In the 2007-2008 school year, Jennifer Hunt, language arts teacher for the 8th grade pre-Advanced Placement class wondered how she could harness the power of Web 2.0 tools to develop her students' literacy skills and deepen their engagement with literature and ideas. To that end, she wrote a successful Qwest Arizona Technology in Education…

This article reviews the emerging research literature on literacy in transnational migrant contexts and extends research in this area through an-depth study of how two immigrant teenagers navigated online media across countries to participate in a domain of interest, which included online forum discussion of philosophy and websites related to…

Millipore Corp.--a global company of 6,100 employees for which the author serves as the science and patent information specialist--supplies products and expertise that span the research, development, and production stages in the life science research and biologic drug manufacturing fields. Millipore's corporate library, the information group,…

This paper presents survey data from English Philology students (University of Granada) on a virtual course entitled ADELEX--Assessing and Developing Lexis--which was carried out in 2007-08 to enhance vocabulary acquisition. In the first part of this paper, we briefly offer a description of this second generation virtual course to enhance lexical…

This article evaluates ways in which students on an online Master's programme are learning about citizenship and developing intercultural awareness in spite of the lack of face-to-face interaction. There is still debate about the effectiveness of online courses and whether they provide an adequate substitute for, or even an improvement on,…

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of how technology has been used to enhance or replace field experiences in preservice teacher preparation programs, and discuss the benefits and limitations of traditional and technology-enhanced/virtual field experience approaches. In this paper, three types of technology-enhanced…

This review highlights recent doctoral research in the United States completed between the spring of 2006 and the fall of 2007 in the areas of language teaching and language learning. Topics of particular interest included language policy, second/foreign language pragmatics, computer-mediated communication, non-native-speaking teachers, academic…

Web 2.0 and virtual world technologies are here to stay. Today, our students come to our classroom with a presence on Facebook, the latest concert as a podcast on their MP3 player, and experience playing games in virtual worlds. In some respects, students are more tech-savvy than their Information Systems professors. Research showing the benefits…

Community psychology theorists underline the importance of promoting sociopolitical empowerment, but few studies have been conducted on the evaluation of the efficacy of empowering programs among university students. The authors report two studies: the first, with 216 psychology majors, compared the efficacy of face-to-face and online community…

This study is a third in a series of studies that examined students' information seeking and problem solving behaviors while interacting with one of two types of web-based representations of an ill-structured instructional design case: hierarchical (tree-like) and heterarchical (network-like). A Java program was used to track students' hypermedia…

This paper reports findings from a survey and interviews with children aged 11-16 years, teachers and parents on their attitudes to e-safety in relation to social networking and media creation (Web 2.0) and their practices at school and at home. The results showed that 74% of the children surveyed have used social network (SN) sites and that a…

This case study describes the use of a synchronous communication application (MSN Messenger) in a large academic computing environment. It draws on data from interviews, questionnaires and student marks to examine the link between use of the application and success measured through module marks. The relationship is not simple. Total abstainers and…

Gaming and social networking define the millennial student. This research focuses on an evolving collaboration between 2 faculty members of different disciplines who merged Web 2.0 and game scenarios to infuse research techniques as integral components of math/computer science courses. Blogs and wikis facilitated student-faculty interaction beyond…

In the Spring of 2000, Ruth Meyerowitz and Christine Zinni began collaborative efforts--inside and outside of academia--to enhance a course on The History of Working Women at SUNY Buffalo. Videotaping the oral histories of women labor leaders, they later teamed up with Michael Frisch and Randforce Associates--a research group at SUNY at Buffalo's…

All teachers know them--the students who sit in the back of the room and never make a peep. If prodded, they may reluctantly offer a comment or opinion, but they are so obviously uncomfortable about participating that a teacher may wonder if it is even worth trying to engage them. Are they unprepared or just shy? Do they lack ideas or merely need…