New infrastructures that dramatically change our possibilities for knowledge production and learning have also brought forward ideals on "new" connectivity. Two important ideals of connectivity are that of the individual who tailors his or her knowledge among expansively dispersed resources, and the ideal of access to multiple, diverse…

Family day-care (FDC) educators work autonomously to provide care and education for children of mixed ages, backgrounds and abilities. To meet the demands and opportunities of their work and regulatory requirements, educators need access to context-relevant and high quality information. No previous research has examined how and where these workers…

This paper reports a 5-year design experiment on cumulative knowledge building as part of an international project. Through a longitudinal study and analysis of cumulative research data, we sought to answer the question, "what happened and why in knowledge building?" Research data constitute messages which participants have written into a shared…

This paper focuses on the implications of two emerging digital technologies on the act of field birding, and the implications of these objects for thinking about wild birds. While the adoption of new immaterial technologies promises to improve the ease with which birding is practiced, their use leads to new ethical considerations. Using the…

This qualitative study examines use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers, cell phones, text messaging, and social networking sites, for campus activism. Participants were 22 student leaders representing eight campuses from 2000 to 2008. The focus of this study was two-fold: first, to describe the form and function…

Discussion forums have been used to support organizational communication and they have become a candidate for study of organizational behaviors. However, online behaviors of NGOs have been insufficiently studied compared to those studies conducted in education and industries. Our empirical study examined how social workers in one NGO used an…

Innovative uses of technology to support teacher learning are emerging through professional learning communities that leverage social networking technologies. The value of an online community for educators lies in the rich and open exchange of ideas, experiences, and resources where educators feel both respected and supported. Yet among the most…

We use social network analysis to test the hypothesis that group ideology affects information exchange among environmental groups. The analysis is based on interviews with leaders of 136 environmental groups in Alabama. This paper adds to the literature on resource mobilization among social movement organizations by exploring information exchange…

Knowledge Building is approached in this study from an organizational perspective, with a focus on the nature of school-university-government partnerships to support research-based educational innovation. The paper starts with an overview of what is known about effective partnerships and elaborates a conceptual framework for Knowledge Building…