Deciding which technologies to support for teaching and learning--and how to support them--depends, first, on the ability to learn about each emerging development. Selecting a platform without knowing what is coming right behind it can be risky. Similarly, it is folly to grasp onto a technology without seeing the variety of ways that the…

Based on more than twenty years' experience working to get boys interested in reading, the author now offers his first readers' advisory volume. With an emphasis on nonfiction and the boy-friendly categories of genre fiction, the work offers a wealth of material including: (1) Suggestions for how to booktalk one-on-one as well as in large groups;…

Science fiction films were used in required and elective nonmajor science courses as a pedagogical tool to motivate student interest in science and to reinforce critical thinking about scientific concepts. Students watched various films and critiqued them for scientific accuracy in written assignments. Students' perception of this activity was…

Creating memory during and after wartime trauma is vexed by state attempts to control public and private discourse. Science fiction author Iain Banks' novel "Look to Windward" proposes different ways of preserving memory and culture, from posthuman memory devices, to artwork, to architecture, to personal, local ways of remembering.…

This paper is designed to accompany an appearance by the author as a panelist during a session on science fiction and teaching methods at the I-CON 28 Science Fiction Convention held April 3-5, 2009, on Long Island (near New York City). The author describes how he employs social science fiction in an honors course at the university level to…

This article examines Terry Pratchett's "The Amazing Maurice" as a modern example of environmentally informed social dreaming about sustainable coexistence. In our increasingly ecologically-conscious world sustainability and coexistence have become key words in the discourse about social, economic and political relations. The problem of relating…

It has been argued that in higher education academic disciplines can be seen as communities of practices. This implies a focus on what constitutes identities in academic culture. In this article I argue that the transition from newcomer to a full participant in a community of practice of physicists entails a focus on how identities emerge in…

This essay brings together two lines of inquiry. Firstly, I revisit research on futures in education conducted during the 1980s and re-examine some of the propositions and principles that this research generated about "the future" as an object of inquiry in education. Secondly, I argue that the language of complexity invites us to…

In a satiric chapter of David Foster Wallace's novel "Infinite Jest," a mock media expert reports how American consumers of the near future recoil from a new communication device known as "videophony" and return to the voice-only telephone of the Bell Era. This article explores the said chapter in the framework of media theories reading the…

This article profiles Orson Scott Card, the winner of this year's Margaret A. Edwards Award for his outstanding contributions to teen literature, specifically for Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow (1999, both Tor), a companion tale. Card, the magician behind both of these best sellers, is one of the nation's most prolific--and contentious--authors.…

The following essay is a close reading of Madeleine L'Engle's science fantasy novel, "A Wind in the Door", in which young Meg Murry travels first to outer space and then into her younger brother's ailing cells. The novel is a fine example of high fantasy (also known as heroic fantasy) wherein a humble protagonist is called to a quest to fight a…

"Teaching Young Adult Literature Today" introduces the reader to what is current and relevant in the plethora of good books available for adolescents. More importantly, literary experts illustrate how teachers everywhere can help their students become lifelong readers by simply introducing them to great reads--smart, insightful, and engaging books…

There is a "reality" to being online which we know to be false. We are simultaneously "there" but "not there" as we talk, work and play with others in online spaces. We move between physical and virtual spaces in ways that realise the predictions made for computers in the mid-20th Century and enact scenarios from science fiction. We are left…

The author has argued that the central concern for the Frankfurt School of critical theory remains a foundationally necessary task for ecopedagogy generally: to understand the domination of nature in all of its complexity and totality as part of an ongoing transformative inquiry (inclusive of both theorization and transgressive action) into the…

This article discusses Philip Reeve's young adult science fiction novels as literary collages. It explores the ways in which the author uses postmodernisms to introduce big ideas and construct a compelling futuristic world that combines fast-paced adventure with the "bildungsroman".