This exploration of online applied music lessons focused on nine trumpet lessons between Jeremy, a college trumpet professor on the East Coast, and Kate, an eighth-grade trumpet player in the Midwest. These lessons followed an entry-level videoconferencing approach using personal computers, Web cams, and Skype videoconferencing software. These…

This article describes how a blogging exchange between preservice teachers and elementary school children was used as part of a social studies pedagogy course. The objective of this exchange was to develop the preservice teachers' understanding of children's differing learning needs, interests and learning styles while the children were immersed…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of literature on the role of Web 2.0 or social software tools in education. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is a critical and comprehensive review of a range of literature sources (until January 2009) addressing the various issues related to the educator's perspective of pedagogical…

Enrichment clusters, a component of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model, are multigrade investigative groups based on constructivist learning methodology. Enrichment clusters are organized around major disciplines, interdisciplinary themes, or cross-disciplinary topics. Within clusters, students are grouped across grade levels by interests and focused…

In today's fast-changing business environment, teams have emerged as a requirement for business success. However, in schools and universities, students are usually not taught teamwork skills. In this paper, we introduce learning to collaborate by collaborating, a process that enables collaboration and teamwork skills to be taught and measured…

This article describes and analyzes efforts to use collaborative asynchronous discussion forums in a three semester online education program for NGO leaders and managers in Slovakia. Slovakia, as a country with autocratic styles of teacher-centered education, presents strong barriers to the implementation of collaborative learning activities. The…

The purpose of this study was to investigate learning in communities of inquiry (CoI) as the terms are defined in Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's (2000) framework. We identified 252 reports from 2000-2008 that referenced the framework, and we reviewed them using Ogawan and Malen's (1991) strategy for synthesizing multi-vocal bodies of literature.…

This paper describes and reflects on the development of the Schome Park Programme (SPP), which was established with the specific aim of extending our thinking about schome, which aims to be the optimal educational system for the 21st century. In an earlier stage of the Schome Initiative, it became clear that people find it almost impossible to…

This paper reports on the initial findings from a project which offers a complementary perspective to much of the research on e-learning and student learning in a digital age. Rather than foregrounding technological applications and their associated affordances, its focus is on texts and practices and textual engagements in digital environments.…

The following autoethnography reflects a neophyte instructor's obsession with teaching an online graduate course. The experience forces her to move ethnographically forward and backward with students in a novel, and sometimes, more intimate fashion. She struggles to balance a serving of technology with a dollop of human interaction, but finds…

The rapid growth of technology has made online tools available for education. The ability to discern the characteristics of these tools and to use them appropriately for educational purposes has become increasingly critical. Weblogs and discussion forums are among those up-and-coming tools that have great potential in supporting learning. They…

Information and communication technologies hold much promise for use in education in developing countries. This study reports on an evaluation conducted on the introduction of computers in the delivery of the mathematics curriculum in one of the provinces of South Africa. Although the request was for an outcome evaluation very early in the…

For almost three decades, the landscape of teacher education has been modestly shaped by the exploration of practices that made use of what were, at the time, current instances of computing and communication technologies (CCTs). More broadly and importantly however, the deployment of CCTs globally has, over the same time period (1980-2008),…

Weblogs--personal online, web-based publications--have exploded on the internet scene in recent years. They are among the technologies indicating changes in the way information is created, managed, and exchanged. This study examined the use of a blog in an intermediate level Spanish class and its effect upon students. Could blogging provide an…

Organizations continue to use technology to train and share information. This study focused specifically on how trainers and trainees interact in the mediated Web conference training context. Using the rhetorical and relational goal theory of instructional communication, this 2x2 experimental study tested the effects of trainer-controlled and…