This study explores teaching experiences of educators within the virtual world of Second Life (SL) and pedagogical practices adopted. A blended approach is applied by using physical classrooms, BlackboardTM, web-based resources, and the virtual world of SL in an Information Literacy (IL) class for 1st year undergraduate students at an institution…

This paper intends to problematise understandings of the ethnographer's presence in investigating contemporary forms of technologised learning. The ubiquity of new educational technologies raises questions concerning the spaces of education and learning, and challenges, at the same time, the sense of "being there" in terms of the face-to-face…

Many reports on rural education give little attention to digital learning. At most, they tend to note either infrastructure needs or the potential of remote course access, with little focus on instruction, outcomes, or exemplars. This report intends to begin correcting that imbalance by connecting the dots between rural regions, rural education,…

Online teaching is in its adolescence and needs to mature in order to overcome some of its growing pains to reach its potential in the field of education. Reflecting upon the author's first three years teaching online, he notes practices and commitments that could help instructors better participate in and facilitate lifelong learning for…

Virtual schools are as different from each other as traditional schools are different when one moves from community to community or state to state. A virtual school typically offers a learning experience via the Internet, may or may not be supported by government funds, and may or may not be accredited. They have been in existence for quite some…

In the Russian Federation and other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, a focus of national education policy is to modernize the education system by integrating new technologies that have emerged within education in Western Europe and North America. The current promotion of one-to-one learning in Russian schools is one of the…

Social capital (or the ways in which people in an organization collaborate and to a greater extent the quality of professional community in that context) has a variety of implications for organizations, specifically schools. This study examined the relationship between attitudes of administrators and faculty at the secondary level toward…

During 2012, the Dance Department at the University of Surrey developed a set of Open Educational Resources with a Creative Commons license (Attribution, Non- Commercial, Share Alike) for dance studies as part of the JISC-funded project Contexts, Culture and Creativity: Enriching E-learning in Dance (CCC:EED) see…

Building and sustaining a school and district culture that has a technology "growth mindset" and the implementation of processes that support a technology-specific culture in which, "the role of the leader is to ensure that the organization develops relationships that help produce desirable results," would ensure that teachers and principals…

With the variety of environment and method of English learning, Autonomy English learning on the Internet is playing a more and more important role in modern English learning. It challenges the traditional learning approach, and also is forwardness. This paper points out that autonomy English learning on the Internet facilitates the improvement of…

This study examines the perspectives of teacher tutors on the value of the online components of PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) courses at the University of Ulster. The work has been undertaken as part of the ESRC-funded project, "A Values-based Approach to Teacher Education." It is set within the value-laden contexts of…

This is the third in a series of three papers about online pedagogy and educational practice as part of the JISE "Online Education Forum." This paper deals with the question: "What approaches help assure a quality online educational experience?" Clearly achieving quality is the chief concern of everyone involved with online education. This article…

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights…

Online teaching is a complex professional practice. In addition to their content knowledge and pedagogical skill, online teachers must be qualified in methods of teaching the content online and have experience in online learning. This document examines some of the aspects of online teaching, specifically those related to communication and…

Background: Although much has been written about the ways in which new technology might transform educational practice, particularly in the area of literacy learning, there is relatively little empirical work that explores the possibilities and problems--or even what such a transformation might look like in the classroom. 3D virtual worlds offer a…