Ann Carolyn Jones

• Educational Technology, PhD
• Professor (Full) at The Open University

In this collection, after almost a year of the Covid-19 pandemic, authors reflect on its impact on higher education, world-wide; including, amongst other topics, challenges for staff and students; new approaches to teaching; accessibility and the support provided by communities.

Personalised learning, having seen both surges and declines in popularity over the past few decades, is once again enjoying a resurgence. Examples include digital resources tailored to a particular learner’s needs, or individual feedback on a student’s assessed work. In addition, personalised technology-enhanced learning (TEL) now seems to be attra...

This paper discusses a UK field trial of the European funded MASELTOV project, which developed a suite of smartphone tools and services (the ‘MApp’) to help immigrants’ language learning and social inclusion in four European cities. The paper reports on interview data and social forum use. Our findings suggest that the MApp helps immigrants with th...

Digital technologies are profoundly social in use. They are developed and defined by participants who learn through iterative processes of participation. This is the case with online citizen science projects. Typically, scientists propose a way of conducting their research in a distributed fashion. They seek out experts in information and communica...

Personalisation of learning is a recurring trend in our society, referred to in government speeches, popular media, conference and research papers and technological innovations. This latter aspect—of using personalisation in technology‐enhanced learning (TEL)—has promised much but has not always lived up to the claims made. Personalisation is often...

This issue examines several of these settings and present a wealth of evidence from often overlooked topics as varied as online formative assessment, intelligent dictionaries, inverted or flipped classrooms, interactive multilingual software and games, Language MOOCs, machine translation, and mobile language resources in six in-depth articles and t...

Most of the literature on mobile language learning is located in classroom contexts, and often concerns the use of resources developed by teachers or researchers. However, we also need to understand learner initiated practices, in informal as well as formal settings, where mobile language learners are increasingly using digital resources. In this p...

The importance of evaluation has grown in recent years so that this topic has become the focus of considerable policy and research interest (Oliver, 2000). As new learning technologies emerge there is a need to evaluate how these are used to support an increasingly diverse student population. All staff are now expected to carry out evaluations to a...

Conole and Alevizou’s social media typology (Conole and Alevizou, 2010) includes amongst its ten categories: media sharing; conversational arenas and chat; social networking and blogging. These are all media with which language learners are increasingly engaging (Lamy and Zourou, 2013). Social networking tools, in particular, which encourage inform...

A central challenge for science educators is to enable young people to act as scientists by gathering and assessing evidence, conducting experiments and engaging in informed debate. We report the design of the nQuire toolkit, a system to support scripted personal inquiry learning, and a study of its use with school students aged 11-14. This differs...

This special issue of JIME features selected chapters from the forthcoming book 'Reusing Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education' edited by Alison Littlejohn and Chris Pegler. The five chapters and the editorial (which contains substantial quotations from Chapter 1 of the book) are reproduced in JIME under an open license...

This paper discusses how the particular features of mobile learning can be harnessed to provide new informal learning opportunities in relation to context aware and location based learning. The MASELTOV project is developing representations of an incidental learning framework to enable software developers and researchers to both design and analyse...

In this paper we analyse children’s talk with a view to understand how a technology enhanced inquiry learning toolkit played a part in enriching collaboration during a fieldtrip and facilitating social interaction. The participants in the study were 15 year-old students carrying out their geography GCSE (General Certificate in Secondary Education)...

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE This issue focusses on a perspective article by Sir John Daniel. Sir John has a long history of involvement with the Open University, the UK home of JIME. Indeed as he points out in his biography (Daniel, 2012), he first visited the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University back in 1972. T...

Key to introducing information and communication technologies in museums is to support meaning‐making activity in encounters with artefacts. The study presented in this paper is exploratory in nature and investigates the use of social and mobile technologies in school field trips as a means of enhancing the visitor experience. It is anchored in soc...

Smart cities are often developed in a top-down approach and designers may see citizens as bits within data flows. A more human-centred perspective would be to consider what the smart city might afford its citizens. A high speed, pervasive network infrastructure offers the opportunity for ubiquitous mobile learning to become a reality. The MASELTOV...

This chapter is concerned with how we might use and harness our technological culture to support children with emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD) and in particular to help them to communicate their views. Computers are a common, everyday part of many children's lives and a technology that most feel very comfortable with and find engaging....

Most research studies concerned with inquiry learning have focused on understanding classroom-based inquiries that are contextualised within specific curricular frameworks. There is, thus, a pressing need for work which resources our understanding of the process of inquiry learning in less formal contexts, such as after-school clubs. In recent year...

Abstract There has been increasing interest in informal learning in recent years alongside interest in how such learning can be supported by technology. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which adults make use of their own mobile devices to support informal learning. In this study, a survey was used to investigate whether, and...

In this paper we consider the problem of training teachers to select suitable educational programs to use in their classroom. We argue that selecting good programs is difficult, requiring both skill and experience, and that training teachers to do this has been largely neglected, both by the available literature and by in-service training courses....

This paper concerns the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in music classrooms, with the focus on the secondary school music curriculum in the United Kingdom. In particular, it reports on a study of learners in a UK school using software designed to support practical music skills. The paper begins by briefly raising and summaris...

