2008 marked the 10-year Anniversary of the Open Source movement, which has had a substantial impact on not only software production and adoption, but also on the sharing and distribution of information. Technical communication as a discipline has taken some advantage of the movement or its derivative software, but this article argues not as much…

Technological innovation is driving fundamental changes in all aspects of our lives. This is especially true of digital content, as our use of e-books, downloadable music, streaming television and movies, and online social networks has exploded. However, the explosive growth in our use of digital content seems so far to have eluded many of the 50…

The purpose of this study is to discuss the ethical issues in education in terms of teachers, students, schools, and software companies. Recent growth of the internet and World Wide Web allows new developments in the way instructors transfer knowledge to their students. Technology is a new tool in education that constantly changes and offers new…

Purpose: Applications of online Second Life (SL) prevail over the world. The purpose of this paper is to make a review and synthesis of recent research studies on SL. Design/methodology/approach: Documental analysis is employed. Totally, 135 research publications, published in 2006-2008, are reviewed and synthesized. Findings: Findings are as…

Current concerns about academic plagiarism in student writing assume qualitative and quantitative differences in the writing of students for whom English is a first language (EL1) and English is a second language (EL2), but lack precision in measuring those differences. I examined the citation practices of EL1 and EL2 students in a timed writing…

This paper provides a history of the "Pachyderm 2.0 Project," a partnership led by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMONA), and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The project brings software development teams and digital library experts from six NMC universities together with…

Open Source Software (OSS) has introduced a new dimension in software community. As the development and use of OSS becomes prominent, the question of its integration in education arises. In this paper, the following practices fundamental to projects and processes in software engineering are examined from an OSS perspective: project management;…

Students are, increasingly, digital content producers, and participate extensively in evolving online social networks. The emergence of the former represents subtle changes in students' experience of images, audience, copyright, ownership of learning, and technology. Experiencing the latter places students in an awkward position in terms of…

In the United Kingdom over the past few years there has been a dramatic growth of national and regional repositories to collect and disseminate resources related to teaching and learning. Most notable of these are the Joint Information Systems Committee's Online Repository for [Learning and Teaching] Materials as well as the Higher Education…

Discusses these four issues identified by EDUCAUSE's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) as being key to its mission to create new collegiate learning environments that harness the power of information technology: (1) intellectual property rights; (2) institutional readiness to enhance academic productivity; (3) faculty support and…

Discusses a research project examining the integration of computers into seventh and eighth grade language arts classrooms. Focuses on the ways in the researchers' observations tend to conform to what has been shown by existing research. Discusses their results in terms of four themes that emerged in their analysis. (MG)

While Microsoft Corporation officials state unequivocally that the company does not want to get into the business of higher education, the company and its chairman have been quietly acquiring rights to intellectual property and creating software rich in academic content. College administrators, nervous about competition for students, are concerned…

This paper presents models of faculty compensation for teaching and development of asynchronous learning (ALN) courses. Faculty members' concerns include teaching workload, course development effort, and ownership of intellectual property associated with ALN teaching. The models presented show that the system for adjusting faculty compensation for…

A physics professor ponders the advantages and possibilities of the Internet in graduate education and shares his own experiences delivering graduate courses and individual lectures online. Discusses accreditation and costing between institutions, the nature and extent of copyright problems, and the most useful forms of student interaction. (PVD)

This is a collected edition of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges adopted papers on technology-related issues. These six papers, written between 1995 and 2000, raise the issues which must be discussed at each college; they also provide suggestions and examples to consider. The most recent of the papers, "Guidelines on…