Social and mobile technologies offer users unprecedented opportunities for communicating, interacting, sharing, meaning-making, content and context generation. And, these affordances are in constant flux driven by a powerful interplay between technological innovation and emerging cultural practices. Significantly, also, they are starting to…

Computer-Assisted Foreign Language Teaching and Learning: Technological Advances highlights new research and an original framework that brings together foreign language teaching, experiments and testing practices that utilize the most recent and widely used e-learning resources. This comprehensive collection of research will offer linguistic…

Partnership is a dominant theme in education policy and practice in England and in other western countries but remains relatively under-researched, especially with respect to what sustains a partnership. This article draws on a study of partnership working in the field of post-16 learning that revealed the role of dimensions of social capital in…

When asked what they would find most helpful to enable them to use technologies more in their teaching, most teachers say "give me examples, in my subject area" and "point me to relevant people I can discuss these issues with". Web 2.0 technologies--with their emphasis on sharing, networking and user production--seem to offer a…

Can we apply the best of Web 2.0 principles to an educational context? More specifically can we use this as a means of shifting teaching practice to a culture of sharing learning ideas and designs? This paper describes a new social networking site, "Cloudworks", which aims to provide a mechanism for sharing, discussing and finding…

Designed to raise awareness of the implications of cable television and satellites for the Open University, this paper indicates why cable television developments will affect the university and the wide range of university people and departments who will be affected by such developments. Four main issues that the university will have to deal with…

Objective: To design, implement and evaluate a peer-led intervention to reduce smoking amongst secondary school students. Design: A health promotion intervention combining peer education with diffusion of innovation theory, to be rigorously evaluated by means of a cluster randomised controlled trial with concurrent process and economic…

Purpose: This paper reports on the development of a workplace-based e-learning programme for small and medium enterprise (SME) managers in five European countries. The course is designed to address the specific needs of SME managers who, it has been noted, represent a significant proportion of the EU workforce but often experience difficulty in…

The dual challenges of competing in a world market and rapid technological advancements have necessitated redesign of the workplace into an innovative work environment known as the high-performance workplace. This environment requires knowledge workers capable of solving problems, creating ways to improve the methods they use, and engaging…

This book contains 19 papers examining innovation in open and distance learning through development of online and World Wide Web-based learning. The following papers are included: "Innovation in Distributed Learning: Creating the Environment" (Fred Lockwood); "Innovation in Open and Distance Learning: Some Lessons from Experience…