Digital technology is transforming life and is beginning to have a profound effect on individual psychic life and the wider social milieu. This article seeks to understand the nature of the new technology and its implications for personal life, culture, and education. The scene is set by comparing the introduction of printing to the revolution…

Although temporality is a key characteristic of the core concepts of CSCL--interaction, communication, learning, knowledge building, technology use--and although CSCL researchers have privileged access to process data, the theoretical constructs and methods employed in research practice frequently neglect to make full use of information relating…

This article takes a renewed look at the concept of "affordance." It points out that the concept is being used within the CSCL community in ways which signify an underlying disagreement concerning the exact ontological nature and epistemological status of an "affordance." Such disagreement, it is argued, is a problem for both design and empirical…

The rapid development of ICT (information technology and communication) in the last two decades has changed society substantially as a whole. For higher education institutions, the external environment pressure to incorporate ICT in their educational and administrative processes has forced them to invest in resources for infrastructure and…

Mobile technologies have enabled a new way of communicating, for whom mobile communications are part of normal daily interaction. This paper explores the proposed and verified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) that can be employed to explain the acceptance of Mobile Learning (M-learning), an activity in which users access learning material with…

The influence of media richness, media attentional load, social influence and users' prior experience with media on selection of media to transmit different messages to peers within an educational organization was tested. Media were discriminated by all potential variables. Support was found for the role of prior experience and social influence in…

What does it mean for a mentoring program to succeed? Most evaluations focus on participants' perceptions of success. Few studies employ an independent measure of the intended outcomes of the program, and fewer still examine both participant satisfaction and achievement. This article presents an example of how comparing data on perceived and…

A significant dilemma for the health and human service professions continues to be the question of how best to bridge the divide between academic research and practice. Communities of practice have traditionally been a vehicle for collaborative research and for information exchange (Moore, 2008). Through collaboration, communities of practice have…

As higher education moves increasingly to blended and fully online environments, smaller institutions often ask whether this is a desirable trend. They face many challenges in transforming their largely face- to-face didactic teaching traditions to the technology mediated learning environments. Learning effectiveness and student satisfaction are…

This article considers the uses and non-uses of digital technology by international distance learners. It draws upon data from in-depth interviews with 60 learners from around the world following distance education degree courses provided by a large UK federal university. The article focuses firstly on learners' descriptions of technology's role…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the concept of Winnicott's intermediate space as a method of understanding the role of learning spaces in the development of technology-enhanced educational organisations. Design/methodology/approach: The approach takes the form of a comparative analysis of interaction within face-to-face and online learning…

This article explores English-language-learning (ELL) youths' engagement with popular media through composing and publicly posting stories in an online fan fiction writing space. Fan fiction is a genre that lends itself to critical engagement with media texts as fans repurpose popular media to design their own narratives. Analyses describe how…

Critical pedagogy believes education to be a form of cultural politics that is fundamental to social transformation aiming to cultivate human agency and transformative activity. The explosion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has provided ordinary people with unprecedented opportunities to take on the ruling educational power…

Bridget Somekh's contributions to the debate on the theory and practice of action research and associated methodologies have often been gained through leadership of innovative action and research with computers in education. A review of her work provides evidence of the journey that starts with an appreciation of the wonders of technology before…

This research sought to understand the experiences of students and instructors with asynchronous video (video-mail) using webcams in three online sections of teacher education classes at Brigham Young University. We examined the experiences of students through scores and comments posted in student ratings surveys, and the experiences of…