The effects of participation in an Internet -based project on the development of global knowledge, global mindedness, and global pedagogy among preservice social studies teachers

In order to prepare younger generations to live in a world characterized by interconnectedness, developing global and international perspectives for future teachers has been recommended by the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects that participation in the International Communication and Negotiation Simulation (ICONS), an Internet-based communication project has on preservice social studies teachers' global knowledge, global mindedness, and global teaching strategies. ^ The study was conducted at a public university in South Florida. A combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches was employed. Two groups of preservice social studies teachers were chosen as participants: a control group composed of 14 preservice teachers who enrolled in a global education class in the summer semester of 1998 and an experimental group that included nine preservice teachers who took the same class in the fall semester of 1998. The summer class was conducted in a traditional format, which included lectures, classroom discussions, and student presentations. The fall class incorporated a five-week Internet-based communication project. The Global Mindedness Scale (Hett, 1993) and an adapted Test of Global Knowledge (ETS, 1981) were administered upon the completion of the class. ^ Contrasting case studies were utilized to investigate the impact of participation in the ICONS on the development of preservice teachers' global pedagogy. Four preservice teachers, two selected from each group were observed and interviewed to explore how they were infusing global perspectives into social studies curriculum and instruction during a 10-week student teaching internship in the spring semester of 1999. ^ This study had three major findings. First, preservice social studies teachers from the experimental group on average scored significantly higher than those from the control group on the global knowledge test. Second, no significant difference was found between the two groups in their mean scores on the Global Mindedness Scale. Third, all four selected preservice social studies teachers were infusing global perspectives into United States and world history curriculum and instruction during their student teaching internship. Using multiple resources was the common pedagogy. The two who participated in the ICONS were more aware of using the communication feature of the Internet and the web sites that reflect more international perspectives to facilitate teaching about the world. ^ Recommendations were made for further research and for preservice studies teacher education program development. ^

Förutsättningar för distanskommunikation mellan reklambyråer och kunder : En intervju- och enkätundersökning

Små reklambyråer har, i skuggan av den ekonomiska krisen, fått konkurrens om sina kunder av större reklambyråer och tryckerier. En lösning kan vara att skapa relationer till företag utanför närområdet. Internetbaserade verktyg för distanskommunikation skulle i sådana fall kunna erbjuda ett bra komplement till det fysiska mötet. Distanskommunikation är effektivt eftersom det bland annat ger minskad tidsåtgång för möten och minskade resekostnader. Denna typ av kommunikation kan dock innebära större risk för missförstånd, och färre tillfällen att bygga en personlig relation till kunden. Användningen av internetbaserade verktyg för att kommunicera på distans förväntas dock bli allt vanligare i framtiden, i takt med att utbudet av kommunikationsverktyg ökar. Huvudmålet med denna studie har därför varit att undersöka förutsättningarna för distanskommunikation mellan reklambyrå och kund. Syftet har varit att ta reda på hur för- och nackdelar med distanskommunikation värderas av respektive parter, samt vilket kommunikationssätt som de anser lämpar sig bäst vid olika arbetssteg. Detta undersöktes genom enkätundersökning till utvalda företag samt intervjuer med fyra mindre reklambyråer i Dalarna. Studiens resultat, visade tydligt att det personliga mötet är mycket viktigt, och att det inte kan ersättas av någon form av distanskommunikation. Däremot ansåg både företag och reklambyråer att verktyg för distanskommunikation kan användas vid arbetsmöten.

Interactive health communication in preventive medicine - Internet-based strategies in teaching and research

Interactive health communication using Internet technologies is expanding the range and flexibility of intervention and teaching options available in preventive medicine and the health sciences. Advantages of interactive health communication include the enhanced convenience, novelty, and appeal of computer-mediated communication; its flexibility and interactivity; and automated processing. We outline some of these fundamental aspects of computer-mediated communication as it applies to preventive medicine. Further, a number of key pathways of information technology evolution are creating new opportunities for the delivery of professional education in preventive medicine and other health domains, as well as for delivering automated, self-instructional health behavior-change programs through the Internet. We briefly describe several of these key evolutionary pathways, We describe some examples from work we have done in Australia. These demonstrate how we have creatively responded to the challenges of these new information environments, and how they may be pursued in the education of preventive medicine and other health care practitioners and in the development and delivery of health behavior change programs through the Internet. Innovative and thoughtful applications of this new technology can increase the consistency, reliability, and quality of information delivered.

