Development of Higher Order Cognitive Skills in Technology Mediated Learning： Activity Theory and Distance Education at Makerere University in Uganda

Makerere University, having been in existence since 1926, is one of the most reputable institutions in Africa located in East Africa. Makerere provides educational environment to many students and therefore some courses are delivered through distance education mode. This mode calls for intensive use of technologies for instruction and learning. Technological advancements in this same university have gone through a number of progressive stages： use of traditional chalkboard technologies to blending technologies including the use of ICT （information and communication technology）. In order to provide a distance education learning environment that enables the development of higher order cognitive skills, innovations like technology mediated learning need to be clearly understood. This paper provides the theoretical view of distance education and technology mediated learning through the activity theory. The paper concludes with some recommendations of how technology mediated learning can lead to the development of higher order cognitive skills in distance learning.     

用于计算机教育的Android实验软件(英文)

In this paper,we address the need for better hands-on learning materials in computing education and the need for integrating mobile computing education into computing curricular.We propose an innovative learning approach that uses state-of-the-art mobile computing technologies and devices to design a highly accessible and real-world relevant hands-on labware for computing education.The labware employs a modular design such that the learning materials can both be combined together into a single course of mobile program development and be integrated into the related computing courses as building blocks.The labware will help students understand the concepts,improve their problem solving skills,and prepare them for the mobile computing industrial workforce.The pilot modules of the labware have been presented to undergraduate students and have received positive feedbacks.     

The application of Digital Storytelling in education

Storytelling is the original teaching tool. It has been found that storytelling is an interesting and effective way for children to acquire knowledge and understand the surrounding world. With the fast development of information technology, the ancient art of storytelling has recently gained new life： Digital Storytelling （DS）. The paper discusses the concept of DS and its creating tools, including Bubble Share, Primary Access etc. Then how to apply DS in education is analyzed to show how a powerful story can capture students＇ attention, fire their imagination, and make clear a difficult idea or concept. Finally, the educational goals of DS for both teachers and students are listed, and the aspects of DS in education are suggested.     

Can You Explain This？ Personality and Willingness to Commit Various Acts of Academic Misconduct

The rapid development of IT has created a problematic situation in higher education by providing individuals with a greater opportunity to engage in academic dishonesty especially in online courses, in contrast to traditional classroom courses. There are various factors that were used in research to explain the phenomenon of academic dishonesty. Among them are personality traits that were found to be effective in explaining unethical behaviors. Therefore, this study explores students＇ personality traits as predictors of academic dishonesty in the context of traditional and distance-learning courses in higher education. Data from 1,365 students enrolled in academic institutes in the U.S.A and Israel were surveyed to assess their personality and their willingness to commit various acts of academic misconduct. The findings indicate that in both countries dishonest behaviors are greater in face-to-face than in online courses. In addition, both American and Israeli students identified with the personality trait of agreeableness showed a negative correlation with academic dishonesty, Furthermore, Israeli students identified with the personality traits of conscientiousness and emotional stability demonstrated a negative correlation with academic dishonesty. In contrast, the personality trait of extraversion among American students was positively correlated with academic misconduct. Implications for further research are discussed.     

Validating Academic Training versus Organizational Training： An Analysis in the Enterprise Resource Planning （ERP） Field

ERP （enterprise resource planning） systems are packaged software applications that support most of an organization＇s informational needs within and across functional areas of the organization. Modern ERP systems serve as the foundation for a wide range of e-business models within one company, as well as throughout the value chain. This study explored industry ERP training of employees new to ERP, and compared this latter group to college students prepared with ERP skills from a college ERP class. The students remotely accessed the ERP systems featured here for class requirements. University and industry collaborations allow for a hands-on experience in the classroom that replicates industry applications by using real world tools. This synergistic relationship provides opportunities for students to acquire knowledge using a tangible tool that imitates what is utilized in the industry. The study noted that schools supported by several ERP vendor initiatives are increasingly integrating enterprise systems in their curricula. The resultant data identifies pertinent information that businesses consider valuable in their employees＇ ERP training. This noteworthy correlation, between college prepared students and employees new to ERP who have gone through ERP training, examined case studies of students who are now in the workforce. This study exposes these students＇ distinct advantage because of their ERP learning experience, and compares it to companies＇ ERP training practices. The intent, as in any educational environment, is not only to help students attain an understanding of the material, but to also master that material in the environment in which they will be required to use it.     

