The Capital Area Technology and Inquiry in Education program (CATIE) is a content-focused, inquiry-based professional development program developed by the Center for Initiatives in Pre-College Education (CIPCE) to assist K-6 teachers in the technology integration process. To address concerns of sustainability and cost-effectiveness, this situated model combined online and face-to-face professional development approaches to encourage thought-provoking experiences that inspire new pedagogies. CATIE united efforts with the Online Learning Forum (OLF) to offer blended mentoring experiences situated in and around the classroom context with a special focus on mathematics instruction. CATIE, formerly a high-resource model, transitioned into a multi-dimensional experience in an effort to sustain technology-rich learning communities and provide quality professional development resources for classroom instruction. This article explores the dimensions of CATIE, the transition to a blended model, and the contributions of this situated model to technology integration professional development.

Learning styles have been attracting the attention of many researchers in educational adaptive hypermedia. We define educational adaptive hypermedia as a learning system designed to tailor online presentations of content for individuals over time. The general approach is based on learning styles psychometric instruments to categorize students and adapt the system accordingly. However, the validity of such assessment instruments is questionable, which might compromise the whole adaptation process. We investigate a cyclical instructional design able to satisfy different learning styles. Observing individuals' interaction styles with this learning cycle revealed to us some hints on how to personalize lessons so that individual learning is improved.

How do you optimize instruction in an adaptive hypermedia learning environment? We believe instruction is optimized when adaptivity is grounded in good instructional design. To respect diverse talents and ways of learning, our cyclic approach to instructional design is the basis upon which inference techniques can be applied to continuously adapt instruction according to learning behavior and performance. We define an individual's learning behavior in terms of how they interact with the environment (i.e links activated, pages visited, time spent, and frequency of visits). This paper describes the OctoPlus cycle and presents results of an experiment comparing two groups interacting with OctoPlus-formatted tutorials: a control and an adaptive group, to whom adaptive navigation, presentation and content features were added over time. Results indicated reduction in time spent for the adaptive group with comparable performance in the fully adaptive tutorial.

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