Reviews

Apolog

Reviews

Francis Botto, Dictionary of Multimedia and Internet Applications ‐ A Guide for Developers and Users, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. ISBN: 0–471–986240. Hardback, x+362 pages, £34.95

W.C.Jakes: “Microwave mobile communications

Online learning is now a reality, with distributed learning and blended learning becoming more widely used in Higher Education. Novel ways in which undergraduate and postgraduate learning material can be presented are being developed, and methods for helping students to learn online are needed, especially if we require them to collaborate with each other on learning activities. Agents to provide a supporting role for students have evolved from Artificial Intelligence research, and their strength lies in their ease of operation over networks as well as their ability to act in response to stimuli. In this paper an application of a software agent is described, aimed at supporting students working on team projects in the online learning environment. Online teamwork is problematical for a number of reasons, such as getting acquainted with team members, finding out about other team members ’ abilities, agreeing who should do which tasks, communications between team members and keeping up to date with progress that has been made on the project. Software agents have the ability to monitor progress and to offer advice by operating in the background, acting autonomously when the need arises. An agent prototype has been developed in Prolog to perform a limited set of functions to suppor

Facilitation of Online Student Group Projects with a

As more courses are provided online, consideration must be given to providing for group working, as an integral part of the learning experience. Present online provision, based on CAL, is aimed at individual study in the main, and CSCW products are aimed at business users. We propose student support agents to help with the maintenance aims of group working, providing support in developing group relations. Our initial prototype is built in Prolog, and is based on a whiteboard architecture. In this paper we describe the design work, based on analysis of traditional face to face group project work, through to developing the prototype for testing

Using Video to Record Summary Lectures to Aid Students ’ Revision

Video as a tool for teaching and learning in higher education is a multimedia application with considerable promise. Including video within the online support material for a module can help students to gain an understanding of the material and prepare for assessment. We have experimented with using short videos that summarise the lectures given, as an aid for students to use when revising. An interpretive method has been adopted to investigate the use students make of these videos, during the teaching term and when revising for assessment. In this paper a summary of ways that video can be used for supporting teaching and learning is given, the ways in which we used video are presented followed by discussion of some issues relating to producing summary length videos. Preliminary research indicates that students find these summary lectures very useful for reviewing lecture material as well as for their revision