This special issue of JIME brings together several papers that were produced following a symposium on 'Portable Learning - Learner and Teacher Experiences with Mobile Devices' held in June 2005 at the UK Open University. There is considerable interest in how mobile devices of various kinds can support learning in different contexts ranging from the...

This chapter looks at how the ideas discussed in the literature on online communities and communities of practice have been applied to the development of two European "blended" communities: communities with both online and face-to-face components. The chapter discusses the development and support of two communities of science teachers located in Ir...

In recent years online and blended communities have become a popular topic among educationalists. In this paper we present a framework that supports the analysis, development and maintenance of online and blended communities. This is applied to two community case studies that differ along several key dimensions such as type of membership, the purpo...

Provides overview of the outcomes from the Becta funded Evaluation of Tablet PCs in schools

Over the last 10 years there has been a rapid increase in the development and use of digital maps for teaching and learning in Higher Education. There is also a political drive to encourage and foster best practice in this area. This is part of a more general initiative on fostering the development and demonstrating the impact of the use of digital...

This paper reports how palmtop computers were used in an English secondary school over the course of a year. In particular, it concentrates on the perceived effectiveness of such computers in an educational setting, and on how teachers’ and students’ knowledge and use of “content-free” applications increased over that time. The benefits and potenti...

In this paper we will describe an approach to evaluating learning technology which we have developed over the last twenty-five years, outline its theoretical background and compare it with other evaluation frameworks. This has given us a set of working principles from evaluations we have conducted at the Open University and from the literature, whi...

A commonly encountered view of computer conferencing focuses on peer interaction, student empowerment and a shift in both teacher and student roles. This paper argues that this view over-emphasises the medium and minimises the importance of factors such as the setting and structure of the conferencing and the discipline area. To gain a better under...

The evaluation of educational software is of concern to two particular academic communities: HCI and educational technology. There is a danger that usability features are considered at the expense of educational issues (and the converse of this is of course equally true). This paper considers how the notion and practice of evaluation in the educati...

1 Abstract This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study that investigated cultural aspects of understanding the website of a virtual campus. Results indicate differences in expectations and understanding due to the users’ knowledge,of everyday life and real world experience, and suggest that the campus-metaphor that was used is not univer...

In this paper the results and implications of two studies of computer-supported collaborative learning are presented and implications discussed. The first study was an experimental study in a British secondary school, while the second study followed a group of primary school children in a naturalistic context. Assessing learning situations is discu...

Describes evaluations of CAL (computer-assisted learning) at the Open University (Great Britain). Highlights include evaluation of science teaching; evaluation of the Home Computing Policy; CAL evaluation in the literature; and a framework for a principled approach to evaluation, including interactions with software, outcomes, and a case study. (LR...

The feasibility of using metal hydride hydrogen storage in a self-sufficient solar hydrogen energy system is studied. Several potential commercial and non-commercial metal hydrides are considered to find a material having a low ΔH value, a low hysteresis effect, gentle P-C-T, plateau slopes and a high hydrogen storage capacity. A 1 N m3 metal hydri...

The Open University plans to make more extensive use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) for distance teaching and learning and for administrative contacts between students, tutors and the University's headquarters. This paper reports on a survey of the Tuition and Counselling (TAC) staff, most of whom work only part-time for t...

Recent research has shown that there are consistent differences between males and females and between students and teachers in their attitudes towards computers. Specifically they reveal that there are likely to be gender differences with male students having more favourable attitudes towards computers than female students but that those difference...

This article is concerned with constructivist theories of learning and how they relate to the design and use of IT in education. Not surprisingly, much of the work on learning theories comes from developmental psychology, and it is mainly this that I shall draw on. Changes in the way that cognitive development has been viewed and accounted for duri...

In any form of teaching, assumptions are made about the kind of learning that the teacher hopes will take place, and about the process of learning. In other words the teacher has a model of learning, although it may not be explicit: indeed the teacher may not be aware of it herself. What are the assumptions about teaching and learning which lie beh...

[About the book] It is said that we live in an information society and that there has been an information explosion during the present century. Indeed we live in an age when the storage, transmission, retrieval, and the creation of information by electronic means has suddenly become commonplace. Clearly our educational system must take all this in...

[About the book] It is said that we live in an information society and that there has been an information explosion during the present century. Indeed we live in an age when the storage, transmission, retrieval, and the creation of information by electronic means has suddenly become commonplace. Clearly our educational system must take all this in...

One problem with research on how students learn (using new technology) is that it is usually concerned with a specific topic, i.e. it has rather a narrow domain and it is not clear to what extent the findings are applicable to other domains. This paper discusses research in two rather different domains: novices learning programming and school pupil...

The publication provides an analysis of twelve case studies involving schools in England that were using Tablet PCs. The analysis is complemented by brief individual reports describing aspects of how each of these schools was using Tablet PCs.

Increased interest in more open approaches to learning, in particular Open Educational Resources is reflected in the programmes of international organisations, national initiatives and the actions of individual institutions. However, while some see OER as an indicator of the future of learning, others are much more sceptical and doubt their long-te...