading Comprehension

Despite its unquestionable interest from a theoretical and practical point of view, so far there has been little research on online reading and there is a lack of attention paid to this topic in most European educational institutions. In particular, primary and secondary school teachers are not adequately trained on how and when to intervene to support students’ proficiency in the online reading comprehension. After presenting a rationale demonstrating why students may struggle with online reading comprehension and the importance to adopt a self-regulated reading, this study proposes a Teacher’s Guide that could support late primary and secondary school teachers in planning online reading lessons with the Think-Aloud (TA) metacognitive technique

Evaluación de Competencias Informacionales en la Educación Chilena

Dentro de la complejidad de la Sociedad de la Información, la cual esta de manera constante mediada por el impacto de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación, demanda a los procesos educativos la incorporación de competencias clave, de las cuales destaca las competencias informacionales, las que se encuentran relacionadas con el tratamiento de la información en un contexto virtual y la competencia de procesamiento digital. Desde este aspecto, adquiere importancia la formación de los estudiantes desde los primeros ciclos de enseñanza. Este estudio evalúa la eficacia de una intervención educativa en contexto b-learning para la formación en competencias informacionales a nivel educativo de primaria. De esta manera, se aplicó un diseño pre-experimental con pretest y postest a una muestra de 328 estudiantes de primaria en Chile, en el sector de la Provincia de Maipo. Se comenzó con la recogida de datos mediante un instrumento validado de evaluación del rendimiento en las cuatro dimensiones de las competencias informacionales. Tras la comprobación de los supuestos previos de normalidad y homocedasticidad, en el análisis de datos se aplicaron las pruebas estadísticas correspondientes. Los resultados establecen un aumento en el aprendizaje de las competencias informacionales teniendo como base la aplicación de la intervención educativa

Impact of Characteristics of Individuals on Evaluating the Quantitative Studies

ABSTRACT Usability studies in the web domain are based on various metrics, but the question is how to apply these metrics to evaluate a larger group of people. When we consider that every user has different qualities, skills and experiences, we could expect that the results of testing of same scenarios will be different. We aim our research to show that quantitative studies can provide more accurate results if we work with information about personal characteristics of participants. We have already conducted a preliminary controlled experiment on a small sample of participants, which explores influence of a web literacy