High-quality classroom dialogues improve students' capacities to learn school subjects and help them develop more general skills such as collaboration and critical thinking. In this chapter, we take a sociocultural stance toward learning and cognition. "Gap-closing" is used as a key concept to understand and explain why and how teachers…

The design and implementation of hybrid, technology-enhanced learning environments is a sophisticated process, especially when incorporating relevant sociocultural factors to support culturally and linguistically diverse students' learning. In this paper, I review and provide a description of an iterative design process for a mobile-assisted…

This paper presents four projects in which mobile devices are used to support authentic learning in an afterschool technology club, "La Clase Mágica" (LCM@UTSA), designed to motivate underrepresented elementary school children in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The implementation of mobile devices into our LCM@UTSA is…

Based on a small qualitative study, this article focuses on understanding the rules for cell phones and other social networking media in schools, an aspect of broader research that led to important understandings of teacher-student negotiations. It considers the rules that schools and teachers make, the rampant breaking of these rules, the…

This introduction to a special report on telecommunications presents several compelling reasons why telecommunications is one of the most practical and beneficial applications of personal computer technology and briefly summarizes the other articles in this section. (MBR)

Discusses advantages and pleasures of utilizing a personal computer at home to receive electronic mail; participate in online conferences, software exchanges, and game networks; do shopping and banking; and have access to databases storing volumes of information. Information sources for the services mentioned are included. (MBR)

Compares the traditional model of a service economy to models based on analyses of actual economic and employment trends, and discusses the role of information technologies in producer and consumer services; current policy issues concerning the information sector; and the need to integrate the concepts of goods and services. (CLB)

Discussion of the field of educational media and technology focuses on external forces in society that will shape its destiny. Highlights include demographic and cultural changes; family structure; globalization; changing nature of the workplace; technological developments including digitization, communication, technical convergence, and…