The Internet has offered many opportunities for interactions and participation. The current study positioned YouTube as a possible affinity space (Gee, 2003, 2004) for students to showcase their personal talents. The participants were recruited from a group of senior students in a Taiwanese university who volunteered to participate in this study.…

As enrollment in distance education courses continues to increase, it is clear that online course delivery is here to stay. And all online courses today utilize a web- or cloud-based Learning Management System that includes a text-based discussion forum, commonly called a 'discussion board', which is the primary mode of communication within the…

Student engagement is a multidimensional construct that includes four distinct, though interrelated, aspects: behavioral, emotional, agentive, and cognitive engagement. The present study investigates students' perceptions about the impact of Padlet as a learning and assessment tool on the four aspects of class engagement. Padlet is a virtual wall…

Crowdsourced research sharing takes place across social media platforms including Twitter hashtags such as #icanhazpdf, Reddit Scholar, and Facebook. This study surveys users of these peer-to-peer exchanges on demographic information, frequency of use, and their motivations in both providing and obtaining scholarly information on these platforms.…

Constructing a meaningful learning network with online students can be challenging for many reasons. First, because there is literally a distance between the instructor and the student, and second, because the majority of online students rarely communicate specific details to their instructors about what aspects of the course are effective or…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of using synchronous and asynchronous communication tools in online group activities to develop collaborative learning skills. An experimental study was implemented on a sample of faculty of education students in Mansoura University. The sample was divided into two groups, a group studied…

This chapter reports on a qualitative investigation on the development of adult Spanish language learners' intercultural sensitivity while using Web 2.0 technologies to explore living abroad. Comments provided by 33 participants on wikis, Pinterest, and journal entries were analyzed using a line-by-line interpretative approach (Charmaz, 2006).…

This case study explores the opportunities for students of Industrial Design Engineering to engage with direct and indirect stakeholders by making their design process and results into open-ended designed solutions. The reported case study involved 47 students during a two-weeks intensive course on the topic of urban gardening. Observations were…

This article reports on a faculty learning community (FLC) as a professional development model for faculty in an English-medium university in the United Arab Emirates. The authors describe how the introduction of a new learning and teaching technology, in the form of iPads, resulted in many of the faculty feeling unsure about their pedagogy. A…

While research has reported generally enthusiastic results regarding L2 blogging, some studies have found contrasting blogging experiences among individual learners. Consequently, this study investigated the factors underlying such discrepancies by exploring 33 EFL learners' experiences of participating in a blog project at a Taiwanese university.…

Web annotation is a Web 2.0 technology that allows learners to work collaboratively on web pages or electronic documents. This study explored the use of Web annotation as an online discussion tool by comparing it to a traditional threaded discussion forum. Ten graduate students participated in the study. Participants had access to both a Web…

In this study the author investigated 228 pre-service teachers' experiences with a global learning wiki project in an undergraduate educational technology course. The project connected pre-service teachers with students in 11 different countries on wiki sites, participants and their overseas partners posting questions about topics of interest to…

With the availability of Web 2.0 technologies, blogs have become useful and attractive tools for teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in their writing classes. Learners do not need to understand HTML in order to construct blogs, and the appearance and content can be facilitated via the use of photos, music, and video files (Vurdien,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the spectrum of undergraduate students' social interactions and related technological tools. Qualitative methods were used for this phenomenological study exploring 35 in-person interviews, with horizonalization in an open coding system secured by in-depth analysis which revealed nuanced themes and…

It is understood that microblogging (tweeting) which is a form of Web 2.0, has been a centre of attraction in some institutions of higher education. However, despite its hype and pomp as reported by some scholars in developed countries, integration of Twitter in a classroom environment in developing countries is just beginning to flourish. In…