Amazon.com description: Product Description: The last thirty years have produced a widely varying series of research experiments and innovative practices in the uses of computer and communications technologies to support teaching and learning. Relatively recently, enough experience has been accumulated to justify significant investment in implementing systems across a broad range of educational and training domains. Much of this experience has been pragmatic and attempts to place the activity within a substantive cognitive framework have not met with much success. Lessons have been learnt from the experience but there are many complex issues of knowledge representation, acquisition and long-term accommodation linked to the role of human actors and technological tools.

This publication divides its exploration of the intricacies of the field into four key areas. Theme A takes a cognitive psychologist's approach to learning processes. It is concerned with the ways in which knowledge is stored or represented inside the human mind; it is also concerned with knowledge acquisition and knowledge structures and their relation to learning environment design. Theme B takes an educationalist's perspective of learning. It takes the learner as the focus and examines learning styles, teaching styles, collaborative learning, etc. Theme C focuses on the design of learning tasks and environments, with considerations of design principles of exploratory or expressive materials. It is strongly domain orientated. Theme D focuses on knowledge architectures as they can be created in a machine and so includes the formalisms and models required in artificial intelligence applications to learning.

In addition to providing a comprehensive consideration of the problems faced and solutions so far achieved, it is hoped the book will stimulate further research and funding in an area that simply cannot be ignored.