Interactive e-learning through Second Life with Blackboard Technology

AbstractIn todays’ economically viable worldview scenario, everyone wants to earn sufficient money which can be spent to maintain better lifestyle. There are many factors such as people living in the remote areas without appropriate communication systems or the physically challenged people et al who are not able to attend the traditional college system hence they seek an alternative option to gain education. E-Learning is a best alternative that provides suitable opportunity to all such individuals to obtain the desired qualifications or degrees as quality education even without attending any face to face college system in the educational institutions. The most positive point in E-Learning is that students find opportunity for access to the course materials anytime and anywhere whenever they find time through the use and application of electronic gadgets. Today, every reputed educational institution especially universities worldwide run their distance learning courses under the E-Learning system. Most powerful feature of E-Learning is that it remains an extremely interactive experience. Too many applications and tools are already available abundantly in the market today to promote E-learning in multiple ways. Take for example Moodle, Blackboard, LectureCast, Classroom 2.0, ELE (E-learning Environments) and E-Learning 2.0 amongst others. In this paper, we have focussed on the Second Life by Linden Lab (USA) for educational trainings. It has special instructiveness as we compare to rest E-Learning training methodologies available before us nowadays. It gives an opportunity to the students to attend virtual classrooms and attend lectures. The good thing is that Second Life develops a sense of presence in the students who feel as if they are physically present in the university campuses and spend time with their faculty members or peers. There are several other impeccable and strong features in Second Life. We have focused on Second Life education project to connect with Blackboard which we have already started to use in our university

Tool support for transforming Unified Modelling Language sequence diagram to coloured Petri nets

Modern software systems are expected to be dependable and the development of such systems requires strong modelling and analysis methods. Model-Driven Development is becoming a mainstream practice in software development to cater for that need. Models help to cope with the large scale and complexity of software systems by specifying the structural and behavioural aspects of the system and providing a means of communication between domain experts, analysts, designers and developers. Consequently, there is an increasing need for being able to combine the benefits of popular design approaches and formal models to contribute to better software products. Sequence Diagram-to-Coloured Petri Net (SD2CPN) is a scenario-based model transformation tool with analysis capabilities. It captures scenarios using Unified Modelling Language sequence diagrams and transforms them into coloured Petri nets that enable reliable analysis of the system models. The model transformations are based on the strongly consistent model-to-model transformation rules that are formally defined previously as part of this research. This paper presents the design, implementation, main features and usage of SD2CPN tool.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Applications of Virtual Reality

Information Technology is growing rapidly. With the birth of high-resolution graphics, high-speed computing and user interaction devices Virtual Reality has emerged as a major new technology in the mid 90es, last century. Virtual Reality technology is currently used in a broad range of applications. The best known are games, movies, simulations, therapy. From a manufacturing standpoint, there are some attractive applications including training, education, collaborative work and learning. This book provides an up-to-date discussion of the current research in Virtual Reality and its applications. It describes the current Virtual Reality state-of-the-art and points out many areas where there is still work to be done. We have chosen certain areas to cover in this book, which we believe will have potential significant impact on Virtual Reality and its applications. This book provides a definitive resource for wide variety of people including academicians, designers, developers, educators, engineers, practitioners, researchers, and graduate students