This paper discusses educational informatics as a research field and provides an overview of the scope of work in this, and closely related, areas by members of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield. Current work in Sheffield focuses on the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in universities and schools, seeking to understand the effects of using ICTs in educational practice on learners, teachers and learning support staff. It also seeks to develop practical knowledge of relevance to the design and facilitation of ICT-enabled learning environments. The paper highlights the interdisciplinary nature of this research, and discusses theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches that are being used by Sheffield researchers. It concludes by suggesting that library and information science has a

. To increase retrieval effectiveness, information retrieval systems must offer better support to users in their information-seeking activities. To achieve this, one major concern is to obtain a better understanding of the nature of the interaction between a user and an information retrieval system. For this, we need a means to analyse the interaction in information retrieval, so as to compare the interaction processes within and across information retrieval systems. We present a framework for investigating the interaction between users and information retrieval systems. The framework is based on channel theory, a theory of information and its flow, which provides an explicit ontology that can be used to represent any aspect of the interaction process. The developed framework allows for the investigation of the interaction in information retrieval at the desired level of abstraction. We use the framework to investigate the interaction in query reformulation and standard web searching. 1

Search engines are very popular tools for collecting information from distributed resources. They provide not only search facilities, but they also offer directories for users to browse content divided into groups. In this paper, we’ve adopted an individual differences approach to explore user’s attitudes towards various interface features provided by existing Web directories. Among a variety of individual differences, cognitive style is a particularly important characteristic that influences the effectiveness of information seeking. Empirical results indicate that users ’ cognitive styles influence their reactions to the organization of subject categories, presentation of the results, and screen layout. We developed a set of design guidelines on the basis of these results, and propose a flexible interface that adopts these guidelines to accommodate the preferences of different cognitive style groups.

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