FuzEmotion as a backward kansei engineering tool

Kansei engineering, also known as kansei ergonomics or emotional engineering, aims at analysing and incorporating customer s feeling and demands into product function and product design. Founded in the late 1970 s, kansei is now considered as a key consumer-oriented technology for new product development. This paper described a system called FuzEmotion for the purpose of assessing the kansei aspects of a product by considering design attributes of a product. Fuzzy logic is used to represent kansei words and process fuzzy input. The system has been successfully implemented to ascertain gender inclination of a mobile phone. Principal parameters of a mobile phone are considered, i.e., length, width, thickness, and mass. The system can inform gender inclination of a mobile phone with accuracy up to 76%. This is based on a set of 92 mobile phone samples from the five major mobile phone manufacturers.     

Construction of e-learning platform

With the rapid development of information technology, the knowledge increases by the way of explosion, and the rapid updating of knowledge challenges the traditional education so as to appeal people to change the learning concepts and the learning methods, lnternet, with its abundant resources, advanced technology and convenient way to obtain information, is favored by people. E-learning, as an innovative way of distance learning, provides a strong challenge to traditional learning with its unique advantage, will become lifelong learning as a major way. In this paper, the basic framework of e-learning platform has been built on the basis of development situation of domestic and foreign network education, and the different functions of the modules are analyzed, then the ideas to adapt to the new form of e-learning platform are put forward.     

基于思科网络平台的高职计算机 公共基础课程改革与实践

Under the new situation of "Internet plus", the demand for higher vocational talents is getting higher and higher. How to enhance IT literacy of higher vocational students is a problem that needs to be solved urgently in higher vocational computer public basic courses. Integrating the advantages of our school's computer public basic courses and Cisco's high-quality education resources, we should reconstruct the curriculum system and teaching content, innovate the course teaching mode, reform the curriculum evalua- tion method, and promote the construction of teaching team. The practice of the pilot class has proved that through the teaching re- form, students' enthusiasm and initiative are stimulated, and the teaching quality of the course is improved.     

A new indexing method based on word proximity for Chinese text retrieval

This paper propsed a novel text representation and matching scheme for Chinese text retrieval.At present,the indexing methods of chinese retrieval systems are either character-based or word-based.The character-based indexing methods,such as bi-gram or tri-gram indexing,have high false drops due to the mismatches between queries and documents.On the other hand,it‘s difficult to efficiently identify all the proper nouns,terminology of different domains,and phrases in the word-based indexing systems.The new indexing method uses both proximity and mutual information of the word paris to represent the text content so as to overcome the high false drop,new word and phrase problems that exist in the character-based and word-based systems.The evaluation results indicate that the average query precision of proximity-based indexing is 5.2% higher than the best results of TREC-5.     

Teaching and Learning on the Internet： A New Model of University,the International Telematic University UNINETTUNO

The convergence of telecommunications and computer science, the realization of computer-based networks and the integration of languages, by overcoming space and time constraints, gave rise to the globalization process and to the development of the knowledge society. We are facing a true revolution that is based on the multiplication of knowledge and its corresponding applications, but also on the knowledge codification, memorization and knowledge transfer. The challenges that educational institutions, and the University in particular, are called to face are linked to the fact that classrooms or lecture halls are no longer the only places where one can follow study courses： anybody from anywhere, if he has the required technological equipment and the appropriate materials can build his own environment to carry on his own educational and self-learning process. This is the reason why we need to identify new models of university and psycho-pedagogic theories allowing for the development of new Internet-based teaching and learning models by carrying on research work. This paper describes the university model proposed by International Telematic University UN1NETTUNO, rapidly become acknowledged at an international level.     

