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This paper addresses two major weaknesses of locating rather specific information on the Web. First, to find information for a specific topic is still quite difficult. Second, if located, the degree of reliability of the information is not clear. We explain that much progress has been made concerning the first issue, yet the real issue is never explicitly mentioned: the interaction between a user and the search engine has to be good enough so that the search engine really knows what the user wants. We will discuss a new approach to solve this. Concerning the second aspect, we will show that no serious large-scale attempts have been made to help users judge the reliability of the information found. We propose a set of measures that would change the situation dramatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web has changed the way we do things in a variety of ways. It is not uncommon to associate the term disruptive technologies to the radical changes happening on the web. This paper takes an encompassing view of developments surrounding the web with a particular emphasis on emerging trends and evolving application scenarios. We provide a broad overview of technologies, in revealing directions for emerging developments as well as directions for next-generation developments. This survey paper first reviews aspects of the web growth and its contributing factors such as the expanding landscape of social networks, mass collaborative system capabilities, and eCommunities. We then present concerns relating to the numerous developments, particularly with respect to social and political developments. This paper clearly points out the knowledge gaps and the ensuing dangers arising from the purely commercial perspectives and motivation that is driving the web. By focusing on the trees rather than the forest as a whole, we are in the process of losing ourselves and endangering our future. Subsequently, we explore the implications of current developments in enabling the web to serve as a platform for serious work, in allowing users to focus on creatively shaping of our world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid penetration of the Web into all areas of society there is also an increasing number of warning voices that the Web is endangering creative work: it encourages plagiarism, the spreading of half-truths, causes loss of memorizing ability, reduces the ability to read complex matters, provides so many distractions that prevent coherent thinking, networks of pseudo-friends eat up valuable productive time, etc. One early target of complaints were search engines with which we "build up a distorted reality", this was followed by researchers who seemed to show the rather negative effects of new (social media) on "reading with understanding", and it has culminated in a number of publications showing negative effects of many aspects of the internet including scathing attacks on e-Learning, like in the German book by Manfred Spitzer on "Digital Dementia: How we make sure that all of us are getting stupid". In this paper we discuss how the Web both supports and stifles creative activities. We report on our experiences, many based on a project that was part of the "Sparkling Science" initiative of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science and Research. We show that some claims can be validated, others are exaggerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, online collaboration tools such as wikis have experienced a tremendous expansion. Their success and popularity is due to their simple and efficient content creation facilities. Moreover, the formatting syntax is basically easy to learn allowing users to easily create and edit web content and thus share knowledge with each other. Despite these advantages, the content creation process is still obscure if authors belong to a computer inexperienced user group. In this paper we present our experiences, challenges, and problems with a specific application of a wiki-based system called the Academia Europaea Information and Communication System. Furthermore, key solutions for bypassing user interaction barriers are discussed throughout this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact that people of all walks of life are becoming more and more reliant on a wide-range of easily-available digital content is often called the Copy-Paste Syndrome. It implies the indiscriminate usage of material, i.e. without checking for reliability or a concern for violations of intellectual property rights or plagiarism, a kind of cheating that has become uncomfortably widespread. A holistic approach is required to address this universal problem combining an institutional approach together with the application of viable technologies, rather than aposteriory checks with software of doubtful reliability. This paper describes a learning ecosystem, ICARE, that addresses the Copy-Paste Syndrome by minimizing the possibility for unwanted copy-and-paste situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a brief overview of current technologies in systems handling encyclopaedic knowledge. Since most of the electronic encyclopaedias currently available are rather static and inflexible, greatly enhanced functionality is introduced that enables users to work more effectively and collaboratively. Users have the ability, for instance, to add annotations to every kind of object and can have private and shared workspaces. The techniques described employ user profiles in order to adapt to users and involve statistical analysis to improve search results. Moreover, a tracking and navigation mechanism based on trails is presented. The second part of the paper details community building around encyclopaedic knowledge with the aim to involve "plain" users and experts in environments with largely editorial content. The foundations for building a user community are specified along with significant facets such as retaining the high quality of content, rating mechanisms and social aspects. A system that implements large portions of the community-related concepts in a heterogeneous environment of several largely independent data sources is proposed. Apart from online and DVD-based encyclopaedias, potential application areas are e-Learning, corporate documentation and knowledge management systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transclusions are an advanced technique for the inclusion of existing content into new documents without the need to duplicate it. Although originally described in the early 1960s, transclusions have still not been made available to users and authors on the world wide web. This paper describes the prototype implementation of a system that allows users to write articles that may contain transclusions. The system offers a simple web-based interface where users can compose new articles. With a simple button the user has the ability to insert a transclusion from any HTML page available on the world wide web. While other approaches introduce new markups for the HTML specification, make use of technologies such as XML and XLink or employ authoring systems that internally support transclusions and can generate web pages as output, this implementation solely relies on the techniques provided by an HTML-based environment. Therefore HTML, Javascript, the Document Object Model, CGI scripts and HTTP are the core technologies utilised in the prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is our experience that many Web-based training (WBT) systems do not consider the latest advances in teaching or learning paradigms - they simply reflect Web technology. We believe that such a technical approach to building WBT systems has a number of drawbacks, since WBT systems are primarily about teaching and learning, rather than about technology. Thus, WBT systems should actually combine conventional and innovative tools compatible with current Web technology to support well-known, well-tested techniques, and also to enable implementation of new and innovative teaching and learning paradigms in a Web-based environment. There- fore, we built an innovative WBT system called WBT-Master as a Web-based platform supporting a wide range of different teaching and learning paradigms. In this paper, we present a WBT-Master tool that implements the well-known and highly accepted project-based learning paradigm. Further, we present results of the application of this tool in conducting a project- oriented software engineering course attended by more than 200 university students. We also present evaluations of applying WBT-Master within a corporate environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usually, web-based training (WBT) systems (Gaines, Norrie, & Shaw 1996; Shaw & Gaines 1996) support a number of different user roles (Helic, Maurer, & Scerbakov, 2000). Standard user roles include authors, tutors, learners and administrators (Helic, Maurer & Scerbakov, 2000). Normally, administrators are considered as a special kind of so-called "power" users that keep a WBT system running in a flawless manner. On the other hand, authors, tutors and learners are viewed as "real" users of the system. These users have the following basic roles with regard to the system (Helic, Maurer & Scerbakov, 2000; 2001b; 2001c): &bul; students participate in different online training sessions offered by the system; &bul; tutors conduct and manage such online training sessions in the system; and &bul; authors prepare these online training sessions. As we can see here, from the users' point of view WBT systems deal with online training sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]