Volume 3
Volume 3, Number 39 |
August 9, 2005 |
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Eunhee Kim
Julian Matthew Scher
Murray Turoff
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Abstract: A significant amount of freeware is accessible to students and faculty, from a variety of sources, and downloadable from a multitude of web-sites. Much of the freeware, often of equivalent quality to commercial off-the-shelf software, and many times unique and having no commercial equivalent, is underutilized by both educators and students, who generally are unaware of its availability. With constraints on their financial resources, students and faculty are faced with limits on the purchase of commercial software, and would significantly benefit if they were to have a single place they could visit to obtain relevant software which is legitimately free of commercial fees. Our objective for this effort is the design and development of a WebCenter which will provide a “one-stop shopping experience” for both students and faculty who are seeking to obtain relevant freeware for their pedagogical needs. The WebCenter will satisfy the diverse needs of a community of users, who will provide links to the software titles which they use or have developed, and who, using a simple Technology Acceptance Model-like evaluation scheme, will supply collaborative feedback on the freeware titles, share their experiences with them, and provide suggestions for their usage. A preliminary taxonomy of pedagogical freeware has been designed, to categorize the freeware titles, and provide for ready retrieval by the user community.
Keywords: freeware, WebCenter, pedagogical, collaborative, feedback, learning
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Recommended Citation: Kim, Scher, and Turoff (2005). Towards a WebCenter for Pedagogical Freeware Collaborative Review and Retrieval. Information Systems Education Journal, 3 (39). http://isedj.org/3/39/. ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of ISECON 2004: §4124. ISSN: 1542-7382.)