Purpose: This study aims to describe the design of a provincial government ministry group mentoring program and examine mentees' and mentors' experiences in the program. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 151 mentees rated their satisfaction in a post-program survey. The survey was followed by in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 10…

The effective use of technology is increasingly important in many fields where online and digital communication, collaboration, and production have become more prevalent. Although it is clear that many higher education students come into the classroom with skills involved with consuming technology, they often are much less capable of producing…

Cooperative learning has many pedagogical benefits. However, if the cooperative learning teams become ineffective, these benefits are lost. Accordingly, this study developed a computer-aided assessment method for identifying ineffective teams at their early stage of dysfunction by using the Mahalanobis distance metric to examine the difference…

The concept and the activities of nurturing are vital to the teacher education classroom. It is essential that student teachers have the ability to understand their own students' connection to learning and thus to the need those students have for a particular and indispensable form of sustenance. Nurturing unites identity and subject matter…

Undergraduate research is viewed as an important catalyst for educational engagement and persistence, with an emphasis on the faculty mentoring relationship. Despite the common practice of having multi-tiered lab teams composed of newer undergraduates and more seasoned undergraduates serving as peer mentors, less is understood about the experience…

Wagner College's academic program emphasizes interdisciplinary study, experiential learning, and reflection on theory and practice. The curriculum is enhanced by a rich array of opportunities in New York City. In the course of their undergraduate studies, students enroll in three learning communities, two of which include experiential learning and…

According to Richard DuFour (2004), "To create a professional learning community, focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively and hold yourself accountable for results." Professional learning communities provide the structure that must exist within a school in order to become effective. However, to truly prepare…

The mission of national colleges of technology (NCT's) in Japan and the universities of technology (UT's) in Taiwan is to pragmatically prepare quality engineers and technologists. In recent years, the partnership among NCT's and UT's is extended and expanded. This paper introduces the pragmatic and successful partnership between National United…

Communities of practice as organisations of learning have developed different forms as: task-based, practice-based or knowledge based communities (Barab et al., 2004). The paper presents a case study of a successful community of practice developed under the umbrella of Council of Europe Pestalozzi programme for teacher development. The programme…

This study concerns how intra-organizational networks affect the implementation of policies and practices in organizations. In particular, we attend to the role of the informal subgroup or clique in cultivating and distributing locally adapted and integrated knowledge, or know-how. We develop two hypotheses based on the importance of…

Van den Bossche (2006) points out how fruitful collaboration is not merely the case of putting people with relevant knowledge together. Studies on collaborative learning suggest that group outcomes improve when members focus not only on the task but also on the inter-personal group processes (Johnson & Johnson, 2005). However, attempts to…

The principle of homophily says that people associate with other groups of people who are mostly like themselves. Many online communities are structured around groups of socially similar individuals. On Twitter, however, people are exposed to multiple, diverse points of view through the public timeline. The authors captured 30,000 tweets about the…

This study focuses on using wikis as a learning environment, as part of a professional development program for chemistry teacher leaders. The study was performed in Israel and involved 20 chemistry teachers. One goal was to investigate how using wiki may promote effective science teacher professional development. Various aspects of the teachers'…

Teacher networks are an important lever for helping schools make change. In order to take advantage of teacher networks, principals must map the existing networks in their schools, identifying teachers and others who serve as experts or advice givers, brokers, and advice seekers. Once these are known, principals can decide on a strategy for…

Building relationships and community collaborations--especially on an institutional level--is a slow and long-term process. These types of innovative, experimental, and long-term collaborations with community organizations and groups often lead art institutions to reflect on the value and place of their institutional structures when engaging in…