Information and Communication Technologies for Educational Development: The Case of Cybercafés at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

This study examines the use of Cybercafés/Internet resources and the evaluation of their usefulness. About eight Cybercafés located in the university community were used in this study. Questionnaires, interviews with the Cybercafé owners, staff and users as well as personal observations made during inspection of these cafés were used in this study. The data were analysed according to the background of the Internet users. The richness and high speed, accuracy, and authority were used by users to judge the quality of the Internet. Information such as the establishment of the café's facilities, membership and the future of the Cybercafés were also looked into. Finally, one can clearly see that the dominating impact of digital technology has crossed the Rubicon of controversy. The result of the survey shows that forty percent of the users learnt to use the internet by self instruction, thirty five percent learnt from colleagues or friends. Those in the sciences use the internet the most, the channel mostly used in obtaining information is the search engines. A large number of students, faculties and researchers make use of the internet in obtaining information. Many of those of those users make use of the Cybercafés in the university community.

Nurturing Young Students' Writing Knowledge, Self-Regulation, Attitudes, and Self-Efficacy: The Effects of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of implementing the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model of instruction (Graham & Harris, 2005; Harris & Graham, 1996) on the writing skills and writing self-regulation, attitudes, self-efficacy, and knowledge of 6 first grade students. A multiple-baseline design across participants with multiple probes (Kazdin, 2010) was used to test the effectiveness of the SRSD instructional intervention. Each participant was taught an SRSD story writing strategy as well as self-regulation strategies. All students wrote stories in response to picture prompts during the baseline, instruction, independent performance, and maintenance phases. Stories were assessed for essential story components, length, and overall quality. All participants also completed a writing attitude scale, a writing self-efficacy scale, and participated in brief interviews during the baseline and independent performance phases. Results indicated that SRSD can be beneficial for average first grade writers. Participants wrote stories that contained more essential components, were longer, and of better quality after SRSD instruction. Participants also showed some improvement in writing self-efficacy from pre- to post-instruction. All of the students maintained positive writing attitudes throughout the study.