Publications: Technology in Education

In e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, authors Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer— internationally recognized experts in the field of e-learning— offer essential information and guidelines for selecting, designing, and developing e-learning courses that build knowledge and skills for workers learning in corporate, government, and academic settings.

As more universities and research institutions develop digital classrooms, a common theme is arising: the need to manage complexity. As more technology is added to a classroom in order to facilitate the presentation, transmission and recording of digital media, the complexity of the environment increases dramatically.

The main thesis of this paper is that conducting class discussions on a computer network is an effective method for increasing the interactive competence of first-year foreign language learners because it provides students with the opportunity to generate and initiate different kinds of discourse. In addition, computer-assisted class discussion (CACD) allows students to play a greater role in managing the discourse, e.g. they feel freer to suggest a new topic, follow up on someone else’s idea, or request more information.

Curiosity, Creativity, and Complex Learning

Basic Research in Reading and Literacy

Businesses selling multimedia rich software or e-content are growing in the Internet. The e-content can be downloaded or streamed immediately after an on-line transaction. Since Internet connection speeds are variable, ranging from dial-up access speeds to broadband speeds, a content provider may provide content at different speeds or levels-of-service (LoS). Providers offering content at different service levels face two major challenges: (1) revenue maximization, and (2) resource provisioning.

Incorporating a significant amount of technology into a classroom is an important, but extremely difficult task. In this paper we describe the next generation of the UCSB digital classroom, called the Collaborative Technologies Lab (CTL). The primary goal of the CTL is to investigate the challenges of deploying technology for technology’s sake. We feel that without the ability to deploy a large amount of technology and offer robust functionality, the whole idea of enhanced learning environments becomes marginalized.

For hundreds of years verbal messages have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool for humans, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. An alternative to purely verbal presentations is to use multimedia presentations in which people learn from both words and pictures--a situation the author calls multimedia learning. Multimedia encyclopedias have become the latest addition to students’ reference tools, and the world wide web is full of messages that combine words and pictures.

Businesses selling multimedia rich software or e-content are growing in the Internet. The e-content can be downloaded by the customer or alternately, streamed by the content provider, immediately after on-line transactions. Since Internet connection speeds are variable, ranging from dial-up access speeds to broadband speeds, the content providers may provide different levels-of-service (LoS) for the same content. If a provider offers service at different LoS, for example at 56 kbps, and 128 kbps, how should the price of the service be set such that the provider makes the most money?

In the last fifteen years, there have been major paradigm shifts in both general and applied linguistics toward acknowledging intonation as an indispensable component of language and communication. In addition, the hardware and software for conducting acoustic phonetic signal analysis have recently become more accessible. The main goal of this paper is thus to integrate the two seemingly disparate subfields of linguistics, acoustic phonetics, and discourse intonation, and to suggest a new framework for facilitating and studying the acquisition of suprasegmental phonology.

Issues in Individual Differences

When do multiple representations of information in second-language learning help and when do they hinder learning?

Feedback has always been a cornerstone of the learning process. Advances in mobile devices and wireless connectivity promise closer and better feedback between speakers and audiences. In this paper we discuss a system allowing both real-time and reflective feedback for speakers. By means of online video annotations the audience can augment a lecture with personal notes and give the speaker valuable feedback both instantaneously and retrospectively. The strengths and weaknesses of the system based on lecture hall experiments are presented and discussed.