Electronic Collaboration Across Cultures in a Web-based Project for English Writing Instruction

The paper highlights the importance of experimentation and an innovative approach to English language writing instruction with the help of information communication technology (ICT or IT). First, it describes the local situation of English language teaching at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Then, it summarizes the development of IT proficiency and student-led collaborative learning groups at CUHK. Third, it reports on an International Web-based writing project involving six collaborating schools in different parts of the world including China, the United States, Indonesia, and Hong Kong in the year 1999-2000. In the report, the author-presenter will share with the audience a new ELT course development titled "English Online: Writing on the Web." He will explain the course objectives, the background of participating classes, the Web Course Tools (WebCT), the design of the project, the evaluation of course effectiveness and the outcome of the new curricular initiative. Finally, the paper presents a summary of a practical guide to electronic collaboration and some of the lessons the writer has learnt in five years\u27 experience of participant-observation in English teaching practice using the Web

Technology advances : transforming university teaching through professional development

Increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in universities is a global trend. However, many teaching academics are unfamiliar with the possibilities of ICTs and have limited understanding of how to integrate them into their teaching in pedagogically appropriate ways. Th is highlights a need for universities to provide professional development opportunities to assist staff to better understand their teaching practices, and the theoretical perspectives underpinning them, in order to exploit current educational technologies for the benefi t of student learning. This paper introduces the broad trends infl uencing the advancement of technology in higher education before considering the opportunities that the new context off ers for pushing the boundaries of theory and practice relating to learning and teaching in higher education. It then describes an online professional development initiative which responds to these opportunities. Th is is an exemplars website entitled Designing Electronic Learning and Teaching Approaches (DELTA) which has been introduced at Monash University to support pedagogically appropriate teaching with technology.<br /

Learning from the learners' experience: e-Learning@greenwich post-conference reflections

This publication comprises papers from presenters who, having made a conference presentation, were invited to author an academic paper about their work

Communication in organizations: the heart of information systems

We propose a theory characterizing information systems (IS) as language communities which use and develop domain-specific languages for communication. Our theory is anchored in Language Critique, a branch of philosophy of language. In developing our theory, we draw on Systems Theory and Cybernetics as a theoretical framework. "Organization" of a system is directly related to communication of its sub-systems. "Big systems" are self-organizing and the control of this ability is disseminated throughout the system itself. Therefore, the influence on changes of the system from its outside is limited. Operations intended to change an organization are restricted to indirect approaches. The creation of domain-specific languages by the system itself leads to advantageous communication costs compared to colloquial communication at the price of set-up costs for language communities. Furthermore, we demonstrate how our theoretical constructs help to describe and predict the behavior of IS. Finally, we discuss implications of our theory for further research and IS in general. Keywords: Language Critique, language communities, communication, self-organization, IS researc

Generated rules for AIDS and e-learning classifier using rough set approach

The emergence and growth of internet usage has accumulated an extensive amount of data. These data contain a wealth of undiscovered valuable information and problems of incomplete data set may lead to observation error. This research explored a technique to analyze data that transforms meaningless data to meaningful information. The work focused on Rough Set (RS) to deal with incomplete data and rules derivation. Rules with high and low left-hand-side (LHS) support value generated by RS were used as query statements to form a cluster of data. The model was tested on AIDS blog data set consisting of 146 bloggers and E-Learning@UTM (EL) log data set comprising 23105 URLs. 5-fold and 10-fold cross validation were used to split the data. Naïve algorithm and Boolean algorithm as discretization techniques and Johnson’s algorithm (Johnson) and Genetic algorithm (GA) as reduction techniques were employed to compare the results. 5-fold cross validation tended to suit AIDS data well while 10-fold cross validation was the best for EL data set. Johnson and GA yielded the same number of rules for both data sets. These findings are significant as evidence in terms of accuracy that was achieved using the proposed mode

Generated rules for AIDS and e-learning classifier using rough set approach

The emergence and growth of internet usage has accumulated an extensive amount of data. These data contain a wealth of undiscovered valuable information and problems of incomplete data set may lead to observation error. This research explored a technique to analyze data that transforms meaningless data to meaningful information. The work focused on Rough Set (RS) to deal with incomplete data and rules derivation. Rules with high and low left-hand-side (LHS) support value generated by RS were used as query statements to form a cluster of data. The model was tested on AIDS blog data set consisting of 146 bloggers and E-Learning@UTM (EL) log data set comprising 23105 URLs. 5-fold and 10-fold cross validation were used to split the data. Naïve algorithm and Boolean algorithm as discretization techniques and Johnson’s algorithm (Johnson) and Genetic algorithm (GA) as reduction techniques were employed to compare the results. 5-fold cross validation tended to suit AIDS data well while 10-fold cross validation was the best for EL data set. Johnson and GA yielded the same number of rules for both data sets. These findings are significant as evidence in terms of accuracy that was achieved using the proposed mode