Games-Based Online Course Design: Prototype of Gamification for Online Tutors

With the ubiquity of interactive games in students’ lives and the rise of gamified experiences across the web and mobile applications, online tutors and practitioners of technology enhanced learning have been inspired to incorporate games-based elements. This paper introduces a prototype of an online application that helps online tutors to embed gaming to design their online course. We developed a framework for online course leaders which explains how Wikis (as an online learning platform) can support students’ learning, interaction, and sharing of knowledge in the online community. We are presenting a metaphor for the course design in a gameboard like “snakes and ladders”. This metaphoric game enables online tutors to elaborate online interaction among their students. The game methodological design approach for this metaphoric game merges different pedagogical theories such as (socio-constructivism) with practice in online learning (Wiki) and gives the online tutor an idea about what theory/approach is used when selecting any technological tool or moving forward in the game. This framework could help tutors, educational institutions and students to use a common language with students to describe their teaching and learning activities. Primarily, it helps tutors to make decisions about learning activities, facilitate, guide and support students’ communication and collaboration

The investigation of using wiki technology to support self-regulated learning in the academic context at Princess Nora bint Abdul Rahman University, Saudi Arabia

Technology has become a major focal point in the modern learning environment. Web 2.0 is being increasingly widely employed in university education and has the potential to improve the quality of education. For optimum benefit to students’ learning practices, web 2.0 technology needs to actively foster regulation skills among students. Self-regulated learning skills (SRL skills) potentially offer a shift from traditional teacher-centred to learner-centred approaches. Wiki technology, as a form of web 2.0 technology, has the potential in education to foster such an approach to learning. The thesis investigates how a wiki can be utilised to enhance self-regulated learning among a cohort of female students attending higher education in Saudi Arabia.The study was primarily motivated by the lack of studies investigating SRL skill enhancement in wiki–assisted learning in higher education, in Saudi Arabia, where the education system largely relies upon teacher-centred learning. This study, therefore, was an effort to potentially improve SRL skills among students attending Princess Nora University (PNU) in Saudi Arabia, with a view to the results being applicable to teaching and learning in similar contexts. The first two objectives of this study were to explore the potential of a wiki as an enhancer of executive function and evaluation skills and to explore students’ attitude towards using wiki as a learning environment. The third objective was to explore students’ perceptions of wiki learning and its contribution to the enhancement of SRL skills. A single case study was administered before and after use of a purpose-designed wiki for an Education Technology module taken by a cohort of female students at PNU. Quantitative data was collected by a questionnaire triangulated with qualitative data gathered in interviews. The findings revealed that after using wiki, students felt that six of the eight SRL sub-skills listed under executive function and evaluation skills had, on the whole, improved significantly.Students generally reported extremely positive attitudes towards learning with wiki technology. They perceived that the reflective nature and the design of the wiki tasks, together with the pages and guidance given by the tutor, may have supported the development of SRL skills, increased their overall motivation to learn and improved their independent learning processes. Overall, this study sought to discover information on a relatively new area to Saudi higher education and acts as a stepping stone to further research into students’ perceptions of wiki technology and its effect on SRL skill enhancement. There is, of course, an opportunity in the future to measure actual SRL skill levels to corroborate the promising results which may, given the reader’s discretion, be viewed as transferable to similar cultural and study contexts

Wikis as Communities of Practice: A Case Study in Higher Education

This dissertation was an instrumental case study that explored the experiences of graduate students when using online software, more specifically, a wiki, in a graduate course. This study also concentrated on the formation of a community of practice within a course wiki. Symbolic interactionism, situated learning, and communities of practice theories guided this inquiry. Field notes, e-observations, students-created documents, a focus group interview and six individual interviews were coded, which led to categories and themes. Findings from the analysis of the data sources exposed the following five themes when exploring the experiences of graduate students with online learning: (1) wiki experiences, (2) meaningful discourse, (3) egalitarian, (4) community enagement, and (5) collaborative learning processes

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

The Dialogue, Summer 2007

CONTENTS: Ask the Field Profile of the Center for Disaster and Extreme Event Preparedness Program Design Elements of Successful Crisis Counseling and Outreach Programs Following a Disaster A Model for Entry into Schools: A Practice Module Which Demonstrated Success Remote Management of Crisis Counseling Program Teams in Colorado Learning from the Past: Historical Disasters—Perspectives for the Field Recommended Reading Conference Highlights Upcoming Meeting

Internet based molecular collaborative and publishing tools

The scientific electronic publishing model has hitherto been an Internet based delivery of electronic articles that are essentially replicas of their paper counterparts. They contain little in the way of added semantics that may better expose the science, assist the peer review process and facilitate follow on collaborations, even though the enabling technologies have been around for some time and are mature. This thesis will examine the evolution of chemical electronic publishing over the past 15 years. It will illustrate, which the help of two frameworks, how publishers should be exploiting technologies to improve the semantics of chemical journal articles, namely their value added features and relationships with other chemical resources on the Web. The first framework is an early exemplar of structured and scalable electronic publishing where a Web content management system and a molecular database are integrated. It employs a test bed of articles from several RSC journals and supporting molecular coordinate and connectivity information. The value of converting 3D molecular expressions in chemical file formats, such as the MOL file, into more generic 3D graphics formats, such as Web3D, is assessed. This exemplar highlights the use of metadata management for bidirectional hyperlink maintenance in electronic publishing. The second framework repurposes this metadata management concept into a Semantic Web application called SemanticEye. SemanticEye demonstrates how relationships between chemical electronic articles and other chemical resources are established. It adapts the successful semantic model used for digital music metadata management by popular applications such as iTunes. Globally unique identifiers enable relationships to be established between articles and other resources on the Web and SemanticEye implements two: the Document Object Identifier (DOI) for articles and the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) for molecules. SemanticEye’s potential as a framework for seeding collaborations between researchers, who have hitherto never met, is explored using FOAF, the friend-of-a-friend Semantic Web standard for social networks

Effects of technology integration in K-12 settings

This review of literature assessed the use and effect of technology in the K-12 public school setting. Local, state and federal governments annually invest billions of dollars to purchase technology; yet, there is still a great deal of uncertainty and debate about the ability of technology to improve classroom teaching and learning. Several types of technologies are available to enhance student learning in the classroom. Everything from audio and video content to handheld technologies and notebook computing has been used in classrooms, and new WEB 2.0-based technology such as Wikis and Blogs are emerging. While it is impossible for any one researcher to present information for all technologies in use in public classrooms across the United States, the goal of this review is to show what is available, who is in control of the technology and how it can be used in the classroom to enhance the learning process. A primary issue of concern for administrators and policy makers in determining whether or not to implement technology is the lack of statistically significant data indicating the effectiveness of current technologies. While not measured by quantitative analyses of standardized tests, findings suggest that the positive influences of technology integration are revealed through more qualitative research