New trends in education: the use of ICT in different ways

In the 21st century and due to the exponential growth of the Internet and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), people live in a technological age, in all areas and in all contexts, we have daily contact with technology, with access to Information. This dynamic requires a constant update of the services and technological tools that change the method that we study, work, communicate and socialize on an unprecedented scale. These constant changes force everyone, regardless of age, gender or profession, to possess a range of functional and critical thinking skills, such as information literacy, media literacy and technological literacy. The evolution of technologies, forces the promoters of education, to always be aware of the changes that society is introducing outside the classroom. Today, students don't have the same pattern as before, regardless of age, they are very active and are no longer the same introverted child who studied a few years ago in the classroom. According to this, students are eager for different forms of motivation inside and outside the classroom, they need the learning and teaching process to move along with changes in society and ICT. To ensure the success of today's students, it is important to provide them with the technological skills to make the correct use of ICTs, to perform tasks essential to their learning process, such as researching and selecting information, creating content, information sharing, use of collaboration tools or environment simulation tools. The main objective of this chapter is to show how ICT tools that can be used in educational environments to help students, helping them develop key skills in their training process, is also relevant to show how these tools can help teachers achieve these goals in daily activities with their students

Pedagogic approaches to using technology for learning: literature review

This literature review is intended to address and support teaching qualifications and CPD through identifying new and emerging pedagogies; "determining what constitutes effective use of technology in teaching and learning; looking at new developments in teacher training qualifications to ensure that they are at the cutting edge of learning theory and classroom practice and making suggestions as to how teachers can continually update their skills." - Page 4

Are digital natives a myth or reality?: Students’ use of technologies for learning

This paper outlines the findings of a study investigating the extent and nature of use of digital technologies by undergraduate students in Social Work and Engineering, in two British universities. The study involved a questionnaire survey of students (n=160) followed by in-depth interviews with students (n=8) and lecturers and support staff (n=8) in both institutions. Firstly, the findings suggest that students use a limited range of technologies for both learning and socialisation. For learning, mainly established ICTs are used- institutional VLE, Google and Wikipedia and mobile phones. Students make limited, recreational use of social technologies such as media sharing tools and social networking sites. Secondly, the findings point to a low level of use of and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies. Thirdly, the study did not find evidence to support the claims regarding students adopting radically different patterns of knowledge creation and sharing suggested by some previous studies. The study shows that students’ attitudes to learning appear to be influenced by the approaches adopted by their lecturers. Far from demanding lecturers change their practice, students appear to conform to fairly traditional pedagogies, albeit with minor uses of technology tools that deliver content. Despite both groups clearly using a rather limited range of technologies for learning, the results point to some age differences, with younger, engineering students making somewhat more active, albeit limited, use of tools than the older ones. The outcomes suggest that although the calls for radical transformations in educational approaches may be legitimate it would be misleading to ground the arguments for such change solely in students’ shifting expectations and patterns of learning and technology use

The evaluation of thermal hotels' online reviews

Th e main objective of this study was to evaluate the perceptions related to the online user reviews of thermal hotels. Specifi cally, it was investigated whether perceptions towards value (V), location (L), sleep quality (SQ), rooms (R), cleanliness (C), service (S) and factors infl uencing general evaluation depend on the star numbers of hotels, the location of the hotels and the nationalities of participants. In order to obtain data on perceptions of consumers towards thermal hotels in Turkey, the web site Trip Advisor (TA) was used. In total, 2,895 user reviews about thermal accommodations on TA were assessed by content analysis method. According to the study results, it was determined that the most important factor was the cleanliness of the hotels. It was followed by the location, sleep quality, rooms and service. Th e value factor was the last important. To analyse the eff ect of the nationality of the participants, domestic and foreign visitors, stars and the location of the accommodation on the perceptions towards value, location, sleep quality, rooms, cleanliness and service, t test and one-way ANOVA method were performed. It was found that the perceptions towards value, location, sleep quality, rooms, cleanliness and service diff ered between domestic and foreign visitors, nationalities, location and 4 or 5-star

Application of Web 2.0 technologies in e-government: A United Kingdom case study

Electronic government (e-Government) has endured significant transformation over the last decade and currently, it is making further leaps by incorporating modern technologies such as second generation web (Web 2.0) technologies. However, since the development and use of this kind of technology is still at its early stages in the public sector, research about the use of Web 2.0 in this domain is still highly tentative and lacks theoretical underpinning. This paper reports the preliminary findings of an in-depth case study in the United Kingdom (UK) public sector, which explore the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the local government authority (LGA). The findings elicited from the case study offer an insight into information systems (IS) evaluation criterions and impact factors of Web 2.0 from both a practical setting and an internal organisational perspective. This paper concludes that a combined analysis of the evaluation and impact factors rather than a singular approach would better assist the decision making process that leads to effective application of Web 2.0 technologies. It also highlights the significant impact and perceived effect of adoption of such technologies

Program your city: Designing an urban integrated open data API

Cities accumulate and distribute vast sets of digital information. Many decision-making and planning processes in councils, local governments and organisations are based on both real-time and historical data. Until recently, only a small, carefully selected subset of this information has been released to the public – usually for specific purposes (e.g. train timetables, release of planning application through websites to name just a few). This situation is however changing rapidly. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Freedom of Information Legislation in the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries guarantee public access to data held by the state. One of the results of this legislation and changing attitudes towards open data has been the widespread release of public information as part of recent Government 2.0 initiatives. This includes the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) at federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) at municipal levels. The release of this data has opened up the possibility of a wide range of future applications and services which are now the subject of intensified research efforts. Previous research endeavours have explored the creation of specialised tools to aid decision-making by urban citizens, councils and other stakeholders (Calabrese, Kloeckl & Ratti, 2008; Paulos, Honicky & Hooker, 2009). While these initiatives represent an important step towards open data, they too often result in mere collections of data repositories. Proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) limit the full potential achievable by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. Our research, presented in this paper, looks beyond the pure release of data. It is concerned with three essential questions: First, how can data from different sources be integrated into a consistent framework and made accessible? Second, how can ordinary citizens be supported in easily composing data from different sources in order to address their specific problems? Third, what are interfaces that make it easy for citizens to interact with data in an urban environment? How can data be accessed and collected