Can an electronic textbooks be part of K-12 education?: Challenges, technological solutions and open issues

An electronic textbook (e-Textbook) is a digitized (or electronic) form of textbook, which normally needs an endorsement by the national or state government when it is used in the K-12 education system. E-Textbooks have been envisioned to replace existing paper-based textbooks due to its educational advantages. Hence, it is of paramount importance for the relevant parties (i.e. national and state governments, or school districts) to draw a comprehensive roadmap of technologies necessary for the successful adoption of e-Textbooks nationwide. This paper provides a brief overview of e-Textbooks and subsequently an extensive discussion on challenges associated with e-Textbooks in the pursuit of replacing traditional textbooks with e-Textbooks. This paper further provides an extensive review on how the challenges have been approached using existing e-Textbook technologies, such as multi-touch technology, e-Paper, Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Literature review and interview have been conducted to identify the challenges of e Textbooks implementation in terms of e-Textbook usage levels and the reasons of its refusal. There were 180 students and 20 academic staff participated as a sample for interviews. Eight categories of key challenges were identified. Subsequently, assessment was performed on how the evolving e-Textbook technology has been applied to address the key challenges and problems. This article aims to provide a strong foundation for further investigations in e-Textbooks for successful adoption of e-Textbooks in school education

UNDERSTANDING ADVANCES IN WEB TECHNOLOGIES: EVOLUTION FROM WEB 2.0 TO WEB 3.0

The current generation of Web applications (Web 2.0) have made them an outright phenomenon in today’s society helping to redefine the way organisations and individuals communicate and collaborate with each other. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise the evolution of Web technologies from a user perspective. Based on inference from existing studies, this paper attempts to identify the architectural direction that the next generation (Web 3.0) of Web applications would meld itself into. The paper emphasizes limitations of current Web technologies and how future trends may address these limitations by focusing on migration that has been witnessed in the scope of the applications presented and features delivered on the Web from a users’ perspective

TOWARDS WEB 2.0 DRIVEN LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Over the last decade, it has been widely argued that technology-enhanced learning could respond to the needs of the new knowledge society and transform the way we learn. However, despite isolated achievements, technology-enhanced learning has not really succeeded yet in revolutionizing our education and learning processes. In fact, most current initiatives do not focus on the social aspect of learning and learning content is still pushed to a pre-defined group of learners in closed environments. Recently, Web 2.0 concepts have started to open new doors for more effective learning and have the potential to overcome many of the limitations of traditional learning models. In this paper we show in which way the communitydriven platform Learnr, under development at the University of Münster, puts crucial success factors for future technology enhanced learning into practice, applying well known concepts like networking and social tagging. As a consequence, a Web 2.0 perspective on learners, learning content and learning communities can be derived.