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Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Empowering the digitally excluded: learning initiatives for (in)visible groups

There is growing evidence that some digitally excluded groups of learners are receiving more attention than others. Discussions regarding why some digitally excluded learners are more visible than others and therefore worthy of more committed digital inclusion interventions raises important questions about how we define and conceptualise digital inclusion and digital inclusion practice; particularly in […]

Digital Storytelling as a Pedagogical Tool within a Didactic Sequence in Foreign Language Teaching

Digital storytelling not only offers language teachers the opportunity of working with all four language skills from the very beginning but also brings together the idea of combining the art of telling stories with a variety of digital multimedia (Robin 2006). This enables instructors to teach any topic in a way that can generate interest […]

The Acceptability of Online Degrees: Principals and Hiring Practices in Secondary Schools

A national survey of high school principals (N = 683) was used to assess the acceptability of job applicant qualifications that included degrees earned either online, partly online, or in a traditional-residential teacher-training program. The applicants with coursework taken in a traditional-residential setting were overwhelmingly preferred over applicants holding a degree earned partly or wholly […]

Information Literacy on the Web: How College Students Use Visual and Textual Cues to Assess Credibility on Health Websites

One of the most important literacy skills in today’s information society is the ability to determine the credibility of online information. Users sort through a staggering number of websites while discerning which will provide satisfactory information. In this study, 70 college students assessed the credibility of health websites with a low and high design quality, […]

Reading Actively Online: An Exploratory Investigation of Online Annotation Tools for Inquiry Learning

This study seeks to design and facilitate active reading among secondary school students with an online annotation tool – Diigo. Two classes of different academic performance levels were recruited to examine their annotation behavior and perceptions of Diigo. We wanted to determine whether the two classes differed in how they used Diigo; how they perceived […]

The Digital Native Debate in Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Literature

More than a decade after Prensky’s influential articulation of digital natives and immigrants, great disagreement exists around these characterizations of students and the impact of such notions within higher education. Perceptions of today’s undergraduate learners as tech-savvy “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001a), who both want and need the latest emerging technologies in all learning situations, continue […]

The Challenge of Open Education

Digital culture and the remix culture it has generated have changed the way in which knowledge and learning are constructed.‬ The last decade since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched the Open Courseware initiative (OCW) in 2002 has seen a significant increase in the number of initiatives related to Open Educational Resources (OER) and […]

The OERTEST Project: Creating Political Conditions for Effective Exchange of OER in Higher Education

This paper refers to the OERTest project and Open Educational Resources (OER) as support education materials that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone. In this paper we will try to answer the following question: how can the political conditions be created to foster an effective exchange of OERs between Higher Education […]

Institutional Repositories: Exploration of Costs and Value

Little is known about the costs academic libraries incur to implement and manage institutional repositories and the value these institutional repositories offer to their communities. To address this, the authors report the findings of their 29 question survey of academic libraries with institutional repositories. We received 49 usable responses. Thirty-four of these responses completed the […]

The Limitations of Access Alone: moving towards open processes in education technology

“Openness” has emerged as one of the foremost themes in education, within which an open education movement has enthusiastically embraced digital technologies as the central means of participation and inclusion. Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have surfaced at the forefront of this development, claiming unprecedented educational reform. This paper provides […]