The advancements made in handheld devices and the widespread use of these devices among users all over the world has opened up new avenues for the use of these devices in education. Many applications have been developed to work on these devices to support the teaching and learning process in all its dimensions. CommEasy is an innovative, interactive communication system for smart handheld devices based on Internet and WiFi technology. This system has been developed mainly to enhance communication and participation in distance-learning classrooms that use video-conferencing technology. It allows students to pose questions for the instructors using their own Apple smart handheld devices, guarantees them complete anonymity and allows the instructors to respond to their students. It also enables instructors to evaluate the learning of their students by posing questions with multiple answers to which students can respond through their devices. This paper concentrates on the role of CommEasy in enhancing teacher-student communication and interaction. The hypothesis to be tested is that CommEasy will increase the level of student participation in the distance-learning classroom. According to the results of the experiment conducted in King Saud University, the null hypothesis is rejected, and the experimental hypothesis mentioned above is accepted.

The educational field has been greatly affected by the current revolution in ICT, especially the advancements made in the use of handheld devices such as smartphones with touch screen capabilities, which have become extremely popular among university students worldwide. Universities and educators have realised that using such devices in education can help to bridge the gap between the way students live and the way they learn as well as enrich the learning experience and tackle the problems students face. This trend has led to developing numerous educational mobile systems to support the teaching-learning process and to tackle the problems that students and instructors face. Hesitation, shyness and crowded classrooms are barriers that can discourage students from participating. This paper presents the perceptions of instructors and students of the interactive communication system CommEasy. This system was developed mainly to tackle a number of communication barriers that female students face in distance-learning classrooms and provide them with a convenient way to pose questions to instructors using their own handheld devices. Results of the evaluation show that students and instructors have a very positive attitude toward the role of CommEasy in supporting communication and participation and removing the barriers they face.

SUMMARY Multi‐touch driven user interfaces are becoming increasingly prevalent because of their intuitiveness and because of the reduction in the associated hardware costs. In recognition of this trend, multi‐touch software frameworks (MSFs) have begun to emerge. These frameworks abstract the low level issues of multi‐touch software development and deployment. MSFs therefore enable software developers who are unfamiliar with the complexities of multi‐touch software development to implement and deploy multi‐touch applications more easily. However, some multi‐touch applications have real‐time system requirements, and at present, no MSFs provide support for the development and deployment of such real‐time multi‐touch applications. The implication of this is that software developers are unable to take advantage of MSFs and, therefore, are forced to handle the complexities of multi‐touch and real‐time systems development and deployment for themselves in an ad hoc manner. The primary consequence of this is that the multi‐touch and/or real‐time aspects of the application may not function correctly. In this paper, guidelines are presented for applying real‐time system concepts to support the development and deployment of real‐time multi‐touch applications using MSFs. This serves to increase the probability that the application will meet its timing requirements while also reducing the complexity of the development and deployment process associated with multi‐touch applications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This research investigates the effectiveness of using aural instructions together with visualisation in teaching some concepts of data structures to novice computer science students. A prototype learning system, known as the Data Structure Learning (DSL) tool, was developed and used first in a short mini study that showed that, used together with visualisations of algorithms, aural instructions produced faster student response times than did textual instructions. This result suggested that the additional use of the auditory sensory channel did indeed reduce the cognitive load. The tool was then used in a second, longitudinal, study over two academic terms in which students studying the Data Structures module were offered the opportunity to use the DSL approach with either aural or textual instructions. Both the quantitative data provided by the automatic recording of DSL use and an end-of-study questionnaire showed appreciation by students of the help the tool had provided and enthusiasm for its future use and development. These findings were supported by qualitative data provided by student written feedback at the end of each task, by interviews at the end of the experiment and by interest from the lecturer in integrating use of the tool with the teaching of the module.

Encouraging collaborative software design through the use of multi-touch interfaces has become increasingly important, because such surfaces can accommodate more than one user concurrently, which is particularly useful for collaborative software design. In this paper, the potential of using multi-touch MT-CollabUML application for collaborative software design is explored. This exploration is done by looking at how students' collaboration might be enhanced in collaborative software design using Unified Modeling Language (UML) comparing the traditional paper-based environment with the contemporary multi-touch table environment.

