A growing body of research about personal epistemological beliefs has provided tertiary educators with evidence to inform strategies in promoting eff ective teaching and learning. Personal epistemological beliefs refer to an individual’s beliefs about the nature of knowing and knowledge and are considered to infl uence how one engages in teaching and learning experiences. Th ere has been very l...

hen people ask about the meaning of life, they have to be given a metaphysical answer. Whether the answer will seem plausible or not, depends on their mindset. It cannot be checked in the domain of experience because the question explicitly leads beyond that domain. Questions about language and how words come to have meaning, are of a different sort and they deserve an answer that speakers of a...

In spite of the scale, popularity, and importance of the open courseware movement for users worldwide, there is yet no quality assessment framework that could support users on their quest for finding the most appropriate learning resource with regard to their educational needs. This paper presents both an evaluation and a comparison between three open courseware on databases offered by three ma...

This paper focuses on the foundational role of interactive epistemology in the problem of generating plans for rational agents in multiagent settings. Interactive epistemology deals with the logic of knowledge and belief when there is more than one agent. In multiagent settings, we are interested in not only the agent’s knowledge of the state of the world, but also its belief over the other age...

Participation is a complex process, engaging the whole person, implying cognitive, emotional and relational aspects (Wenger, 1998). In online open and distant learning, group work is a commonly used strategy, given its collaborative nature and constructivist framework (Bates & Poole, 2003; Garrison & Anderson, 2003; Jonassen, 2005). In this context, collaborative learning processes are highly d...

The liberation from the view that only one way of making sense of experience is legitimate (the one that “corresponds to reality”), which follows from the results of 20th century science and philosophy, puts us into a position to consciously choose and assign a purpose to the creation of meaning; and based on that choice, to develop completely new modes of information, to suit each chosen purpo...

Three years of graduating business honors cohorts in a large urban university were sampled to determine whether the introduction of ubiquitous laptop computers into the honors program contributed to student achievement, student satisfaction and constructivist teaching activities. The first year cohort consisted of honors students who did not have laptops; the second and third year cohorts were ...