Usable guidelines for usable websites? An analysis of five e-government heuristics

Many government organizations use web heuristics for the quality assurance of their websites. Heuristics may be used by web designers to guide the decisions about a website in development, or by web evaluators to optimize or assess the quality of an existing website. Despite their popularity, very little is known about the usefulness of heuristics for web designers and evaluators. In this study, five government heuristics are examined with special attention to their presumed use, content, validity, and presentation format. Our findings raise questions about the usability of heuristics for web design and web evaluation purposes. More research into the actual use and effects of web heuristics is needed.     

Evaluation of distance learning delivery of health information management and health informatics programmes: a UK perspective

The aim of the article is to review evaluations of distance learning programmes in health information management, in order to identify the critical success factors for such programmes and discuss future directions. The emphasis is on the UK experience, based partly on reflections on the experience of one programme at University of Wales Aberystwyth (now over 10 years old), and partly on a policy review conducted for the NHS Information Authority and the NHS Information Policy Unit. The methods are, as far as possible, those of a systematic review of existing research, with, additionally, an overview of relevant policy developments for lifelong learning. The topics covered include the aims, objectives and educational philosophies of the programmes. The evidence, combined with the UWA experience, indicates the importance of face-to-face interaction, to complement distance or virtual learning. A student-centred approach to curriculum design and delivery is essential.     

A comparative critique of several methods of collecting data for cognitive mapping

Summary Cognitive mapping by learners for various research purposes is assisted if the appropriate technique is used with learners at different stages of schooling and with varying degrees of understanding of a content field and of related content fields. There are however, techniques now available which appear to be usable by learners in primary, secondary and tertiary education. The use of the elucidatory interview is an exciting new tool for science educators. It is not, however, an easy one to use and our own experience suggests that a challenging combination of experince and naivety is needed for it to have optimal benefit as a means of rich data.     

Classical retrieval and overlap measures satisfy the requirements for rankings based on a Lorenz curve

Classical information retrieval and overlap measures such as the Jaccard index, the Dice coefficient and Salton’s cosine measure can be characterized by Lorenz curves. This result demonstrates the existence of a formal link between information retrieval and the information sciences on the one hand, and concentration and diversity theory, as used, e.g., in social economics and ecology on the other.     

The Research Assessment Exercise: its effect on scholarly journal publishing

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) plays a major part in academic life in the UK. One of its chief measures of ‘research performance’ relates to the publication of articles in refereed scholarly journals. This paper examines the effect of the RAE on the journal publishing system, looking at the communities of authors, editors, and publishers.     

L'institut facultaire de psychologie et de pedagogie de l'universite Lovanium (Kinshasa)

Sans résumé