This paper challenges readers to reflect on academic disciplines in a new way, through the lens of the theory of evolution. Indeed, how disciplines came into being has been largely left unexplored. This paper shows how the concepts of evolution can be productively applied to describe the development, creation, and diminishment of disciplines. These concepts include natural selection, speciation, parallel evolution, extinction, and heterosis, among others. The paper concludes that these forces lead to a prediction that a new form of organization, the transdiscipline, is evolving to become perhaps predominant.
This papers provides an overview of e-learning from its fundamentals (what is knowledge, what is teaching) through how e-learning is being implemented using campus-wide Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS). While others, such as MacDonald et al. (2005), detail the transformation of education in light of changing technologies, this paper attempts from a variety of perspectives to make sense of the transformation. E-learning can be difficult to understand because different authors use the term differently. Still, beyond these apparent differences lies agreement on basics that this paper explores.E-learning can best be understood in the broader context of using technology to meet society's needs for learning. It also requires us to understand that adult learners have psychological needs that e-learning must address. The Informing Science framework helps us understand that teaching in higher education involves a cast of roles that might best be performed by different specialists.One of the most important aspects of e-learning are Learning Objects and the various software tools that aid in their development, storage, use in teaching, and administration. This is because elearning is often delivered using specialized software that assists teachers to create their courses, the student to use coursework, and the administrator to make previously developed coursework available for re-use. Learning Objects are the raw material of such systems. E-learning can be delivered by a sole teacher or as part of a campus-wide effort. Campus-wide LCMSs make it possible for technologists, content specialists, instructional specialists, and students to work seamlessly to create and refine e-learning.
This paper describes the process and particular support tools for authoring reusable web-based multimedia presentations. These tools enable authors to record and encode streams of audio and video, and to integrate into them additional multimedia material, such as PowerPoint slides. The paper also describes the W3C synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) standard that enables the interlinking of audio/video with additional material. Finally, the paper introduces an easy-to-use authoring tool, developed and used by the author's faculty to produce multimedia information packages, and their corresponding user interface.
This paper introduces a six paper series that examines the manner in which complexity impacts the informing process. Two of these papers specifically consider how the objective complexity of the domain being studied changes the nature of the solution-with domains consisting of many interacting elements and changing criteria for success tending to produce highly rugged fitness landscapes that violate the normal assumptions of decomposability that we make in our research and incorporate into our theories. A third paper considers how the concept of utility impacts informing and is impacted by complexity. Another pair of papers examines, first, how the structure of a client's mental models-referred to as structural complexity-changes with repetitive task performance and, then, how various cognitive filters work in concert with this structure during the informing process. The final paper specifically considers client-to-client informing processes, using the diffusion literature to argue that they are indispensible to complex informing and further mapping different models to different levels of informing complexity. Collectively, it is hoped that these papers will spur further research into the processes that enable complex informing.
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