Mentored online intercultural interaction offers foreign language learners the opportunity to develop different competences, including intercultural, linguistic, and digital competence (O'Dowd, 2021). Such virtual exchange (VE) projects typically involve computer-mediated communication via, for example, Zoom. However, the use of high-immersion…

This paper aims to analyse if virtual forums set up in an environment specifically designed to improve collaborative learning can effectively influence students' discourse quality and learning when compared with those forums set up in a general environment. Following a coding schema based upon the set of scaffolds offered in the Knowledge…

This chapter explores the use of social media in the higher education classroom highlighting potential issues for student-faculty boundary management and providing suggestions for praxis. Social media has captured the attention of educators and provides exciting new ways to engage students in course material. However, instructors and students…

Computer-supported collaborative learning has an unexploited potential of becoming an effective learning method for pupils with intellectual disabilities. This paper aims at showing how some specific requirements of this target group may be met by structuring a learning situation with the help of "floor control," which restricts the opportunities…

Student academic performance and social competence are influenced positively by parent involvement; effective parent-teacher communication not builds parent reliance on a school, it enhances parent knowledge of raising children. As information technology develops rapidly, it is already a trend that e-communication is replacing traditional paper…

A number of factors may affect student interaction in an asynchronous online discussion forum used in learning. This study deals with student preferences for the subject line of messages and in what ways the choice of subject line contributes to coherence and interaction reflected in the textual and interpersonal functions of the linguistic items…

Alumni relations professionals need a method of measuring alumni engagement, including giving, that goes beyond counting event attendees and the number of Twitter followers. Social media are changing the way things have been done within the alumni relations profession, but that does not mean that people throw out everything they have done in the…

On September 4 2010, a massive 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck the Canterbury region in the South Island of New Zealand. The response from the University of Canterbury was immediate and carefully co-ordinated, with the university's web-based environment and a responsive site developed on the social media platform "Facebook" becoming…

Three-dimensional (3-D) multi-user virtual environments (3-D MUVEs) have been used to provide language learners with realistic scenarios in which verbal and non-verbal interactions are simulated. However, little is known of the underlying factors that shape interaction in avatar-based virtual worlds. This study examined the perceptions of 38…

The institutional web site is ubiquitous and has emerged as nearly universal in its utilization as a recruiting and informational tool for the twenty-first century community college. Community colleges have embraced utilization of the Internet through the establishment of institutional web sites containing volumes of information, forms, and links.…

Maximize the effectiveness of your professional activities through the use of wikis, and raise student achievement in turn! With strategies from online educator and technology expert Stephanie Sandifer, this book provides how-to advice on the way in which wikis result in a more efficient use of time, better communication, and increased adult…

At the end of 2010, for the first time ever, smartphones outsold PCs. Mobile device adoption rates continue to rise rapidly around the world. A recent forecast by Cisco found that global mobile data traffic more than doubled last year, and by the end of 2012, the number of mobile devices in use will outnumber the world's population. In the United…

As organizations strive to succeed in an increasingly competitive international environment, they are recognizing the importance of maximizing intellectual capital, the collective knowledge that resides within their companies. More and more businesses are turning to wikis, sites where content is collectively edited by users, to maximize the…

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…

This paper studies the social talk of high school students in online discussion forums. On-task talk has generally been assessed as valuable discussion because it contributes directly to productive learning. Off-task conversation, on the other hand, is often regarded as useless and a waste of time. Should this social talk indeed be regarded as an…