In the opening paper in this Special Edition I outlined the major issues that led to the establishment of "project e-scape". The project was intended to develop systems and approaches that enabled learners to build real-time web-based portfolios of their performance (initially) in design & technology and additionally to build systems…

Most innovations have contextual pre-cursors that prompt new ways of thinking and in their turn help to give form to the new reality. This was the case with the e-scape software development process. The origins of the system existed in software components and ideas that we had developed through previous projects, but the ultimate direction we took…

Social and mobile technologies offer users unprecedented opportunities for communicating, interacting, sharing, meaning-making, content and context generation. And, these affordances are in constant flux driven by a powerful interplay between technological innovation and emerging cultural practices. Significantly, also, they are starting to…

In 1998, as part of what was then Zambia's Department of Technical Education and Vocational Training's (DTEVT) human resources capacity building initiative, under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Vocational Training (MSTVT), donor funding was secured to provide degree-level training for key teachers and managers within the technical…

Purpose: As colleges implement alternative forms of education delivery, prospective students must consider the method of instruction when choosing a post-secondary institution. The purpose of this research paper is to assess the search criteria considered most important to prospective undergraduate students and to evaluate their preference for…

Purpose: This paper seeks to look into Gabriel--the Worldwide web server for those European national libraries represented in the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), providing a single point of access on the internet for the retrieval of information about their functions, services and collections. Above all, it serves as a gateway…

A wide range of tools is now available to enable teaching practitioners to create web-based educational materials from PowerPoint presentations, adding a variety of different digital media, such as audio and animation. The pilot study described in this paper compared three different systems for producing multimedia presentations from existing…

Background: Many of the potential benefits of using virtual worlds for teaching and learning are difficult to define and often become overly focused on the functionality of the technology or on its ability to support informal or "social" forms of learning. Purpose: The aim of the paper is to highlight the experiential nature of virtual…

Most studies on reusable digital learning materials, learning objects (LOs), relate to their use in universities. Few empirical studies exist to explore the impact of LOs on pedagogy, especially in schools. This paper provides evidence from an evaluation of the use of LOs in schools. The evidence is from a European Union-funded project, Context…

In December 1996 UNESCO commissioned the Australian Broadcasting Authority to conduct a pilot study which considered a range of online issues; this report outlines the findings of the pilot study, based on data collected between February and May 1997 and updated in July 1997. The objective is to identify the main types of Internet content which…

Trust and collective learning are useful features that are enabled by effective collaborative leadership of e-learning projects across higher and further education (HE/FE) institutions promoting lifelong learning. These features contribute effectively to the development of design for learning in communities of e-learning practice. For this,…

Higher education institutions in the United Kingdom are subject to a variety of pressures to encourage a more inclusive and broader based student body. This has resulted in an extended range of flexible course delivery patterns for mature, part-time students. This article discusses a pilot to extend the academic year for a small cohort of such…

This paper examines the experience of some of the teachers participating in the Multimedia Portables for Teachers Pilot, one of 25 projects composed the United Kingdom Education Department's Superhighways Initiative. The Pilot put 1,138 high-specification portable computers in the hands of practicing teachers in a range of schools. The teachers…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…