In this co/autoethnographic account of a school-based cyber-bullying incident, the authors discuss the challenges of current anti-bullying approaches in schools. In the incident, male-identifying students were alleged to have engaged in online gender-based abuse of female-­identifying students. The authors identify three key themes toward…

While the influence of digital technologies on literacy expression has long been a central concern of literacy studies, the proliferation of digital platforms across contemporary life has prompted increased scholarly attention to their influence on literacy. How, this scholarship asks, do platforms' interfaces, algorithms, and business models…

One of the main characteristics of distance education is the absence of face-to-face interaction with instructor and learner as well as learner and learner. The purpose of this article is to explore the issue of social presence and the various innovations used to foster a social presence with distance education programs.

This paper explores what it means to be an autonomous learner in an online social context. Using distinctions originally drawn by Jürgen Habermas, it argues that classic accounts of learner autonomy as teleological action are inadequate to explain learner activity in group settings. It points out that learners in such settings display attitudes…

This empirical study explored the impression management techniques and standardized performances college students use on their Facebook profiles to ensure their peers believe they are fully participating in the undergraduate experience. Employing an ethnographic research design and data collected using participant-observation and interview…

The purpose of this article is to examine the communication behaviors of online leaders, or those who influence other members of online communities in triggering message replies, sparking conversation, and diffusing language. It relies on 632,622 messages from 33,450 participants across 16 discussion groups from Google Groups that took place over…

The open-ended, informal, and socially negotiated nature of role-playing games creates a distinct learning challenge for newcomers to the hobby. The explicit rules of the game provide only an incomplete framework for structuring the actions of players, and the expectations and mores of a given group will add other, unspoken rules that discourage…

In this paper we focus our attention on the use of social software as educational enablers for use in formal online education contexts. To this end we study the hypothesis that users have to acquire a set of important Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) skills. Such PKM skills are presented in the paper. They are also examined in relation to…

This study examined the effects of group composition based on the learners' personality types as measured by the Myers-Briggs type indicator as they interacted in threaded discussions. Three groups comprised introverts, extroverts, and mixed introvert-extrovert classifications. Ninety-six participants were divided into 24 groups of 4 participants…

Two experiments investigated if and how visual representation of interactants affects depersonalization and conformity to group norms in anonymous computer-mediated communication (CMC). In Experiment 1, a 2 (intergroup versus interpersonal) x 2 (same character versus different character) between-subjects design experiment (N=60), each participant…

Presents seven types of identity knowledge. Identifies major rationales and contexts for anonymity and identifiability and suggests a principle which holds that those who use pseudonyms on the Internet in personal communications are obliged to indicate they are doing so. Suggests 13 procedural questions to guide the development and assessment of…

This study examined member behaviors, distribution of performed behaviors, and development-shaping forces in order to identify group development patterns of virtual learning teams. Participants of this study were 7 newly formed virtual learning teams working on a final group project in a 12-week online graduate-level course. Examining the group…

This article reviews the findings of a study which set out to examine the role that consciousness raising (CR) plays in grammatical development in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Students participated in weekly SCMC sessions. Spanish L2 forms "por/para" and "ser/estar" were chosen, and the data from two groups--form-and-meaning…