This paper investigates the impact of web based lecture recordings on learning and attendance at lectures. Student opinions regarding the perceived value of the recordings were evaluated in the context of usage patterns and final marks, and compared with attendance data and student perceptions regarding the usefulness of lectures. The availability of recordings was not seen to impact lecture attendance, although students showed some tendency to listen to the recording for a missed lecture. Students who achieved a high mark tended to supplement lecture attendance with recording usage more than students who achieved a low mark, but they did so with greater variation. If students perceived that a learning experience was of value to their learning, they were more likely to use it. Individual case studies describing perceptions, usage patterns, and attendance records of selected students highlight the fact that there is great variation in successful learning patterns, and suggest that engagement is an important factor impacting learning. Although the use of recordings to supplement lectures was seen to enhance the learning of some students, its uptake and effectiveness was not uniform across the cohort. This observation highlights the need for a range of learning modes in engineering education, appealing to a diverse set of individual learning styles. Future work is described in the context of these findings. IntroductionThere are many pedagogical and logistical reasons to utilise web based lecture technologies (WBLT) to make lecture recordings available to students via the Internet. These include (Gosper, Green, McNeil, Phillips, Preston & Woo, 2008) • supporting students who are unable to attend class; • providing a study tool for review and revision; • catering for individual learning strategies and styles; • supplementing face to face lectures, but at a time and place of the student's choosing; • accommodating student expectations regarding the digital delivery of course material; and • facilitating distance education as an alternate delivery mode.There is strong evidence that students place significant value on lecture recordings deployed via the Internet to personal computers and MP3 players. Research funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) conducted by Gosper et al (2008) showed that 66.8% of students surveyed believed that WBLT helped them to achieve better results, and 79.9% of students believed that reviewing lecture recordings made it easier for them to learn. 582Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2009, 25(4) Academic staff who took part in the survey concurred to a lesser extent: 30.2% of academic staff believed that WBLT helped students to achieve better results, and 48.9% believed that the technology made it easier for students to learn. Many academic staff acknowledged that WBLT can enhance some aspects of traditional lectures, but there was concern about the extent to which the technology impacted lecture attendance. In particular, 55.1% of academic staff reported...

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This paper describes a new region-growing technique that uses a closed snake driven by a pressure force that is a function of the statistical characteristics of image data. This statistical snake expands until its elements encounter pixels that lie outside user-defined limits relative to a seed region; when these limits are violated the pressure force is reversed to make the model contract. Tension and stiffness forces keep the boundary of the region model smooth, and a repulsion force prevents self-intersection. Boundary elements can be added and removed in response to complexity changes, and the tension, stiffness and pressure parameters can be adjusted to preserve the energy balance of the changing model. Statistical snakes have been used to segment a variety of images including composite textures and NMR data volumes.

Two recently developed kinematic models of human eye movements predict systematic departures from Listing's law which are associated with changes in vergence. This vergence-dependent torsion t is proportional to elevation e and vergence v, that is t = kev/2. The proposed value for k is either 1 (Van Rijn, L. J., & Van den Berg, A. V. (1993). Vision Research, 33, 691-708) or 1/2 (Minken, A. W. H., Gielen, C. C. A. M., & Van Gisbergen, J. A. M. (1995). Vision Research, 35, 93-102). One implication of both models is that an eye with a constant fixation direction should exhibit systematic torsional variation during movements of the other eye. This paper therefore examines the torsion produced by moving a fixation target inwards and outwards along the line-of-sight of the right eye at five different viewing elevations (0, +/- 15 and +/- 30 degrees). In a monocular analysis, each eye generally showed intorsion during convergence at positive elevation angles, whereas extorsion occurred at negative elevations; the opposite was true during divergence. However, the torsion response was visibly different between the five subjects, and depended on the direction of target motion. In a binocular analysis, cycloversion (mean of left and right eye torsion) varied dramatically both between subjects and between convergence and divergence; however, cyclovergence (torsional difference) was much less variable. Least-squares methods were used to estimate the constant k from monocular torsion, yielding values between 0.2 and 1.0; however, corresponding estimates based on cyclovergence were all close to 1/2. These findings support suggestions that a binocular control system couples the three-dimensional movements of the eyes, and that an existing model of monocular torsion should be generalised to the binocular case.