In the information-oriented society, training nationals with IT knowledge and application ability has been the focus of education development in countries. They have been promoting the program relevant to information education and laying the foundation stone of the twentyfirst century. Information education aims to help students develop the ability of information retrieval, application and analysis and make them have the correct information learning attitude including the ability of creational thinking, problem solving, active learning, communication cooperating and learning how to use information technology well. Furthermore, it trains the sophisticated IT R&D talents with both theory and practice and helps promoting the domestic industries. On the other hand, the application of information technology is focused on exploring the industries' development trend and then mastering it requirement. Also, it accelerates the originality and application technology towards to higher value. Finally, it creates the new value to national information industries. Research in these fields is emergent and crucial, not only in academic and research community, but also in industrial field. In this decade, technological application researches are very popular. This special issue focuses on the state-of-the-art software technology related to these issues, including distance education, networking, agent technology, web services, Ontology research, and social network .Eleven papers are included in this special issue.
In the first paper entitled “Constructivism in Mexican Elementary School Education: Designing a Platform for Cooperative Learning”, Dr. Ivan A. Garcia and Carla L. Pacheco discussed a pedagogical/technological platform, based on constructivism ideas, as a means of making the learning process in elementary school more efficient and interesting. The constructivist platform presented uses graphical simulators developed for Web 2.0 as a support tool, creating a teaching and learning environment in which practical experiments can be undertaken as each topic is introduced and explained.
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