Anne Honkaranta

Bridging the Gap between Advanced Distributed Teaching and the Use of Learning Management Systems in the University Context

The selection of appropriate learning management system (LMS) is critical for supporting advanced distributed teaching. A survey was targeted for understanding the features that the LMS offer for university teachers and to find if the advanced features of the LMS were utilized, The findings imply that there is a gap between the LMS tools for advanced distributed teaching and their use in the university context. The teachers using LMS were also found to be heterogeneous by their computer skills and LMS uses.

XML document implementation: Experiences from three cases

Implementing production of XML documents is a rarely discussed topic in academic literature even though it is an important issue in many contemporary organizations. This paper describes findings from three case organizations where different kinds of XML documents were implemented. Our findings suggest that the implementation is a domain-specific task related to various kinds of organizational activities from document authoring to business processes. As expected, the amount and complexity of document types as well as the number of people and organizations involved affect the challenges in the implementation process. Hiding the XML format from the software users and training the end users are important means to reduce the user resistance against structured document authoring and novel tools.

Two Methods for Schema Design for Intelligent XML Documents in Organizations

XML markup language provides means for incorporating semantics, i.e. “meaning” of logical content parts residing within documents. Therefore it has become the lingua franca for Semantic Web, e-Business applications and for enterprise application integration. In order to realize novel, intelligent XML-based document applications in organizations, schemas defining the domain-oriented semantics are needed. So far, the potential of XML has not bee fully utilized in organizational documents, due to the lack of XML support in common and inexpensive office software. Due to the arrival of XML support on common software such as Microsoft Office 2007 and Open Office 2.0 organizations need knowledge about schema languages and their design methods for designing intelligend XML document applications for document content reuse, content integration across documents, and document content retrieval from Web Services and other source. This paper introduces three schema languages and compares the features of two potential methods for document-oriented schema design.