"The book provides researchers and developers of online collaborative systems with approaches for effective and efficient means that would assist e-learning students and teachers with precise and relevant information regarding the ongoing online learning activity at both individual and group levels"--Provided by publisher.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2009, held in Nice, France in September/October 2009. The 35 revised full papers, 17 short papers, and 35 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 136 paper submissions and 22 poster submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on adaptation and personalization, interoperability, semantic Web, Web 2.0., data mining and social networks, collaboration and social knowledge construction, learning communities and communities of practice, learning contexts, problem and project-based learning, inquiry, learning, learning design, motivation, engagement, learning games, and human factors and evaluation.

Websites are a central part of today’s business world; however, with the vast amount of information that constantly changes and the frequency of required updates, this can come at a high cost to modern businesses. Web Data Mining and the Development of Knowledge-Based Decision Support Systems is a key reference source on decision support systems in view of end user accessibility and identifies methods for extraction and analysis of useful information from web documents. Featuring extensive coverage across a range of relevant perspectives and topics, such as semantic web, machine learning, and expert systems, this book is ideally designed for web developers, internet users, online application developers, researchers, and faculty.

"This book presents best practice environments to implement e-collaborative knowledge construction, providing psychological and technical background information about issues present in such scenarios and presents methods to improve online learning environments"--Provided by publisher.

Virtual Reality is clearly interdisciplinary research. It has, not only Information Technology importance but social, educational, economical importance too. It combines multiple disciplines for the development of virtual reality systems in which the user has the immersive feeling of being in the real world. Virtual reality has several applications in almost all fields of real life. The most typical fields for the application of virtual reality are health-care, engineering and game industry. This book may be a solid basis for the novice and advanced engineers who would like to develop user friendly Virtual Environments for education, rehabilitation and other applications of Virtual Reality. Our book provides a resource for wide variety of people including academicians, designers, developers, educators, engineers, practitioners, researchers, and graduate students.

Although the effort to involve women in engineering has risen in recent years with the creation of new initiatives and the promotion of inclusion in technical disciplines, the active participation of women in engineering professions is continuously lower than expected. While the need for engineers appears to be constantly increasing, women still do not fill most of this role and have a long way to go to even reach an equal split in the field. This gender gap has a significant impact how women in the STEM fields are perceived as well as their experiences in their education and careers. When it comes to Latin American women in IT, their contribution to science can go unnoticed, their participation levels in these fields are very low, and they often occupy lower-level positions than their male counterparts. These issues need to be discussed, and the experiences of women who work in the field must be shared. Latin American Women and Research Contributions to the IT Field highlights the important role of Latin American women in IT by collecting and disseminating their frontier-research contributions in order to provide more visibility and inspire greater participation of Latin American women within the major field of computer science. With chapters contributed by female authors from eight Latin American and Caribbean countries, the book provides a deep analysis of these women’s trajectory paths to high quality theoretical and applied relevant research in computer science and IT. While highlighting areas such as inclusivity and STEM education, along with advancements and achievements in topics that include nonverbal interaction in virtual reality, fuzzy logic applications in education, and ant colony optimization, this book is ideal for professionals, academics, students, and researchers working in the fields of information technologies and computer science as well as those interested in gender and women’s studies.

Technology-enriched online settings provide new ways to support lifelong learning. Learners can interact with other learners, gain from their experiences, and then construct their own knowledge, be it through Google Docs, online collaborative communities, YouTube, wikis, or blogs. Cases on Online Learning Communities and Beyond: Investigations and Applications provides a variety of essential case studies which explore the benefits and pedagogical successes of distance learning, blended learning, collaborative learning environments, computer-supported group-based learning, and professional learning communities. This casebook is an essential resource for educators, instructional designers, trainers, administrators, and researchers working in the areas of online learning and distance learning.