Postsecondary faculty do not provide detailed, individualized, and timely feedback to students, although faculty and students consider feedback an integral aspect of higher education. Text expander technology, or software programs that automatically convert snippets of predetermined text into longer phrases, can aid postsecondary faculty in…

Concerns about the reading comprehension skills of students in the United States have been raised partly because of the introduction of digital products into their lives and the classroom setting. The Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards results from 2013 that were provided by the Arizona Department of Education indicated that reading scores…

Augmented reality technology has implications for the ways that the field of library and information science (LIS) serves users and organizes information. Through content analysis, the author examined how augmented reality (AR) is conceptualized within a sample of LIS literature from the Library and Information Science & Technology Abstracts…

Portfolios have been used in the field of education as a form of assessment since the 1980s. As time has progressed, portfolios have transitioned from paper to electronic form. Research on electronic portfolios has focused on implementation issues and their impact on student learning. There has been limited effort, however, on their long-term…

In recent years, many popular media reports have observed a new phenomenon in news known as hyperlocal online news. While some accounts suggest that hyperlocal is different from community news in that it focuses on news at the neighborhood level or on areas that are often less frequently covered by the mainstream media, little research has…

How are technologies are designed and used tactically by activists? As the HCI community starts to contend with social inequalities, there has been debate about how HCI researchers should address approach this type of research. However, there is little research examining practitioners such as social justice activists who confront social problems,…

Technology is an increasing part in the lives of junior high students, but little is known about how this technology affects their reading. Reading comprehension from e-books is compared to reading comprehension from conventional print books with junior high students. The problem is that students may be reading from a medium that is less than the…

In this dissertation, I study economics textbook markets as an example of durable goods monopoly. Textbooks are protected by copyrights, and from a student's point of view, different textbooks are not good substitutes because students wish to use the textbook adopted by their instructors. Therefore sellers have market power. Textbooks can be…

Background. Investment in health information technology (HIT) is rapidly accelerating. The absence of contextual or situational analysis of the environment in which HIT is incorporated makes it difficult to measure success or failure. The methodology introduced in this paper combines observational research with time-motion study to measure the…

Although use of social media by students has been shown to be nearly ubiquitous, many K-12 school systems have banned its use on their campuses or use between their teachers and students. In contrast, many collegiate faculty have utilized social media in their teaching. Social media has been shown to assist faculty in engaging with students,…

In order to ease the burden of electronic note entry on physicians, electronic documentation support tools have been developed to assist in note authoring. There is little evidence of the effects of these tools on attributes of clinical documentation, including document quality. Furthermore, the resultant abundance of duplicated text and…

The use of technology and media modalities in digital technologies in today's media has created a new form of journalism. While some call it citizen-reporting, some dub it we media, or participatory news reporting. The new press evolves with the engagement of ordinary citizens in news gathering and distribution. Apart from helping to enhance the…

The goal of this project is to begin investigating the emergent media practices of current academic disciplines. This dissertation posits that Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) scholars have investigated new media use in undergraduate pedagogy, and to some extent the practices of graduate students. However, WAC scholars have yet to try to…

This dissertation aims to investigate how advanced information technologies cope with the various demands of disaster response. It consists of three essays on the exploration of micro-blogging and FOSS environments. The first essay looks at the usage of micro-blogging in the aftermath of the massive 2008 China earthquake and explores the…

(Re)Writing Civics in the Digital Age: The Role of Social Media in Student (Dis)Engagement addresses an important gap in the knowledge of civic rhetoric available in Rhetoric and Composition by using qualitative methods to explore the parameters of civic engagement through social media-based digital writing. With funding from URI's Office of…