New technologies are used increasingly to enhance people's lives in many fields, and education is a very important sector that can benefit from technological development. The idea of using technology to facilitate and enhance learning, known as electronic learning, has led to the development of a wide range of applications and implementations worldwide. Electronic learning can offer new opportunities for developing countries by increasing access to education and improving learning outcomes. This chapter presents Virtual Collaborative Learning (VCL) as a modern technology-enhanced team-learning arrangement based on a constructivist learning paradigm. By utilizing Web 2.0 tools to empower and enhance classical e-Learning methods, VCL reaches far beyond classical Web-Based Training. Opportunities and challenges of VCL for developing countries will be discussed based on a long European teaching and research experience.

An important factor in performance evaluation of web search engines is the search behavior of users working with these special information retrieval applications. To explore this behavior of Arab internet users, the top searches executed on Google from seventeen Arab countries in the year 2010 were collected and analyzed. Less than the half of search queries were in Arabic letters and 78% of them consisted of one simple term. Other characteristics like search term uniqueness, language distribution and search goals are discussed in this paper.

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New technologies are used increasingly to enhance people’s lives in many fields, and education is a very important sector that can benefit from technological development. The idea of using technology to facilitate and enhance learning, known as electronic learning, has led to the development of a wide range of applications and implementations worldwide. Electronic learning can offer new opportunities for developing countries by increasing access to education and improving learning outcomes. This chapter presents Virtual Collaborative Learning (VCL) as a modern technology-enhanced team-learning arrangement based on a constructivist learning paradigm. By utilizing Web 2.0 tools to empower and enhance classical e-Learning methods, VCL reaches far beyond classical Web-Based Training. Opportunities and challenges of VCL for developing countries will be discussed based on a long European teaching and research experience.

During their collaboration in a virtual learning environment, students leave "digital traces" that record their interaction with other students, instructors, and learning objects. These traces allow instructors to monitor students' work and encourage isolated or passive ones to participate actively. They also help course designers to assess students' behavior and experience in the learning environment. This paper aims to explore the effects of design changes in Virtual Collaborative Learning arrangements on the learning experience using Social Network Analysis. The network structures of two international collaborative courses were analyzed, visualized and compared using the Social Network Analysis tool Gephi based on log files of the Social Network software elgg. The results show changes in groups' interaction after adjusting technical functions of the platform, the case study and the deliverables' method. A high potential of Social Network Analysis to understand group dynamics in the virtual classroom is also demonstrated here.