Rich-media representations of teaching using animated cartoons can be effective at stimulating teachers' discussion about practice and hence help them learn productively from one another about their profession. Our research aims to design web-based interactive rich-media virtual settings for teachers to learn to do the practice of teaching. For…

This narrative interview study of a Spanish learner documents and explains apparent contradictions in a student's story when reporting on why she continues to take Spanish even when she does not like it or perform well in foreign language courses. A dialectical approach to human activity based on sociocultural theory is used to make sense of her…

Advocating dialogue between language teachers and learners has been an area of growing exploration, particularly in the area of reflective practice in second language teacher education. In this brief report, the authors detail the conceptualization and procedures of two online exchange projects conducted in 2008 and 2009, in which they tried to…

This study investigated the effect of peer leadership on students' cognitive achievement in online asynchronous discussions. Undergraduate students from a large online course were randomly assigned into groups for four asynchronous discussions, with each group having two to three peer leaders. Results of the mixed-method analysis revealed that the…

Many adolescents spend time online, communicating with friends, family members and strangers, and these social activities have been often related with their loneliness experience. The goals of this study were to examine the social distress expressed by adolescents with and without learning disabilities (LD) and to distinguish between unique…

This qualitative study investigates the relationship between learning opportunities and teacher cognition in the context of a videoconferencing (VC) project for foreign languages (FL) in French primary schools. Six generalist primary teachers were followed throughout the initial six-month stage of the initiative, and data were collected from…

This study examined the literacy practices of children ages 5-11 as they engaged in out-of-school use of virtual worlds. The purpose of the study was to explore the nature, purpose, and role of literacy in children's use of a virtual world. In this article, I reflect on how children's use of literacy practices in the virtual world constructed and…

The main focus of this article is on the multilingual literacy practices and values of English-educated university students (aged 14-20) in Brunei Darussalam, Southeast Asia. Multilingual literacy is used as a lens to examine the impact of globalization on the communicative practices of these young people and to investigate the specific ways in…

An international wiki-based collaboration was integrated into a large introductory educational technology course enrolling 346 students, divided into 43 teams. Student teams participated in a 5-week project in which they created wiki chapters about the educational uses of specific Web 2.0 tools. Two to four international students, located in their…

In 2006, a secondary English and feminist studies teacher created a course and designed a study around a reading exchange for eighth-grade girls from two vastly different communities. Girls from a school in a northeastern state read young adult novels and wrote about their reading and related topics with girls from Washington, DC on a wikispace…

This article investigates the relationships between social presence, cognitive absorption, interest, and student satisfaction in online learning. A hypothesized structural equation model was developed to study these critical variables that may influence interaction in online learning environments. Contrary to expectations, the study determined…

Although most online learning environments are predominately text based, researchers have argued that representational support for the conceptual structure of a problem would address problems of coherence and convergence that have been shown to be associated with threaded discussions and more effectively support collaborative knowledge…

As a group, readers' advisory (RA) librarians are a chatty bunch when it comes to what they are reading. They share book ideas with their friends and families. The adoption of online RA conversation forms is helping to extend these opportunities even further and offers a fascinating testing ground for RA work. Librarians have found that offering…

This article presents this year's winners of Tech & Learning's student photography contest. Selected from an overwhelming six thousand entries, these images are proof that "the kids today" are not only extremely talented, but also powerfully enabled by digital tools that can help them express and communicate those talents. The theme of the…

Intellectual, social, managerial and technical are four commonly reported categories of facilitation in online discussions. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether these four broad categories of facilitation were equally applied in online discussions and which specific skills were perceived to be more important. In this study,…