Design Considerations for Virtual Classroom and Laboratory Environments

With the ever-increasing demand for distance education one of the key challenges facing faculty is not only delivering effective instruction through both lecture-style and laboratory means, but also giving students an environment with a sense of presence. The key challenge here is to improve on the distance student‟s capabilities for interaction and collaboration thereby enhancing their ability to work in more group and team settings. In short, virtual environments present distance students with exciting new forums for meeting and sharing their thoughts and ideas in real-time. Today‟s virtual environments like Second Life (SL) provide students with open-ended opportunities for exploration and invention. This has broad reaching implications for faculty, and allows for the delivery of course content in stimulating and highly engaging manners. However, before these virtual environments can be implemented as academic tools, virtual spaces in the form of classrooms and laboratories need to be designed and developed to facilitate student and faculty interaction. This effort describes considerations made when designing some of the early virtual classroom and laboratory spaces developed within a newly established virtual campus. Once these spaces were built, class sessions were conducted and the students were surveyed in order to document their first impressions of the experience. Finally, the survey responses are analyzed and consideration is made for the establishment of design criteria for further virtual site development

Data in Depth: Web 3-D Technologies Provide New Approaches to the Presentation of Course Content

For nearly two decades, the Web has provided the classroom with vast, ever-expanding volumes of browseraccessible information. As the web has evolved so too has our desire to become more involved with the process of content-creation and content-sharing. Now new web-based technologies look to provide smarter, more meaningful content and present that content with a new level of depth and interactivity. No longer are faculty and students browsing for information that is largely static; instead, these users are interacting through their three-dimensional (3-D) proxies (their avatars) and are querying applications (semantic web agents) soliciting them to collect, filter, verify, correlate, and present answers to their queries. Yet, all of this capability is not without potential challenges. There is an evolving need for faculty and students to find and build out new structure in their 3-D virtual surroundings that visually enables their content, making it more palatable to the user while presenting it in a 3-D format verses the typical 2-D format that has been the mainstay for the past two decades. With the maturation of virtual world (3-D Web) and semantic web technologies, the web-based content available in the classroom increases exponentially and takes on a new look. Following a brief overview of these two technologies and their overall impact in the classroom, this article presents several practical approaches for presenting course content in 3-D Web environments based on recent implementation efforts. In- World lectures and lab assignments, project team briefing sessions, student mentoring activities, and open conference forums are just a few of the areas discussed. Further discussions also focus on setup and future evaluation studies planned in the near-term to further evaluate course content presentation techniques

Enhancing the Distance Learning Experience: Designing Virtual Classroom and Laboratory Environments

New virtual environments are evolving to a point where academics can visualize the benefits of these more socially interactive distance media. A first step in evaluating these virtual environments is to build virtual classrooms, meeting spaces, and laboratories that look to improve the distance student‟s ability to collaborate and interact. The next step is to identify new ways to interface with existing classroom and lab materials. The goal is to accelerate the process of building out new virtual course offerings and also provide distance-based class platforms for further study and analysis. Finally, evaluating the effectiveness of these newly built virtual classrooms and laboratories is critical to any proposed pedagogical presentation. Current efforts have focused on the building of several classroom and laboratory environments in the Second Life virtual space. Discussion includes efforts to identify, design and develop virtual environments that enhance the learning experience for distance students. Further observations describe the conduct of several other academic events conducted in these newly established virtual spaces including holding office hours, completing lab assignments, giving group presentations, working with student project teams, and conducting class lecture meetings virtually. This paper documents courses of action taken by the authors in the development of virtual classrooms, meeting spaces, and learning labs in the realm of Second Life where students and faculty can conduct effective and meaningful academic activities. Key discussion areas include choosing a virtual environment, virtual classroom and meeting room design considerations; virtual lab and workspace design considerations; preparations for successful initial virtual meetings; and a look toward future virtual design efforts

The effectiveness of paid services in supporting carers' employment in England

This paper explores the effectiveness of paid services in supporting unpaid carers’ employment in England. There is currently a new emphasis in England on ‘replacement care’, or paid services for the cared-for person, as a means of supporting working carers. The international evidence on the effectiveness of paid services as a means of supporting carers’ employment is inconclusive and does not relate specifically to England. The study reported here explores this issue using the 2009/10 Personal Social Services Survey of Adult Carers in England. The study finds a positive association between carers’ employment and receipt of paid services by the cared-for person, controlling for covariates. It therefore gives support to the hypothesis that services for the cared-for person are effective in supporting carers’ employment. Use of home care and a personal assistant are associated on their own with the employment of both men and women carers, while use of day care and meals-on-wheels are associated specifically with women’s employment. Use of short-term breaks are associated with carers’ employment when combined with other services. The paper supports the emphasis in English social policy on paid services as a means of supporting working carers, but questions the use of the term ‘replacement care’ and the emphasis on ‘the market’

Neuropsychological profile of patients with normal pressure hydrocephalus and Alzheimer's disease

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Participatory autism research: early career and established researchers’ views and experiences

Despite more autism research taking place than ever before, there is a disconnect between the current landscape of autism research and what autistic people and their allies want from research. While participatory research has been proposed as a potential solution, we know little about how researchers (particularly, early career researchers) employ this approach. We interviewed 25 researchers (14 early career and 11 established researchers) about their views and experiences of participatory autism research. Through reflexive thematic analysis of interview and focus group data, we identified three themes. First, our participants emphasised the flexible nature of participatory research, and the many forms it can take; yet noted that this flexibility could cause confusion. Second, our participants highlighted the importance of building relationships with research partners, while commenting on the challenges around effective communication and working with diverse groups of people who may have limited research experience. Finally, participants described the challenges of working within academic environments that are not conducive to participatory research (e.g. due to limited time, funding and support). We discuss these issues with regard to changes required at both an individual and systemic level, ensuring that efforts are made to meaningfully involve autistic people and their allies in all stages of the research process

The growth kinetics of xenografts of human colorectal tumours in immune deprived mice.

The technique of labelled mitoses was used to examine cell proliferation within grafts of human colonic and rectal tumours in immune deprived mice. Most of the data were obtained on the first passage but in some cases up to the third passage was used. It was found to be difficult to obtain precise kinetic data on this type of tumour material, but the results did allow some estimates to be made, particularly of the duration of the G2 and S phases of the mitotic cycle. The average G2 duration was 6 h and the average S phase was 14 h. It is concluded that whilst xenografts may differ in a number of respects from the tumour in the patient, they nevertheless constitute a type of experimental tumour that is worthy of further study

Neuropsychological profile of patients with normal pressure hydrocephalus and Alzheimer's disease

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are