With the widespread availability of Internet and computer technology, on-line web-based learning has become prevalent in the field of teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language (CSL/CFL). This study examined the concepts of usability and types of design elements that help construct an effective web-based learning environment, as well as their…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

The Open University has been undertaking an extended initiative to improve student retention through enhanced support for at-risk students. This initiative has evolved through a series of stages from ad hoc small scale local interventions relying largely on tutors and student self-referral, to an institution-wide pro-active system implemented by…

The Achieving the Dream (ATD) initiative works with more than 100 community colleges across the United States with the specific goal of increasing student success. Together, Achieving the Dream colleges graduate or transfer close to 250,000 students a year. With just a 5 percent increase in graduation rates, individuals can positively impact the…

"The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education" is the first authoritative reference work to provide an international analysis of the relationship between power, knowledge, education, and schooling. Rather than focusing solely on questions of how we teach efficiently and effectively, contributors to this volume push further…

Attempts to improve retention in conventional college settings in the United States (see Barefoot article in this issue) have emphasized the importance of institutions having good information systems and appropriate interpretation of information as a means of identifying where retention is a problem and what might be causing student withdrawal,…

Geography's institutional position in US colleges and universities has strengthened over the past 15 years. Student numbers have increased, many existing geography programmes have expanded, and new programmes have been launched. This article documents these developments and situates them historically. Attention is then directed to reasons behind…

A listing of 42 operational and experimental online agricultural information systems in the United States is provided, noting system name, sponsoring organization, location, information and services provided, and key contact person and phone number. (EJS)

This article describes what a structured abstract is and how a structured abstract can help researchers sort out information. Today over 1,000 education journals publish more than 20,000 articles in the English language each year. No systematic tool is available at present to get the research findings from these tens of thousands of articles to…

The core curriculum of information systems (IS) is vital to the IS field. It serves as a base of knowledge that all IS graduates should possess. Within academic and practitioners' communities, there have been constant discussions about the content of the IS core curriculum. In this article, the authors used a direct survey strategy to examine all…

Since its inception in the early 1990s, geographic information science and its related technology, geographic information systems (GIS), have diffused slowly into select groups of K-12 classrooms worldwide. The technology has not been adopted at a rate commensurate with expectations. The purpose of this article is to explore GIS implementation by…

With the rapid expansion of scientific information at the end of the 19th century, disciplines sought ways to keep their members abreast of the relevant research. Those pressures were felt in the science of psychology in the United States, where psychologists developed a bibliographic aid, The Psychological Index, in 1895 only a little more than a…

At the request of the National Science Foundation, the Panel on Telecommunications Research of the Committee on Telecommunications of the National Academy of Engineering has made a preliminary survey of the status and trends of telecommunications research in the United States and selected foreign countries. The status and trends were identified by…

This is one in a series of reports to the President and Congress developed by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) on key contemporary issues in information technology. This report argues that significant improvements in health care would be possible if modern clinical information systems were widely implemented and a…

Further developing a theme that has characterized several recent EDUCOM conferences, the 1974 EDUCOM Fall Conference focused on "Computing and Networks in Higher Education." Included in the conference program were papers and discussions on approaches to solving the organizational and financial problems of networking used in both the…