Intra-organizational use of communication tools in value nets - Cases from the ICT industry

Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli selvittää sisäisen kommunikoinnin tilannetta case-yrityksissä. Yritykset kuuluvat kahteen case-arvoverkostoon, jotka toimivat informaatio- ja kommunikaatioteknologian alalla. Sisäinen kommunikointi valittiin tutkimusalueeksi, koska se muodostaa perustan ulkoiselle, yritysten väliselle kommunikoinnille. Tutkimuksen painopiste oli web-pohjaisessa kommunikoinnissa ja webin ominaisuuksissa arvoverkoston näkökulmasta. Tutkimusprosessissa käytettiin sekä kvalitatiivisia että kvantitatiivisia menetelmiä. Tutkimuksen kvantitatiivinen osa toteutettiin web-kyselynä, jonka tulokset osoittivat, että case-yritysten sisäinen kommunikointi perustuu pääasiassa perinteisten kommunikointivälineiden käyttöön. Toisin sanoen, webin hyödyntäminen on vähäistä, mihin vaikuttavat monet eri tekijät. Webissä on kuitenkin useita ominaisuuksia, jotka parantavat kommunikointia arvoverkostossa ja siksi nämä web-pohjaiset välineet tulisi huomioida, kun suunnitellaan yleistä kommunikointijärjestelmää. Tutkimuksen teoreettisessa osassa määriteltiin vuorovaikutteisuus-ominaisuuteen perustuva kommunikointivälineiden luokittelu. Tämän lisäksi määriteltiin myös arvoverkoston käsite. Empiirinen osa koostui web-kyselyn toteutuksen ja tulosten raportoinnista, jonka jälkeen yhteenvetokappale koosti merkittävimmät havainnot sekä mahdolliset jatkotutkimusaiheet.

The use of computer-based learning tools for teaching and clinical purposes: Interactive computing strategy for Iraq

Medical universities and teaching hospitals in Iraq are facing a lack of professional staff due to the ongoing violence that forces them to flee the country. The professionals are now distributed outside the country which reduces the chances for the staff and students to be physically in one place to continue the teaching and limits the efficiency of the consultations in hospitals. A survey was done among students and professional staff in Iraq to find the problems in the learning and clinical systems and how Information and Communication Technology could improve it. The survey has shown that 86% of the participants use the Internet as a learning resource and 25% for clinical purposes while less than 11% of them uses it for collaboration between different institutions. A web-based collaborative tool is proposed to improve the teaching and clinical system. The tool helps the users to collaborate remotely to increase the quality of the learning system as well as it can be used for remote medical consultation in hospitals.

Social Support Quality in Internet Based Information and Communication: From "Digital Divide" to "Voice Divide"

National and international studies demonstrate that the number of teenagers using the inter-net increases. But even though they actually do have access from different places to the in-formation and communication pool of the internet, there is evidence that the ways in which teenagers use the net - regarding the scope and frequency in which services are used as well as the preferences for different contents of these services - differ significantly in relation to socio-economic status, education, and gender. The results of the regarding empirical studies may be summarised as such: teenager with low (formal ) education especially use internet services embracing 'entertainment, play and fun' while higher educated teenagers (also) prefer intellectually more demanding and particularly services supplying a greater variety of communicative and informative activities. More generally, pedagogical and sociological studies investigating "digital divide" in a dif-ferentiated and sophisticated way - i.e. not only in terms of differences between those who do have access to the Internet and those who do not - suggest that the internet is no space beyond 'social reality' (e.g. DiMaggio & Hargittai 2001, 2003; Vogelgesang, 2002; Welling, 2003). Different modes of utilisation, that structure the internet as a social space are primarily a specific contextualisation of the latter - and thus, the opportunities and constraints in virtual world of the internet are not less than those in the 'real world' related to unequal distribu-tions of material, social and cultural resources as well as social embeddings of the actors involved. This fact of inequality is also true regarding the outcomes of using the internet. Empirical and theoretical results concerning forms and processes of networking and commu-nity building - i.e. sociability in the internet, as well as the social embeddings of the users which are mediated through the internet - suggest that net based communication and infor-mation processes may entail the resource 'social support'. Thus, with reference to social work and the task of compensating the reproduction of social disadvantages - whether they are medial or not - the ways in which teenagers get access to and utilize net based social sup-port are to be analysed.

