The present study reports a questionnaire-and interview-based survey into computer and Internet technologies and their use in intermediate and secondary schools for boys in Saudi Arabia. Teacher and student questionnaires were developed to collect data from respondents on their assessment of computer and Internet facilities in their schools and the extent of the usage they made of them. Additionally, data were sought on teacher and student computer and Internet skills, how they had acquired these and on whether they had access to a computer and the Internet at home. Both instruments also included a series of statements designed to assess teacher and student attitudes towards computer and their use in school. Questionnaire data were gathered from a sample of 143 teachers and 686 students, drawn from 29 public and private sector intermediate and secondary schools in the Al-Qasseem region of Saudi Arabia. Supplementary data were gathered from interview samples of 10 teachers and 18 students drawn from questionnaire respondents in the same schools. The study found that even in secondary schools, where computer studies are part of the formal curriculum and practical computer work is part of the syllabus, teacher and student respondents reported there being insufficient computers available in computer suites given student numbers. Few if any schools had Internet connections other than those provided by the local directorate-general to facilitate communications between the directorate and school administration staff. Over three-quarters of the teacher and student respondents reported being able to use a computer keyboard and having basic word processing skills. Only a few teachers, for the most part, computer studies specialists, had received any academic training in computers. Most teacher and student respondents with computing skills had either acquired these with the help of a colleague/friend or from a family member; others were self-taught. Over 7 in every 10 teachers and students had access to a computer at home. In intermediate schools, few teachers and students had access to a computer suite. These were those in 'combined' intermediate and secondary schools, and those in a few private sector schools that had partnerships with private companies, who provided them with a computer suite, in return for being allowed to provide computer courses to students (for payment of a fee). Analysis of teacher and student responses to a series of statements on attitudes towards the use of computers in schools showed both teachers and students largely welcomed the computer age and were keen to learn more about computers and to develop their computer skills.

With advances in digital tabletop technology and increased levels of affordability in recent years, there has been growing interest in exploring multi-touch digital tabletops within educational contexts. Multi-touch digital tabletops offer simultaneous touch input facilities and a face-to-face communication platform- beneficial and attractive features for collaboration. This thesis focuses on understanding the communication patterns when children interact around digital tabletops within a learning environment. This thesis proposes three main contributions: 1) an analysis of the talk patterns between children when they collaborate around digital tabletops 2) the behavioural patterns of how children in India collaborate around digital tabletops and 3) the behavioural patterns of how children in multiple countries interact around digital tabletops. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the conversation styles and the behavioural patterns of children collaborating around multi-touch digital tabletops within an educational context. Moreover, understanding the communication patterns and interaction styles that occur within a multiple country setting provide an access such that any technological deployment can have a positive impact on their local users.

No description available.

No description available.

One early pedagogical model developed within the field of Technology Enhanced Learning was Laurillard's 'Conversational Framework'. This model quickly achieved acceptance, and is still widely cited within the educational technology community of practice. Despite a recent surge of interest in the development of pedagogical models within this community, there has been remarkably little critical analysis of the Conversational Framework, or questioning of its usefulness as a model.

This study examines the use of new technology by young people in the context of community media education activity. The research to which it refers was carried out between 2006 and 2011 at Knowle West Media Centre, a community media organisation in the city of Bristol in the United Kingdom. A practice-led participatory action research method was employed to facilitate young people's involvement as co-researchers in the project. The purpose of the research is to identify how the choices young people make in relation to their engagements with new technology, and their capacity to do so, can inform policies and practices developed and enacted by professional practitioners working to support youth media activity primarily within the field of community media and also more widely within informal educational settings. The findings demonstrate the need for community media practitioners to increase opportunities for young people to learn about and to use internet and mobile networked technologies within their creative media practice in order to maintain the relevancy of such activities for young people and to address inequalities in the way young people are able to access and appropriate such technologies for social participation. In order to do so, this study advocates ways in which practitioners can keep pace with rapid changes, both social and technical, that new technology contributes to, and emphasizes the need to develop more effective media literacy frameworks to articulate the imperative to develop young people's critical skills and dispositions in informal educational settings. This study also contends that current discourse with the subject field can be expanded beyond the significance afforded to content production to include the notion of platform creation, in both a technical and figurative sense, as reflecting the dynamics of social media systems and practices and the dialectic nature of educational relationships and processes that are rooted in principles of social democracy.

Serious games can be defined simply as games with an educational intent. These games are regularly positioned within a curriculum as simple teaching agents and often lack meaningful participation from learners in their development. In 1992, Roger Hart proposed a model for the roles children play in participatory projects with adults. ‘Hart’s Ladder’ presents eight levels of children’s participation moving from tokenistic manipulation of children at the base of this ladder to ‘citizenship’ at the top where children can initiate and share activities with adults. This research contributes to knowledge on methods of integrating serious games into formal educational settings by investigating how children, as participants, can work with their educators, as facilitators, to create serious games for use by their peers. Exploratory field studies have worked with secondary school children (11-16 years) to evaluate the hypothesis that higher levels of participation of children in making serious games will produce more effective educational artefacts. Educational artefacts are context specific to each study but encompass the product and accreditation of the process by participants, facilitators and all stakeholders involved. Experimental work has investigated methods of facilitating a participatory serious games design project led by children with adults in a supportive role at level eight of Hart’s Ladder. Results are compared with a design project led by adults who inform and assign specific roles to children (level four) and finally a revised design project led by adults who share decisions with children (level six). The participatory design approach is also applied to a serious games design project with adult offenders (considered students of an educational probation programme) to evaluate its scalability to a wider demographic of learner. The research concludes that simply increasing the participation of students in making serious games does not consistently produce more effective educational artefacts. Rather, the positioning of learners and adults as ‘design partners’ at level six of Hart’s Ladder produces a more engaging and productive design process together with a more functional and client-sensitive serious game product.

