How can school librarians change the view of school librarians to better match the reality of their work? One way is to increase their explicit connections with broad, recognizable initiatives, like digital fluency and computer science. The The New York State Computer Science and Digital Fluency (CS/DF) Standards, in alignment with the "AASL…

Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this "wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service" was a project funded by an 'in-the-wild' research programme, involving the study of digital…

Purpose: Ethiopia operates a large agricultural extension service system. However, access to extension-related knowledge, technologies and agricultural inputs is unequally distributed among smallholder farmers. Social learning is widely practiced by most farmers to cope with this unequal distribution though its practices have hardly been…

Networks are of significant importance in many application domains, such as World Wide Web and social networks, which often embed rich topological information. Since network topology captures the organization of network nodes and links, studying network topology is very important to network analysis. In this dissertation, we study networks by…

Remote working is the new reality, and transactional work--provided by freelancers, contract employees or consultants--has increased exponentially. It is forecast that as much as half the labor force will be working independently and virtually by 2020. Most organizations are still grappling with how to effectively manage their virtual staff and…

Resource-rich computing devices, decreasing communication costs, and Web 2.0 technologies are fundamentally changing the way distributed applications communicate and collaborate. With these changes, we envision Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems that will allow for the integration and collaboration of peers with diverse capabilities to a virtual community…

Affordable, reliable access to high speed broadband is critical to U.S. economic growth and competitiveness. Upgrading to higher-speed broadband lets consumers use the Internet in new ways, increases the productivity of American individuals and businesses, and drives innovation throughout the digital ecosystem. As this report describes, while the…

Scholarly attention regarding faculty involvement has primarily focused on faculty opinions of shared governance and faculty influence on institutional decision-making. There has been limited attention given to academic service productivity and the effectiveness of traditional approaches toward the accomplishment of faculty service requirements.…

Providing access to robust connectivity is critical to ensuring today's students are college and career ready. As such, federal, state, and district-level leaders have dedicated a significant amount of time, effort, and resources toward improving our schools' external broadband access, including both Internet access and wide area network (WAN).…

Innovation is a survival tool for the corporate world to play in the ever competitive free global market in the 21st century. The innovation process, especially at the front end, is the most challenging phase because of the inextricably intertwined fuzziness of high uncertainty and the deficiency of information available. Although the uncertainty…

This dissertation is a study of scientific collaboration at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a modern, multi-disciplinary, distributed laboratory involved in sensor network research. By use of survey research and network analysis, this dissertation examines the collaborative ecology of CENS in terms of three networks of…

This paper presents the first in a series of studies on the informal advice networks of a community of teachers in an in-service professional development program. The aim of the research was to use Social Network Analysis as a methodological tool to reveal the social networks developed by the teachers, and to examine whether these networks…

Some studies of technology use by immigrants have explored the role of digital media in their maintenance of affiliations with their nations of origin. However, the potential for transnational social networks to serve as "resources" that facilitate digital literacy socialization for adult immigrant learners remains unexplored. In this…

Youths' learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice…

Beginning with a discussion of the latest findings in the information and communication technologies (ICT) and educational improvement field, this article develops a comprehensive strategy to analyse online community building. Far from offering a utopian or dystopian vision, we study the contribution of ICT appropriation as a tool for…