Media is constantly influencing our understanding of the world. To critically understand media and how it reconstructs the reality, media literacy education is becoming increasingly important. However, many inadequacies exist in media literacy education, especially in creative practice, as emphasized by many textbooks and curricula. This study proposes and develops a Web-based media literacy education program using an online video editing simulator to resolve the inadequacy of creative practice in Web-based media literacy education. The simulator provides a platform for simulating the video creation and editing process through functions such as video streaming and timeline control. This program focuses on TV and visual media contents as representative of media communication, and students' behavioral objective is to demonstrate comprehension of how media messages are constructed through their analysis and practice with TV and other visual contents. “Frame” and “montage” analysis is utilized to interpret the construction process of media contents. The evaluation results suggest that this program, especially the video editing simulator, increased students'media literacy.

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Mark Warschauer (2011) presented that visual syntactic text formatting (VSTF) was a promising approach for making reading material more accessible to ESL learners. VSTF, as a method of displaying digital text on screens of digital devices, seems to have three major advantages: providing meaning clues by organizing text according to syntactic structure, enabling efficient reading according to fixation of reader's visual focus, and causing less eyestrain. Preceding studies on VSTF with ESL students have shown higher performance of reading fluency, and comprehension. This paper will examine the use of this format in reading activity of college EFL students. Unlike prior studies, this attempt puts emphasis on improving reading efficiency and speed, both of which I have long been seeking to improve in a specific software environment. The results show the advantages and limitations of VSTF when it is used for a different purpose, and, eventually, some improvements to this unique format turn out to be effective for optimized digital text.

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When understanding sentences by silent reading, following steps are used: 1) strings are input by eyes, 2) strings are converted to voices and 3) voices are understood. Then, we tried to improve reading speed by training of step 3) voice understanding (fast listening). As experimental results, we recognize that reading speed is improved by fast listening training, and we find weak correlation between reading speed and listening speed.

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In this paper, the authors focus on an application of semantic information in math expressions to math education. Math expressions have ambiguities in themselves, and this causes difficulty in treating math expressions on computers properly. To solve this problem, MathML (Content Markup) is adopted for explicit descriptions of the semantic information. As an application of our research, a learning system is proposed which helps overcome an impasse on learning math and continue the learning efficiently, by showing candidate study materials and supporting transformation of math expressions.

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This paper shows a method of recognizing a learner's action simply with just a few information on learning attitude measurement system. It is assumed that the head, the right hand and the left hand move characteristically during learning, and we measure the motions of the three body parts of the learner. The system recognizes the behavior type comparing with the motion data related of learning behaviors that has been prepared beforehand. It experimented with the above on the nine typical learning attitudes such as “lateral writing”, “mathematical expression”, “document creation with word-processing software” and so on. As a result, it proved that the method is effective for learning attitude recognition.

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This paper investigates the nurturing of experts with practical expertise based on the practice of project oriented education (POE) carried out at School of Management and Information, University of Shizuoka. First, four student-led projects in POE conducted in 2010 and 2011 are reviewed. Next, based on a comparative analysis of the four projects, their success and failure are measured. The relationship between the results of the projects and the development of student abilities is also discussed, in terms of the students'own construction of a conceptual model for learning. Finally, a learning plan is proposed, based on the construction of a conceptual model of object learning.

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This paper explores how information and communication technology (ICT), the Internet in particular, can expand the opportunities for the self-directed language learning activities of learners of Japanese, and support learners' second language skills. Data consisted of learning diaries, collection of materials, background interviews and interaction interviews. Dray.ring on Activity Theory (Leont'ev, 1978; Engeström 1999, 2001) and the concept of Affinity Space (Gee, 2004, 2007, 2008), the analysis showed that the Internet played significant roles in creating opportunities for using Japanese outside the language classrooms. It also provided a number of online resources and support in English. In addition, the features o f those online communities in which community members self-manage participation also expanded the potential of authentic language use activities regardless of the learners' Japanese language skills. Implications are drawn for L2 learning and teaching in terms of how language teachers can facilitate learners' spontaneous language learning and authentic language use activities in out-of-classroom contexts.

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This paper reports a case study for a CMS training at the “project management” unit in Knowledge Studies Lab. using the WebCT system. This unit provided students with an opportunity of a project management activity through the development of e-Learning programs. The development of e-Learning programs was a group exercise and the students delivered them using WebCT. Furthermore, the unit asked the students to play the role of both an instructor and learner (of other groups'program) on the WebCT system. This demonstrated a feasibility of an unconventional yet effective use of the WebCT system. Two questionnaires show the students were satisfied with this unit.

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