W-CDMA capacity analysis using GIS based planning tools and MATLAB simulation

The evolution of cellular systems towards third generation (3G) or IMT-2000 seems to have a tendency to use W-CDMA as the standard access method, as ETSI decisions have showed. However, there is a question about the improvements in capacity and the wellness of this access method. One of the aspects that worry developers and researchers planning the third generation is the extended use of the Internet and more and more bandwidth hungry applications. This work shows the performance of a W-CDMA system simulated in a PC using cover maps generated with DC-Cell, a GIS based planning tool developed by the Technical University of Valencia, Spain. The maps are exported to MATLAB and used in the model. The system used consists of several microcells in a downtown area. We analyse the interference from users in the same cell and in adjacent cells and the effect in the system, assuming perfect control for each cell. The traffic generated by the simulator is voice and data. This model allows us to work with coverage that is more accurate and is a good approach to analyse the multiple access interference (MAI) problem in microcellular systems with irregular coverage. Finally, we compare the results obtained, with the performance of a similar system using TDMA.

Programming internet based DAI applications in Qu-Prolog

This paper presents the unique collection of additional features of Qu-Prolog, a variant of the Al programming language Prolog, and illustrates how they can be used for implementing DAI applications. By this we mean applications comprising communicating information servers, expert systems, or agents, with sophisticated reasoning capabilities and internal concurrency. Such an application exploits the key features of Qu-Prolog: support for the programming of sound non-clausal inference systems, multi-threading, and high level inter-thread message communication between Qu-Prolog query threads anywhere on the internet. The inter-thread communication uses email style symbolic names for threads, allowing easy construction of distributed applications using public names for threads. How threads react to received messages is specified by a disjunction of reaction rules which the thread periodically executes. A communications API allows smooth integration of components written in C, which to Qu-Prolog, look like remote query threads.

Evaluation of an internet-based physical activity intervention: A preliminary investigation

The Internet has the potential for delivering innovative, interactive physical activity (PA) interventions to large numbers of people. This study was designed to test the efficacy. of ant Internet intervention that consisted of a Web site plus 12 weekly e-mail tip sheets, compared with a waiting list control group. The Internet intervention was theory based and emphasized clear, graphical presentation of PA information. Sixty-five (30 intervention and 35 control) sedentary adult employees of several large hospitals (9 men and 56 women) were randomly assigned to 1 of the 2 study arms. Of the 65 participants, 57 completed the 1-month follow-up, and 52 completed the 3-month follow-up. At both 1 and 3 months, those in the intervention group were significantly more likely to have progressed, in stage of motivational readiness for PA than participants in the control group: 1 month, chi(2)(1, N = 52) = 4.05, p

How new online communication tools and the availability of content influence the audiences and the creative process

We live in a changing world. At an impressive speed, every day new technological resources appear. We increasingly use the Internet to obtain and share information, and new online communication tools are emerging. Each of them encompasses new potential and creates new audiences. In recent years, we witnessed the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other media platforms. They have provided us with an even greater interactivity between sender and receiver, as well as generated a new sense of community. At the same time we also see the availability of content like it never happened before. We are increasingly sharing texts, videos, photos, etc. This poster intends to explore the potential of using these new online communication tools in the cultural sphere to create new audiences, to develop of a new kind of community, to provide information as well as different ways of building organizations’ memory. The transience of performing arts is accompanied by the need to counter that transience by means of documentation. This desire to ‘save’ events reaches its expression with the information archive of the different production moments as well as the opportunity to record the event and present it through, for instance, digital platforms. In this poster we intend to answer the following questions: which online communication tools are being used to engage audiences in the cultural sphere (specifically between theater companies in Lisbon)? Is there a new relationship with the public? Are online communication tools creating a new kind of community? What changes are these tools introducing in the creative process? In what way the availability of content and its archive contribute to the organization memory? Among several references, we will approach the two-way communication model that James E. Grunig & Todd T. Hunt (1984) already presented and the concept of mass self-communication of Manuel Castells (2010). Castells also tells us that we have moved from traditional media to a system of communication networks. For Scott Kirsner (2010), we have entered an era of digital creativity, where artists have the tools to do what they imagined and the public no longer wants to just consume cultural goods, but instead to have a voice and participate. The creativity process is now depending on the public choice as they wander through the screen. It is the receiver who owns an object which can be exchanged. Virtual reality has encouraged the receiver to abandon its position of passive observer and to become a participant agent, which implies a challenge to organizations: inventing new forms of interfaces. Therefore, we intend to find new and effective online tools that can be used by cultural organizations; the best way to manage them; to show how organizations can create a community with the public and how the availability of online content and its archive can contribute to the organizations’ memory.

