This paper reports on action research activities during 2000-2001, involving first-year engineering students in an extended study programme of the School of Engineering at the University of Pretoria. Students in the participating group were enrolled for a support course aimed at facilitating the fundamental concepts underpinning a study in calculus as well as complementing the development of pe...

The adoption level of emerging web technologies is on the rise in academic settings. However, a major obstacle in the practice of web-based instruction is the limited understanding of learners’ characteristics and perceptions about technology use. Thus there is a need to understand the relationship between students’ learning styles and their preferences for instructional strategies, including t...

We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

In this paper, we introduce a notion of epistemic equivalence between hierarchies of conditional beliefs and hierarchies of lexicographic beliefs, thus extending the standard equivalence results of Halpern (2010) and Brandenburger et al. (2007) to an interactive setting, and we show that there is a Borel surjective function, mapping each conditional belief hierarchy to its epistemically equival...

We study the problem of elicitation of subjective beliefs of an agent when the beliefs are ambiguous (the set of beliefs is a non-singleton set) and the agent’s preference exhibits ambiguity aversion; in particular, as represented by α-maxmin preferences. We construct a direct revelation mechanism such that truthful reporting of beliefs is the agent’s unique best response. The mechanism uses kn...

This paper examines the nature of partisan preferences on a range of issue scales. It compares preferences in a period of strong ideological focus, in the late eighties and early nineties, with preferences in 2000 and 2001 – a period of weak ideological focus. Where partisan preferences were formerly polarised, they are now more consensual. I argue that once positional issues now resemble valen...

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This study investigated the use of three online referencing tools on translation and writing performance of twenty-two college students. The referencing tools included a bilingual concordancer, a bilingual collocation tool and a bilingual dictionary. An offline writing task was given before and after four online tasks in order to know the impact of online exercises on the learners’ written prod...

Recent developments in semantic web technologies heightened the need for online adaptive learning environment. Adaptive learning is an important research topic in the field of webbased systems as there are no fixed learning paths which are appropriate for all learners. However, most studies in this field have only focused on learning styles and habits of learners. Far too little attention has b...

The advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has provided new opportunities for teaching and learning in the form of e-learning. However, developing specialized contents, accommodating profiles of learners, e-learning pedagogy and available ICT infrastructure are the real challenges that need to be properly addressed for any successful e-learning system. The adaptability in...