The data team intervention was designed to support Dutch secondary schools in using data while developing a solution to an educational problem. A data team can build school-wide capacity for data use through knowledge sharing among data team members, and knowledge brokerage between the team and other colleagues. The goal of this mixed-methods…

The great influx of international students into UK universities has led to internationalisation becoming an important issue. Previous studies have focused on the integration of home and international students, illustrating a lack of intercultural interaction. Yet there has been a lack of research investigating international students' networks and…

The University of Helsinki established a Teachers' Academy to reward excellence in teaching. This study focuses on teachers' significant networks and their meaningful conversations about teaching and learning before the establishment of the Teachers' Academy. The research data consisted of answers to open-ended questions, and were examined using…

This article explores the networking roles and practices of special educators with the methods of social network analysis. This multiple case study included three special educators in a Finnish part-time special education context. The results revealed that although the special educators had central positions in the formal teacher communities as…

This article addresses the question of understanding more about networked universities by looking at open source software developers working in academic contexts. It sketches their identities and work as an emerging professional community that both relies upon and develops digitally mediated networks and contributes to the progress of academic…

To date, little empirical research on professional use of social network sites has been conducted, particularly with reference to groups of teachers on Facebook. The paper presents the results of two surveys addressed to the founders of five Italian Facebook groups and their members (n = 1107), with the aim of investigating mechanisms underlying…

Professional development for distance tutors is traditionally delivered through texts or websites, supplemented by face to face workshops. However, one of the major challenges is to ensure that they engage with the materials and carry away something which is of value to their practice. At the Open University (UK) our 8000 tutors work from home,…

Using the theories of critical reflection and community of practice, the aim of this paper was to explore the use of blogs as a reflective platform in the training processes of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student teachers, who were learning to teach English for future employment in Taiwan. They made use of blogs as a platform to critically…

The research reported here follows previous articles in this special issue which detail a national study involving a team of researchers across four higher education institutions in New Zealand. A key theme that emerged from a collection of questionnaire, interview and observational data was the central importance of teacher-student and…