System Reconstruction in the Field-Specific Methodology of Economic Subjects

The proposal is focused on reconsideration and total reconstruction of recent economic education on the basis of different teaching styles, real competence-based learning, education for entrepreneurship and other trends in life-long education. These qualities are closely and mainly linked to target competencies which are the results of education and are reconditioned by these qualities. A modernized taxonomy of teaching methods and styles and instructions for their application in a diverse form will be proposed. The project applicants believe that the conceptual changes should be addressed by basic research as an innovation of methodological support in the form of teaching aids stratification. Teachers of economic subjects must be able to create their own teaching aids independently. They should be field methodology innovators, too. The new proposed taxonomy should be reflected in the training of teachers so that they avail of the new paradigm. This article is provided as one of the outputs of the research project of the Faculty of Finance and Accounting, which is realized in the framework of institutional support University of Economics IP 100040.     

Quadrature Kalman Filter （QKF） and Reduced Quadrature Kalman Filter （R-QKF） in Ballistic Target Tracking

Recently there have been researches about new efficient nonlinear filtering techniques in which the nonlinear filters generalize elegantly to nonlinear systems without the burdensome lineafization steps. Thus, truncation errors due to linearization can be compensated. These filters include the unscented Kalman filter （UKF）, the central difference filter （CDF） and the divided difference filter （DDF）, and they are also called Sigma Point Filters （SPFs） in a unified way. For higher order approximation of the nonlinear function. Ito and Xiong introduced an algorithm called the Gauss Hermite Filter, which is revisited in [5]. The Gauss Hermite Filter gives better approximation at the expense of higher computation burden, although it＇s less than the particle filter. The Gauss Hermite Filter is used as introduced in [5] with additional pruning step by adding threshold for the weights to reduce the quadrature points.     

基于校企合作的软件工程课程体系创新模式(英文)

Through the cooperation of College of Software and IBM Corporation,new technologies and methods are introduced into classroom successively to carry on the innovation of industrialized software education curriculum system.Take the new "data structure and modeling" course for example.This innovation model develops teaching materials and laboratory manuals.It improves students' hands-on ability through business cases training and preferably enhances students' ability to solve problems in the process of analyzing practical situations.This model cultivates students to meet actual demands of enterprises.Besides,supported by Co-Lab,student clubs and innovation units can be set up to compete,practice,and complete final design,achieving "pre-employment" in the training base.The practices of this model have already brought up a plenty of engineering-type,innovation-type and utility-type talents,bringing the continuous rise in the students' employment rate and employment quality.     

Use Case for the Development of a Mobile Learning Application

This paper presents use cases developed for a mobile learning application named MLEA （mobile learning environment adapter）, developed in collaboration with the Universidad do Vale do Rio dos Sinos-Unisinos, Brazil and UTP （Universidad Tecnologica de Panama）. MLEA allows users to access, through a single platform, courses in a content management system--Moodle. The objective of this project is to create a communication platform that allows users of Android based mobile devices to use services of the virtual campus of UTP. The work team is composed of six professors and researchers in Panama and three in Brazil, with voluntary students in both countries. A complete, step by step use case is documented, including requirement specifications, interface designs based on Android patterns, as well as programming patterns used for the communication between mobile devices and Moodle platform.     

UBI-HIT联合工程硕士课程知识与工程教育(英文)

This paper tentatively discusses the necessity and the requirements to better educate joint UB1-HIT master students from an engineering and engineer's perspective.The author argues that the students should have a broader engineering culture.After having given the context and basic definitions,the paper presents the author's view on how to better develop the engineering capabilities from a knowledge acquisition and learning point of view.Requirements for engineering education are addressed,based,among others,on the professional experience the first author built up while serving as senior manager in information technology and business transformation,at Capgemini Consulting(Belgium).A series of conclusions are given at the end of the paper.     