This thesis is concerned with Intelligent Tutoring Systems. It investigates the architecture of an Intelligent Knowledge Based Tutoring System in terms of three knowledge models: that of the domain, the student and the tutor, and examines the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of these three knowledge models. Existing Knowledge Based Tutoring Systems are reviewed, and the relationship between their behaviour and architecture is analysed by evaluating them against Wenger's model of a didactic operation. Two such systems, PROUST, a tutoring system for Pascal program debugging skills, and micro-SEARCH, a tutoring system for mathematical transformations skills, are used in the study. This evaluation serves two purposes: to unravel the requirements for interrelatedness and interconnectedness between the three knowledge models in order to develop a true Knowledge Based Tutoring System with a full-scale didactic operation, and to uncover the limitations of the current generation of Knowledge Based Tutoring Systems and how they fail to fully encompass these requirements. On this basis the thesis goes on to propose a hybrid model made up of Artificial Intelligence and Hypertext concepts which helps to overcome the limitations of existing Knowledge Based Tutoring Systems. This model in particular addresses the requirements for the development of an Intelligent Tutoring Systems with a full-scale didactic operation. The model integrates Hypertext's explicit information nodes and linking properties with Artificial Intelligence's logical inferencing on knowledge representation schemes. The thesis finally shows how to use this model to design a generic Intelligent Tutoring System that supports a full-scale didactic operation.

Digital technologies now exist which support and assist writing activities for those who have difficulty with its production. These include the development of specific technologies such as text prediction, text to speech support, speech recognition and more recently applications on mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets. However, research into the contexts in which these are used and who actually uses them is limited. This qualitative research explores the potential affordance of technologies with individuals who have been unable to construct text either efficiently or independently through other methods. It is a journey of discovery about the specific needs of the individual, the technologies they try and the affordances they offer. Yet, how these have been used has not only been influenced by the individual needs of the user, but the contextual considerations of the environment and the perceptions of literacy in which they are situated. Using a participatory methodology, the study sought to take into consideration a social and cultural understanding of the settings in which textual production took place. It offers a valuable insight into the contexts in which technologies have been used and how individuals have been able to exert choice and autonomy. It does not dwell purely upon successful implementation but demonstrates the problems, frustrations and barriers some have encountered as they have endeavoured to strive for productivity. The significance of the tools they eventually used to compensate or overcome the issues they faced is of significance. Importantly it examines whether concepts of learning difficulty and impairment are exacerbated by a lack of contextual consideration and not with individual deficit. The study also considers how some schools have lacked awareness and knowledge of the availability of different types of digital technologies specifically designed to support the writing process. It argues that the pen and pencil as tools for expression of literacy competence induce difficulty for some students. It examines the issues of those who cannot use these specific tools, but who are able to produce textual meaning through other modes. Yet, how they are able to do so is affected by contextual considerations of the environment, attitudes and perceptions of literacy that impact upon their utilisation.

Whether in traditional or e learning, it is important to consider: what to learn, how to learn, and how well students have learned. Since there are various types of students with different learning preferences, learning styles, and learning abilities, it is not easy to provide the best learning approach for a specific student. Designing learning contents for different students is very time consuming and tedious for teachers. No matter how the learning process is carried out, both teachers and students must be satisfied with students’ learning performance. Therefore, it is important to provide helpful teaching and learning guidance for teachers and students. In order to achieve this, we proposed a fined-grained outcome-based learning path model, which allows teachers to explicitly formulate learning activities as the learning units of a learning path. This allows teachers to formulate the assessment criteria related to the subject-specific knowledge and skills as well as generic skills, so that the pedagogy could be defined and properly incorporated. Apart from defining the pedagogical approaches, we also need to provide tailored learning contents of the courses, so that different types of students can better learn the knowledge according to their own learning abilities, knowledge backgrounds, etc. On the other hand, those learning contents should be well-structured, so that students can understand them. To achieve this, we have proposed a learning path generation method based on Association Link Network to automatically identify the relationships among different Web resources. This method makes use of the Web resources that can be freely obtained from the Web to form well-structured learning resources with proper sequences for delivery. Although the learning path defines what to learn and how to learn, we still needed to monitor student learning progress in order to determine proper learning contents and learning activities in an e-Learning system. To address the problem, we proposed the use of student progress indicators based on Fuzzy Cognitive Map to analyze both performance and non-performance attributes and their causal relationships. The aim is to help teachers improve their teaching approaches and help students reflect their strengths and weaknesses in learning. . This research focuses on the intelligent tutoring e-Learning system, which provides an intelligent approach to design and delivery learning activities in a learning path. Many experiments and comparative studies on both teachers and students have been carried out in order to evaluate the research of this PhD thesis. The results show that our research can effectively help teachers generate high quality learning paths, help students improve their learning performance, and offer both teachers and students a better understanding on student learning progress.