The purpose of this study is to investigate students' perceptions of their motivation to learn while possessing an avatar alongside the learning activities. The activities include attendance and accessing the course module's eLearning portal. 47 students participated in the study and were divided into two groups: an avatar group and a non-avatar group. Additionally, two research instruments were used in the study. Firstly, an avatar environment named Avatar Hall was developed to allow the students from the avatar group to view their avatars. The second instrument was a motivation inventory, which was used to identify the students' perceptions of the extent to which the presence of an avatar motivated them to learn. The results for both groups show a moderate percentage distribution of the students' perceptions of their motivation to learn and further statistical test reveal no significant difference between the two groups of students in terms of their motivation to learn.

The definitive version can be found at : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ Copyright Wiley [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

This abstract describes ongoing research on human to human interaction between early career Computer Scientists as they explore a complex collaborative concept mapping task performed by a collocated group using a large wall-screen projected display. We have investigated the effects of input configuration and mode of input on human to human computer interaction through the use of gesture based controllers. Application of Bales' Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) [1] supports identity trade offs in choosing from a plethora of available input devices and displays when investigating interaction and knowledge discovery.

This paper demonstrates how sentiment analysis can be used to identify differences in how students and staff perceive the opinions contained in feedback for programming work. The feedback considered in this paper is conceptually different in that it is given in the form of tags that when associated with a fragment of source code can be considered as a sharable learning resource. The research presented investigates the differences in perception of whether feedback is positive, negative or neutral according to students and examiners. This paper also investigates the adequacy of an automated sentiment analysis engine with a view that sentiment information when combined with the feedback tag and source code may create a more informative sharable learning resource. This paper describes the investigatory technique and presents the initial results. Results indicate that there are important differences between the sentiment of feedback perceived by students and examiners. This paper highlights the benefit of including sentiment data along with feedback.

The work presented in this paper aims to break the conventional view of Web browsing as an individual learning activity by leveraging the notion of collaborative browsing. An ontology based approach is proposed to automatically link users on the Web who have similar or related browsing interests. The novelty of the approach lies in the fact that it utilizes not only the similarity between userspsila activities but also the instructional relatedness between them, a thing that can lead to more intelligent matching results. A distance-based approach within an ontology is used to measure the relatedness between the ldquosubject mattersrdquo of the Web pages browsed by users. Subsequently, users who have navigated related Web pages are informed of each otherspsila contact details and visited pages. The assessment of the service by expert judgment revealed its ability to identify semantically-related browsing activities.

This paper presents Knowledge Puzzle, a tool for knowledge construction from the Web. Its main contribution to Web-based learning is the adaptation of information structure on the Web to cope with the interlinked knowledge structure in the learnerpsilas mind. Self-directed learners will be able to adapt the path of instruction on the Web to their way of thinking, regardless of how the Web content is delivered. The way to achieve that is to provide the learner with a metacognitive tool that enables him to bring his knowledge to the surface and visualize what he has in mind. Once we get the learnerpsilas viewpoint externalized, it will be converted to a hypermedia layer that will be laid over the Web pages visited by the learner. The attached layer adapts the views of Web pages to the learnerpsilas information needs by associating information pieces that are not already linked in hyperspace and attaching the learnerpsilas notes to the page content.

In this paper we present SWLinker, a system that aims to empower browsing of Web learning resources by the integration of Semantic Web technologies. It leverages the synergy of learning objects (LOs) on the Semantic Web and ontology based dynamic linking in order to enrich Web pages with semantic layers of complementary knowledge. Furthermore, we demonstrate how SWLinker can support collaborative browsing by enabling context based matching in order to assemble effective groups of co-learners.

Ensuring a Website is accessible for diverse sets of users is a crucial and in some circumstances a legal requirement. It can also be a time consuming and frustrating fire fighting exercise. This research paper describes a visual evaluation of the accessibility of a Website using Tree-Maps. Its goal is to highlight areas of a site that need attention. This is achieved by generating accessibility metrics and then plotting these onto a visualisation. The research identified that tree-maps can efficiently represent the accessibility of a Website. Further work on the visualisation of changes in accessibility is suggested and discussed.

