In this paper we address an open key issue during the development of web-based educational systems. In particular, we provide an educational-oriented approach for building personalised e-learning environments that focuses on putting the learners’ needs in the centre of the development process. Our approach proposes user centred design methodologies involving interdisciplinary teams of software ...

In this paper we discuss the educational and research benefits of applying an innovative technology Topic Maps for the organization and retrieval of online information in the context of e-learning courseware. Topic Maps offer a standards-based approach to encoding expert’s (domain and instructional) knowledge, i.e. to building educational ontologies and courseware components. This allows furthe...

In this paper we present a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) application that aims at improving the discoverability of educational media typically distributed over different universities and institutions. We investigate JXTASearch, a distributed search engine constructed upon Sun’s open source P2P platform JXTA, and further extend it to support Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) based P2P searches. Whil...

In this paper we discuss the educational and research benefits of applying an innovative technology Topic Maps for organizing and retrieving online information in the context of Web-based courseware. Topic maps offer a standardsbased approach to encoding expert’s domain and instructional knowledge, i.e. to building educational ontologies and courseware components. This allows further reuse, sha...

Computer supported collaborative learning has the potential for driving educational reform efforts, but there are many challenges to face before achieving that vision. Two of the most critical are achieving teacher buy-in and motivating students to participate in a knowledge-building community. We have developed a new CSCL tool whose flexibility is inspiring good teachers to create exciting new...

The work describes the design of the focused crawler for Intinno, an intelligent web based content management system. Intinno system aims to circumvent the drawbacks of existing learning management systems in terms of scarcity of content which often leads to the cold start problem. The scarcity problem is solved by using a focused crawler to mine educational content from the web. Educational co...

The paper presents the impact of using computer-supported cooperative work tools in building educational environments and the facilities such tools bring to educational methodologies. It also shows the relation between this new technique and the learnercentered approach in education, a participative style of education in which the learner is actively involved in the learning process, while stre...

We present a prototype of an integrated reasoning environment for educational purposes. The presented tool is a fragment of a proof assistant and automated theorem prover. We describe the existing and planned functionality of the theorem prover and especially the functionality of the educational fragment. This currently supports working with terms of the untyped lambda calculus and addresses bo...

The University of Cape Town Karl Storz Head and Neck Surgery Fellowship is the only head and neck surgery fellowship in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article briefly describes this fellowship and outlines the experience and ongoing collaborative efforts of members of the American Academy of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery with graduates of this program who are now building head and neck surgery...

What: Our vision is to bring together three previously distinct disciplines [education, psychology and neuroscience] – to focus on a specific common problem: how to promote better learning. This will mean building a new scientific community and a new discipline, educational neuroscience. Why: We now understand better how learning organizes and reorganizes the brain, but there is very little res...