Preface

Information explosion and advances in computing hardware have brought forth a new generation of application son the Internet and on mobile devices that are poised to transform the way we work and play. One of the biggest     

Fault-tree models of accident scenarios of RoPax vessels

Ro-Ro vessels for cargo and passengers (RoPax) are a relatively new concept that has proven to be popular in the Mediterranean region and is becoming more widespread in Northern Europe. Due to its design characteristics and amount of passengers, although less than a regular passenger liner, accidents with RoPax vessels have far reaching consequences both for economical and for human life. The objective of this paper is to identify hazards related to casualties of RoPax vessels. The terminal casualty events chosen are related to accident and incident statistics for this type of vessel. This paper focuses on the identification of the basic events that can lead to an accident and the performance requirements. The hazard identification is carried out as the first step of a Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) and the modelling of the relation between the relevant events is made using Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). The conclusions of this study are recommendations to the later steps of FSA rather than for decision making (Step 5 of FSA). These recommendations will be focused on the possible design shortcomings identified during the analysis by fault trees throughout cut sets. Also the role that human factors have is analysed through a sensitivity analysis where it is shown that their influence is higher for groundings and collisions where an increase of the initial probability leads to the change of almost 90% of the accident occurrence.     

Active network supports for mobile IP

The basic mobile IP protocol is difficult to implement on the traditional IP network and not flexible and efficient under certain conditions.For example,firewalls or boundary routers may drop packets sent by mobile nodes for security reasons.Traditional networking devices such as routers cannot dynamically load and unload extended services to achieve different qualities of services.In this paper,a new scheme of using the active network to support the mobile IP is presented.The Softnet,a prototype of active networks based on mobile agents,is introduced.The active network is characterized by the programmability of its intermediate nodes and therefore presents dynaic and flexible behaviors.Special services can be dynamically deployed onto the active nodes in the Softnet.This property is definitely required in implementing the mobile IP protocols.The SOftnet.This property is definitely required in implementing the mobile IP protocols.The Softnet.This property is definitely required in implementing the mobile IP protocols.The Softnet supports not only the basic mobile IP protocol but also other extended mobile IP protocols.Virtual networks for mobile IP services are dynamically formed by mobile agents in the Softnet to provide different qualities of services.     

Software-oriented approaches for teaching computer architecture to computer science students

This paper describes a combination of approaches to provoke deeper comprehension in various topics in computer architecture details to computer science students. It also presents the outcome of this effort. The proposed educational approaches apply to a sequence of two courses on computer architecture and organization. The first course explains basic notions of execution on a processor, as well as hardware details. The tools used are simulation, assembly language and C programming. The second course deals with more advanced matters of computer organization. There, the authors introduced building a simple Linux device driver as a new approach for getting hands-on experience, on issues related to interactions of the operating system kernel with the memory, I/O, peripherals, and bus system components.     

SmallWorld Model-Based Polylogarithmic Routing Using Mobile Nodes

The use of mobile nodes to improve network system performance has drawn considerable attention recently. The movement-assisted model considers mobility as a desirable feature,where routing is based on the store-carry-forward paradigm with random or controlled movement of resource rich mobile nodes.The application of such a model has been used in several emerging networks,including mobile ad hoc networks(MANETs),wireless sensor networks(WSNs),and delay tolerant networks(DTNs).It is well known that mobility increases the capacity of MANETs by reducing the number of relays for routing,prolonging the lifespan of WSNs by using mobile nodes in place of bottleneck static sensors,and ensuring network connectivity in DTNs using mobile nodes to connect different parts of a disconnected network.Trajectory planning and the coordination of mobile nodes are two important design issues aiming to optimize or balance several measures, including delay,average number of relays,and moving distance.In this paper,we propose a new controlled mobility model with an expected polylogarithmic number of relays to achieve a good balance among several contradictory goals,including delay,the number of relays,and moving distance.The model is based on the small-world model where each static node has"short"link connections to its nearest neighbors and"long"link connections to other nodes following a certain probability distribution.Short links are regular wireless connections whereas long links are implemented using mobile nodes.Various issues are considered,including trade-offs between delay and average number of relays,selection of the number of mobile nodes,and selection of the number of long links.The effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated analytically as well as through simulation.