Courseware in academic library user education: A literature review from the GAELS Joint Electronic Library Project

The use of courseware for information skills teaching in academic libraries has been growing for a number of years. In order to create effective courseware packages to support joint electronic library activity at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, the GAELS project conducted a literature review of the subject. This review discovered a range of factors common to successful library courseware implementations, such as the need for practitioners to feel a sense of ownership of the medium, a need for courseware customization to local information environments, and an emphasis on training packages for large bodies of undergraduates. However, we also noted underdeveloped aspects worthy of further attention, such as treatment of pedagogic issues in library computer‐aided learning (CAL) implementations and use of hypertextual learning materials for more advanced information skills training. We describe how these findings shaped the packages produced by the project and suggest ways forward for similar types of implementation

Developing key concepts for the design of hypertext for printed books

In the modern world, computers and interactivity are becoming an ever-increasing phenomenon, but this means that the tactile appeal of the printed book is giving way to the increasing popularity of digital interactivity. This research explores how one of the integral concepts of computer interaction, hypertext, can be applied to the medium of print and the advantages that this can bring to the reading environment. The interaction used to read a printed book is different to that of reading material in an electronic form. Books are linear, moving forward, whereas electronic material is laterally associative. However, reading material in an electronic form, such as hypertext, allows the readers to customise and reorder knowledge for their own needs. In comparison, navigation of paper documents is aided by the information being fixed, and readers can easily refer to several documents simultaneously. The considerations that need to be made when combining the benefits of two such contrasting media needs careful attention. Six key design concepts applying hypertext methods to books are discussed to assist the production of effective reading media

The treatment of navigation in web engineering

This paper aims at giving a global vision of the most popular web engineering approach. Web systems have woken up a high interest in companies and in the research community in the last years. Thus, techniques and methods are being proposed in order to offer a suitable framework to deal with the special characteristics of the web. For these reasons, some years ago a new line in the software engineering appeared. This line, then named web engineering, has grown in the last years, proving that web systems have special characteristics that require a special treatment. One of the most treated characteristic is the navigation. Navigation is a critical aspect in web systems and its suitable development in the life cycle is a basic need to guarantee the project quality. This survey shows how navigation is treated in 15 web proposals, which are the most referenced ones, and it analyses the available techniques, models and the possible gaps in the treatment

Requirements Capture Workflow in Global Information Systems

The development of information systems has changed a lot in the last years. Nowadays, applications are often developed in distributed environment. It is quite common, they are distributed via Internet and they usually have hypermedia and multimedia elements in huge databases. They are characterized by having complex functional and security requirements, many and undefined users who have different degree of knowledge. These systems are named Global Information Systems. The development of these complex global information systems must be like a software project, based on a development methodology, to get the application suitable to the client s requirements. This methodology must offer a right treatment of all its aspects. Nowadays, there is no standard methodology which covers all these characteristics. On the one hand, there are some traditional propositions, like the Unified Process [11]. This is a good proposition to work with storage and functional requirements. On the other hand, there are propositions that have come from the multimedia environment, like OOHDM [18], Hyper-UML [14], WSDM [4], etc. which, although give more importance to the interface and navigation, don t cover all the phases of the whole life cycle. After doing a comparative study of the most relevant methodologies for hypermedia and Web development published in the last few years [7], we have made a methodology proposition to develop global information systems. This methodology is based on the Unified Process, but it adds new models and aspects to treat correctly the navigation, the hypermedia and the interface. In this paper, we present a global vision of our methodology and we focus on the proposition to get requirements from the user. To present the results, we apply the proposition to a real problem in a public company in Seville

Teaching new media composition studies in a lifelong learning context

Governmental proposals for lifelong learning, and the role of Information and Learning Technologies/Information Communication Technologies (ILT/ICT) in this, idealistically proclaim that ILT/ICT empowers learners. A number of important governmental funding initiatives have recently been extended to the development of ILT in further education, which provides a particularly appropriate environment for lifelong learning. Yet little emphasis is given to more problematic research findings that students may be ‘disarmed’ in the process of learning to use technology. In the current global shift towards new forms of multimedia literacy, it is important to recognize human diversity by carrying out research focusing on the actual problems students face in adapting to Web‐based technology as a new authoring medium. A case study into multimedia creative composition carried out with FE students in 1996–9 found that students tend to experience a problematic but potentially useful period of ‘creative mess’ when authoring in multimedia, and that ‘scaffolding’ strategies can be useful in overcoming this. Such strategies can empower students to derive benefits from multimedia composition if close attention is given to the setting up of the learning environment: a teachers’ model for supporting novice hypermedia authors in further education is proposed, to assist teachers to understand and support the learning processes students may undergo in dynamic composition using new media technology

Hypotheses, evidence and relationships: The HypER approach for representing scientific knowledge claims

Biological knowledge is increasingly represented as a collection of (entity-relationship-entity) triplets. These are queried, mined, appended to papers, and published. However, this representation ignores the argumentation contained within a paper and the relationships between hypotheses, claims and evidence put forth in the article. In this paper, we propose an alternate view of the research article as a network of 'hypotheses and evidence'. Our knowledge representation focuses on scientific discourse as a rhetorical activity, which leads to a different direction in the development of tools and processes for modeling this discourse. We propose to extract knowledge from the article to allow the construction of a system where a specific scientific claim is connected, through trails of meaningful relationships, to experimental evidence. We discuss some current efforts and future plans in this area

The Research Proposal of Developing and Testing an Adaptive Learning System in Order to Increase the Primary School Students’ Awareness Regarding Teeth Health and to Reduce their Dental Anxiety

AbstractThis research proposal has been planned and suggested in order to contribute to the supply of this need. In this research, a learning system will be designed, improved and tested to increase the primary school children’ awareness of dental health and to reduce their dental anxiety. When the proposal has been completed, with the education of about 10.000.000 primary school children, a functional product will be developed to increase the awareness of dental health and to reduce dental anxiety, which are the most significant issues for the student of this age. The generalization of this product usage are not covered with this proposal, therefore this proposal has a potential to cause a new proposal. The learning system which will be developed by this proposal can be adaptive to the students’ learning styles and their socio-economic level which are reported to be efficient factors in terms of dental health in the field literature. Moreover, this research proposal also has the originality in terms of being a case study, which will provide the opportunity of an adaptive learning system that is a current approach in the field of educational sciences

Processing Structured Hypermedia : A Matter of Style

With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early nineties, hypermedia has become the uniform interface to the wide variety of information sources available over the Internet. The full potential of the Web, however, can only be realized by building on the strengths of its underlying research fields. This book describes the areas of hypertext, multimedia, electronic publishing and the World Wide Web and points out fundamental similarities and differences in approaches towards the processing of information. It gives an overview of the dominant models and tools developed in these fields and describes the key interrelationships and mutual incompatibilities. In addition to a formal specification of a selection of these models, the book discusses the impact of the models described on the software architectures that have been developed for processing hypermedia documents. Two example hypermedia architectures are described in more detail: the DejaVu object-oriented hypermedia framework, developed at the VU, and CWI's Berlage environment for time-based hypermedia document transformations