We document our experiences in teaching smart contract programming to undergraduate students at the University of Maryland, the first pedagogical attempt of its kind. Since smart contracts deal directly with the movement of valuable currency units between contratual parties, security of a contract program is of paramount importance. Our lab exposed numerous common pitfalls in designing safe and...

The paper presents an approach to automatic annotation of learning objects’ (LOs) content units that we tested in TANGRAM, an integrated learning environment for the domain of Intelligent Information Systems. The paper mainly reports on the content-mining algorithms and heuristics applied for determining values of certain metadata elements used to annotate content units. Specifically, the focus...

Electronic learning objects (LOs) are commonly conceived of as digital units of information used for teaching and learning. To facilitate their classification for pedagogical planning and retrieval purposes, LOs are complemented with metadata (e.g., the author). These metadata are usually restricted by a set of predetermined tags to which the classification schema must conform (e.g., IEEE LOM)....

Wikis have been recently promoted as tools that foster collaborative learning. However, there has been little research devoted to the criteria that are suitable to address issues pertinent to collaborative learning. This paper proposes a set of criteria to explore technical and pedagogical usability issues of collaborative learning with wikis. The criteria are then used to evaluate students’ co...

The widespread involvement of librarians in information literacy education has raised concerns about their development as teachers, but there is little research on their acquisition and application of pedagogical knowledge. A questionnaire was used to collect mainly quantitative data about the teaching roles, pedagogical knowledge and professional development of subject librarians in 82 UK high...

This study describes and interprets (a) a student teacher's decisions about task content and content progression across an elementary and high school sport unit and (b) those aspects of his pedagogical content knowledge that he used to explain and justify his decisions. The student teacher's pedagogical content knowledge of dividing and sequencing subject matter can be summarized briefly: first...