The Visitors and Residents model of internet use suggests a continuum of modes of engagement with the online world, ranging from tool use to social spaces. In this paper, we examine evidence derived from a large cohort of students to assess whether this idea can be validated by experimental evidence. We find statistically significant differences…

When major news breaks in our hyper-connected society, we increasingly turn to an encyclopedia for the latest information. Wikipedia's coverage of breaking news events attracts unique levels of attention; the articles with the most page views, edits, and contributors in any given month since 2003 are related to current events. Extant…

An extraordinary large-scale student movement in Hong Kong successfully forced the government to withdraw a patriotic education proposal in 2012. The student group has attracted serious scrutiny from the pro-government camp because of the students' unusually young age and remarkable mobilising power. This study aims to explore the community…

The ongoing development of mobile devices like cell phones, iPods, PDAs, and so on is seen by an increasing number of educationalists as a chance to focus on a new kind of learning. This mobile learning, as it is called, should enable students to learn while on the move. Rather than giving a genealogy of the use of mobile equipment in education,…

There was a time, not so long ago, when having a website for a teacher's music program was considered cutting-edge. But today, over 40 years after the birth of the Internet, everyone lives in an age of instant information. New online services and Internet technologies have changed more than just the interaction between teacher, student, and…

Despite the widespread popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) amongst children and young people in compulsory education, relatively little scholarly work has explored the fundamental issues at stake. This paper makes an original contribution to the field by locating the study of this online activity within the broader terrain of social…

In this study, we explore the cognitive style profiles and linguistic patterns of self-organizing groups within a web-based graduate education course to determine how cognitive preferences and individual behaviors influence the patterns of information exchange and the formation of communication hierarchies in an online classroom. Network analysis…

This paper reports a 5-year design experiment on cumulative knowledge building as part of an international project. Through a longitudinal study and analysis of cumulative research data, we sought to answer the question, "what happened and why in knowledge building?" Research data constitute messages which participants have written into a shared…

In the knowledge society, the appearance and development of new networked working and learning environments is increasingly common. In the "Accelera" project, which is the basis for this paper, we have developed an online community of practice which enables experiences and knowledge to be shared between various educational agents, and…

Twitter provides rapid information in a short form, and it is extremely easy to follow the updates of others because of myriad software applications with which it works on both mobile devices and traditional computing hardware. Currently, most academic librarians are using Twitter primarily as a tool at library conferences and seminars to capture…

The trend to adopt more online technologies continues unabated in the higher education sector. This paper elaborates the means by which such technologies can be employed for pedagogical purposes beyond simply providing virtual spaces for bringing learners together. It shows how data about student "movement" within and across a learning community…

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…

This paper focuses on the implications of two emerging digital technologies on the act of field birding, and the implications of these objects for thinking about wild birds. While the adoption of new immaterial technologies promises to improve the ease with which birding is practiced, their use leads to new ethical considerations. Using the…

Increasing instructor-student interactions and improving support personnel interventions with students positively affects their academic performance, retention, and graduation rates. This article discusses the Grade Performance Status (GPS) which is Northern Arizona University's new online, academic early alert tool for increasing instructor…

This study aims to investigate the patterns and the quality of online interaction during project-based learning (PjBL) on both micro and macro levels. To achieve this purpose, PjBL was implemented with online group activities in an undergraduate course. Social network analysis (SNA) and content analysis were employed to analyze online interaction…