This article, based upon the closing plenary delivered to the recent conference of Professional Practice, Education and Learning, reflects upon the developments of the ProPEL network over the past seven years and its possibilities for future directions. To provide some context for these reflections, the article begins by outlining key challenges…

The 21st century workplace is being shaped by ever-changing technological innovations, shifting demographic patterns, globalization and power shifts, in addition to different economic players such as policymakers, employers, education and training institutions that shape the quality of the future workforce. In today's work environment,…

Long-term studies monitoring the process of young people adopting new media patterns of social interaction and communication with parents and peers are needed to better understand how young people cope with perpetual peer communication, how parents and adolescents deal with intergenerational conflicts, and the outcomes of these practices and…

The recent increase in short messaging system (SMS) text messaging, often using abbreviated, non-conventional "textisms" (e.g. "2nite"), in school-aged children has raised fears of negative consequences of such technology for literacy. The current research used a paradigm developed by Dixon and Kaminska, who showed that exposure to phonetically…

The purpose of this study is to determine the potential effects of an Internet2 implementation at the FDA. Because Internet2 does not currently exist in the FDA, research will be made to compare the tools used today to transmit data to what may develop with an Internet2 presence. These effects will be assessed from the point-of-view of the…

This paper relates developments in the use of Internet-based communication technologies to contemporary exchanges of geographical ideas and content. A brief history of the Internet provides the basis for a review of uses of broadband Internet in contemporary Geography. Two themes are explored: the first is the concept of virtual communities of…

In this paper, we go beyond what have been described as "mechanistic" accounts of e-learning to explore the complexity of relationships between people and technology as encountered in cases of networked learning. We introduce from the social informatics literature the concept of sociotechnical interaction networks which focus on the…