This study investigated the use of online mentoring in giving professional support to 26 limited licensed teachers doing a practicum in the area of emotional/behavioral disorders. The practicum involved planning, implementing and evaluating an intervention for a learner in the teacher's classroom who displayed longstanding problems in behavior.…

The interest in new media for teaching and learning has highlighted the potential of innovative software and hardware for education. This has included laptops, hand-helds, wireless systems and Web-based learning environments. Most recently, however, this interest has focused on blogs and blogging. Weblogs, or blogs, are Web pages often likened to…

This article explores the relevance for network learning of themes developed by Wenger, initially with Lave and subsequently alone. While Wenger's fieldwork is located in the workplace, he sees his theorisation on becoming a learner as applicable to any context, be it home, work or formal education. In unravelling the connectedness between…

The present study investigated the effects of speech recognition technology (SR) and advance planning on children's writing processes. Fluent and less fluent writers, ages 11 to 14, composed 4 narratives, via handwriting and SR, both with and without advance planning. Less fluent children's handwritten narratives were significantly inferior to…

This study examined users' views about the usability of digital libraries' current and perceived importance. Age, gender, prior experience with the Internet, college status, and digital library proficiency are the independent variables. Users' current views about the usability of digital libraries and users perceived importance of digital library…

This study examines the formation and change of collaborative learning social networks in a distributed learning community. A social network perspective is employed to understand how collaborative networks evolved over time when 31 distributed learners collaborated on a design project using a computer-mediated communication system during two…

A pioneering administrator of a campus laptop mandate, the author explains how increasingly sophisticated computer enhancements of the curriculum create more and more learning possibilities and potential, with universal laptop ownership in a wireless environment approaching the fullest use of the available technology.

This article discusses the technology of instant messaging (IM), a relatively simple form of communication. It is also--by its very nature--a collaborative communications tool. This collaborative nature is what makes IM ideal for educational and learning environments. With IM playing such a large role in the communication, interactivity, and…

In this paper, we draw on Bernstein's [1996. "Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique." London: Taylor and Francis] notion of "framing" of pedagogical communication to propose a framework for use in specific literacy contexts. Here, we illustrate how this framework has emerged from an examination of text response online…

Scholars have argued that the Internet could bring about the realization of an electronic global village, with no race, gender, infirmities, or the social problems that often accompany these physical indicators of difference. In this study, we explored this issue by conducting content and discourse analyses of online conversations about race and…

Purpose: To illustrate the need for social network metadata within semantic metadata. Design/methodology/approach: Surveys properties of social networks and the semantic web, suggests that social network analysis applies to semantic content, argues that semantic content is more searchable if social network metadata is merged with semantic web…

It is commonly agreed that professional development of teachers in the use of information and communication technologies should be sustained over time. Most professional development, however, is delivered in single or short sequences of face-to-face sessions, paying little heed to this requirement. Once the face-to-face training is completed, a…

This investigation compared 267 students with a hearing loss and 178 students with no declared form of disability who were taking courses by distance learning in terms of their scores on an abbreviated version of the Academic Engagement Form. Students with a hearing loss obtained lower scores than students with no disability with regard to…

Computer-mediated communication in individuals with Asperger syndrome, Tourette syndrome and normal controls was explored with a program called Bubble Dialogue (Gray, Creighton, McMahon, & Cunninghamn (1991)) in which the users type text into speech bubbles. Two scenarios, based on Happe (1994) were adapted to investigate understanding of figure…

The advent of electronic and digital communication as an integral part of academic discourse has profoundly changed the ways in which universities and their faculties pursue teaching and scholarship. Such changes are manifest in the methods by which information is obtained and disseminated, the means of storing and retrieving such information, and…