Dominance trees have been used as a means for reengineering legacy systems into potential reuse candidates. The dominance relation suggests the reuse candidates which are identified by strongly directly dominated subtrees. We review the approach and illustrate how the dominance tree may fail to show the relationship between the strongly direct dominated procedures and the directly dominated procedures. We introduce a relation of generalized conditional independence which strengthens the argument for the adoption of the potential reuse candidates suggested by the dominance tree and explains their relationship with the directly dominated vertices. This leads to an improved dominance tree, the moral dominance tree, which helps aid program comprehension available from the tree. The generalized conditional independence relation also identifies potential reuse candidates that are missed by the dominance relation.

No abstract available.

This paper evaluates the suitability of dominance trees as a means of re-modularising legacy systems. It uses two factors to assess the suitability of the dominance tree approach as a restructuring mechanism. Firstly, it considers if dominance tree analysis identifies suitable reuse candidates and secondly, if the candidates generated represent an improvement to the structure of the code. Applications from two domains and software written in two development languages are used to evaluate the dominance tree's suitability factors. Sequential versions of the software are used to identify specific changes that are made to the software over time, to ensure that the reuse candidates identified are supportive of software change. The results show that overall the dominance trees are useful for software re-modularisation. Furthermore, the results of this study have revealed some interesting observations regarding the general characteristics of software and the process of software change.

The paper evaluates the suitability of reuse candidates identified through the dominance relation approach and their ability to support the process of software evolution. The paper provides an overview of the dominance relation and how it is used to identify the reusable candidates. The reuse candidates that are identified by this approach are then evaluated to see how they stand up to the process of software evolution. A number of case studies, and the results of the object's evolution, are described.

As software applications increase in size, grouping the application into smaller, more manageable components is often proposed as a means of assisting software maintenance activities. This paper investigates the suitability of components generated using data clustering techniques. The suitability of the approach is based on real case studies from a commercial environment. Successive versions of the software application are used to investigate how the software applications change throughout the maintenance process. Within this paper, the change process as a whole is referred to as the process of software evolution. This paper provides an indication of how applications evolve over time and how clustering techniques are affected by the evolution process.

This paper describes an investigation into the use of code replication within legacy software systems. Two cases of replication are investigated. These are replication with an individual program and replication of an entire or part of a program across a program suite. For each of the cases an example is given from code used within the commercial sector. The instances of replication are then investigated and the implication of their occurrences within the code on the maintenance process are considered. The reasons why code replication is not a form of software reuse are discussed. Finally this paper investigates whether, with reengineering, areas of high usage of code replication are potential candidates for reuse

We describe work performed for the IDENT project which is concerned with the identification and encapsulation of reusable modules. The aim of the project is to look at the integration of two methods for supporting maintenance; RE/sup 2/ and RECAST. We describe a case study where we try to extract reusable modules from a 21,000 line COBOL program. We approach this through the use of some of the basic methods addressed by the RE/sup 2/ reuse reengineering paradigm and some of the stages of the reverse engineering RECAST method. We have found that the identification of modules is very difficult because of high connectivity between data items. In order to deal with this problem we identify a number of strategies for removing particular data items using some of the RECAST stages and steps. These include the logical data model and system processing steps. However, in most cases we have found that such approaches were insufficient and that expert domain knowledge is also required to assist in module identification.

AMES (Application Management Environments Support), ESPRIT Project no. 8156, is concerned not simply with program comprehension but with application understanding. This paper considers the difficulties of gaining an understanding of the detailed functioning of an application in order to perform maintenance, and describes a method and tool support which have been developed to guide a maintainer through this learning process. Our method uses a theoretical background based on learning theory, with our tools aiming to improve upon the approach of many existing program comprehension toolsets by linking related aspects of the application's documentation to form a united graph. Results of the application of our toolset are described and their implications discussed. Finally, we describe some of the future directions that we will be taking based on the results that we have obtained.

This paper describes work completed for the Application Management Environments and Support (AMES) project. AMES is concerned with providing methods and tools for the effective support of application management. We describe an evaluation framework for application management which we have proposed. The framework uses a three layer approach, consisting of a strategic, operational and service level. We use this framework to evaluate the CMM, DMM, MACS, EPSOM and REDO models and methods and then to describe and evaluate the AMES method. While we describe the framework in full, we only detail the tasks at the service level. This is because the service level represents the bulk of the research performed for application management and thus allows a detailed evaluation to be performed.>