Web accessibility for everyone. This concept drove lawmakers in 1998 to undertake Section 508 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. In this directive, all possible measures were to be taken by federal agencies to ensure everyone, regardless of physical or technical challenge, would be able to access the Internet and retrieve information by 2001. In…

While the charter movement has a rich history in Utah, virtual charters are a recent development. In 2007, a founding board consisting of faculty, staff, and graduate students in Utah State University's Center for Open and Sustainable Learning prepared and submitted an application to create the state's second virtual charter, called the Open High…

In this article, the author has advanced the view that the world is currently on the threshold of a new status quo--the hegemony of the image. Yet, this seems a mixed blessing, for people, and especially young people, are not equipped with the necessary critical viewing and thinking skills to survive it. Nevertheless, this unfortunate situation…

The nature of disruptions encountered by classroom teachers is changing. In the past, disruptions were typically students chewing gum, eating or taking naps during class, engaging in acts of incivility including the occasional brawl, and the like. These disturbances, in many ways, pale in comparison to those accompanying the use of technologies in…

Human Communication in Organizations (HCO) is an introductory college course at Ithaca College, typically taken in the freshman year, in which students from a wide variety of majors examine the basic concepts, issues, and uses of organizational communication including communication theory, superior-subordinate and peer relationships, leadership,…

This paper explores the use of learning management systems (LMS) at colleges and universities in the United States of America. The study explores which systems are in use including both commercial and self-developed systems. The findings are based upon a random sample of 100 of the approximately 2,000 institutions of higher learning in the United…

In an age of Internet education, what does it mean for a tenure/tenure-track faculty to have a web page? How many professors have web pages? If they have a page, what does it look like? Do they really need a web page at all? Many universities have faculty web pages. What do those collective pages look like? In what way do they represent the…

Reflection and professional development are two key practices that characterize an effective teacher and that are frequently overlooked in preservice training (Bowles, 2003; Halen-Faber, 1997; Patrick & Reinhartz, 1999). Reflection can be defined as the type of thinking that serves to challenge notions of prior learning (Halen-Faber, 1997), and…

This paper presents a review of recent research that examines the relative instructional utility of text-based synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC). As a mechanism for limiting the number of studies reviewed as well as controlling for emergent technologies, only research published since 2000 was reviewed. The goal was…