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To understand the importance of technologies like the Internet and Learning Management Systems to Higher Education students' learning activities, this study characterizes the Internet access behaviour of Polytechnic of Porto (IPP)' students. Student's habits were obtained through a questionnaire that was answered by 10% of all IPP students. Our analysis is focused not only on the global Internet usage profile under the Polytechnic of Porto, but also on the differences between the students born before and after 1980. International trends are confirmed in this Portuguese Higher Education institution.

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The Internet plays an important role in higher education institutions where Learning Management Systems (LMS) occupies a main role in the eLearning realm. In this chapter we aim to characterize the Internet and LMS usage patterns and their role in the largest Portuguese Polytechnic Institute. The usage patterns were analyzed in two components: characterization of Internet usage and the role of Internet and LMS in education. Using a quantitative approach, the data analysis describes the differences between gender, age and scientific fields. The carried qualitative analysis allows a better understanding of students' both motivations, opinions and suggestions of improvement. The outcome of this work is the presentation of the Portuguese students' profile regarding Internet and LMS usage patterns. We expect that these results can be used to select the most suitable digital pedagogical processes and tools to be adopted regarding the learning process and most adequate LMS's policies. © 2012, IGI Global.

Abstract
The usage of information and communication technologies has been growing among students and teachers. In order to improve the use of the Internet as a tool to support teaching and learning it is necessary to understand the Internet usage habits of students. Thus, a study was conducted with 1397 students from five schools of the Polytechnic of Porto. The data was collected through an online questionnaire abd was analized by age range, gender and scientific field. In this paper,gender differences are analyzed and presented in 3 dimensions: type of Internet usage, communication tools and the role of the Internet tools in education.

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Purpose - The intent of this work is to evaluate several generalist and health-specific search engines for retrieval of health information by consumers: to compare the retrieval effectiveness of these engines for different types of clinical queries, medical specialties and condition severity; and to compare the use of evaluation metrics for binary relevance scales and for graded ones. Design/methodology/approach - The authors conducted a study in which users evaluated the relevance of documents retrieved by four search engines for two different health information needs. Users could choose between generalist (Bing, Google, Sapo and Yahoo!) and health-specific (MedlinePlus, SapoSande and WebMD) search engines. The authors then analysed the differences between search engines and groups of information needs with six different measures: graded average precision (gap), average precision (ap), gap@5, gap@10, ap@5 and ap@10. Findings The results show that generalist web search engines surpass the precision of health-specific engines. Google has the best performance, mainly in the top ten results. It was found that information needs associated with severe conditions are associated with higher precision, as are overview and psychiatry questions. Originality/value - The study is one of the first to use a recently proposed measure to evaluate the effectiveness of retrieval systems with graded relevance scales. It includes tasks from several medical specialties, types of clinical questions and different levels of severity which, to the best of the authors' knowledge, has not been clone before. Moreover, users have considerable involvement in the experiment. The results help in understanding how search engines differ in their responses to health information needs, what types of online health information are more common on the web and how to improve this type of search.