Experience with an internet-based course for ophthalmology residents

OBJECTIVE: To describe the first experience of an Internet-based course for ophthalmology residents. METHOD: Twenty-three residents were invited to participate in the study; however, only 13 (56.52%) took part, performing the proposed activities and answering a questionnaire. RESULTS: Of the 13 participants, only five (38.46%) completed 100% of the tasks, three (23.07%) completed between 70 and 90%, two (15.38%) completed between 50 and 60% and three (23.07%) completed less than 10% of the tasks. Regarding the use of computers and the Internet in general, all the participants reported using the Internet daily. All of them also affirmed they use the internet to study or to conduct research. CONCLUSION: Despite the advantages of the Internet, medical residents are still very reluctant to its use. Considering the context of information and communication technologies, there is a pressing need to reformulate continuing medical education in order to meet the demand of this new developing world.

Internet-Based Supervisory Teleoperation of a Virtual Humanoid Robot

This paper describes the approach used by the Sarbot-Team for controlling the Atlas humanoid robot during the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge that took place in June 2013. Herein we present a proposal for overcoming the restrictions on performance caused by limited bandwidth, high latency and the effects of signal degradation induced by beyond line of sight (BLOS) conditions, RF interference, and other related circumstances. Experimental evaluation confirmed the effectiveness of our approach and present an alternative for coping with constrained communication conditions during the control of humanoid robot deployed at unattended areas.

Successes and failures in assessing acquired language disorders using an Internet-based telerehabilitation system

We have used a telerehabilitation system (eREHAB) to remotely assess acquired language disorders via the Internet. The system was used to establish a 128 kbit/s videoconference between two sites and allowed a remote language assessment to be conducted using the standardized Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). The system had the capacity to display text and images, and could play pre-recorded instructions to the participant via various built-in tools. A touch screen allowed tasks involving picture identification to be completed easily. Eighteen participants with a diagnosis of an acquired language disorder were simultaneously assessed using the eREHAB system, and in the traditional face-to-face manner by two speech pathologists. There was very high agreement between the two assessors, with weighted kappa scores of 0.8–1.0 for 88% of the sub-tests of the BDAE. There was also high agreement (80–100%) and high kappa scores (0.67–0.90) between assessors on the six rating scales relating to language characteristics. The agreement between the two assessors for the diagnosis of the type of aphasia was 83%. Limitations of the system related mainly to problems inherent in IP videoconferencing. The inability to maintain the preferred speed of 128 kbit/s for the duration of the videoconference and the resultant increase in video and audio breakup and latency affected the clinician’s ability to administer the BDAE with the same ease and accuracy as in face-to-face administration. These difficulties were exacerbated when participants presented with a moderate to severe language disorder, auditory comprehension deficits or significant hearing loss. Despite these limitations, a valid assessment of language disorder was found to be feasible via this telerehabilitation application.

Internet-based applications in the agri-food supply chain:a survey on the Greek canning sector

In the agri-food industry, Internet-based applications changed the way companies conduct business mainly by facilitating activities that were already taking place, rather by giving birth to virtual networks creation. Due to the specific characteristics of the sector, Internet's huge potential has not been fully exploited yet, still remaining a new communication tool. This paper aims at giving empirical insights regarding the use of Internet-based applications in the agri-food supply chain, by focusing on the Greek fruit canning sector. In particular, the paper identifies companies' perceptions regarding perceived benefits, constrained factors and motivation factors towards the use of Internet-based applications. Results indicate that companies recognise benefits arising from the use of Internet, however they still use traditional ways when communicating with their partners. Regarding transportation issues, while companies' overall satisfaction is rather moderate and differs significantly from the importance placed on a number of criteria, companies are still sceptical in using Electronic Transportation Marketplace. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.