This paper reports on the use of action research in a case study involving two iterations of an online workshop implemented at two universities in late 2007 and early 2009 to prepare teaching staff for using wikis for student group work and assessment. Workshop participants were immersed in the experience of collaborating in a wiki as learners and…

Writing groups have been used in a variety of academic disciplines to support and encourage faculty in their scholarly endeavors. This article gives an overview of the impact a writing group within a Teacher Education department at a teaching institution had on scholarly output over a two year period. The structure of the writing group is shared…

This is at once a playful text with a serious purpose: to provide the reader with the theoretical lenses to analyze the dynamics of social class. It will appeal to students, and indeed anyone interested in how class mediates relationships in higher education, both because of its engaging tone, and because it uses the college campus as a microcosm…

Collaboration is a hard and challenging endeavor. It takes all the key players to make it happen. This paper discusses our current thinking about school-university collaboration. In it, we define what collaboration involves in the context of universities and schools. Next, we discuss what we believe are the essential benefits of effective…

Midway High School is a school that would like to be able to claim itself "a restorative school", though its journey is just beginning. It is a mid-decile, urban, co-educational New Zealand secondary school of approximately 970 students. The school draws a wide range of students with approximately 40 per cent NZ European, 27 per cent…

Reading through her files, the author takes a journey back in time to 1991 when a few lesbians and gay men met in a conference room at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Convention in Seattle to discuss issues relating to their lives and their teaching. It was at this meeting that NCTE first discussed forming a new group…

This article focuses on teachers' learning in a research and development (R&D) work project. The teachers are working in a lower secondary school, and the cooperation between them and the researcher lasted for two years. The aim of this article is to show what teachers can learn and how they can learn during such a project. In the qualitative…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the IT professionals in a Hong Kong public transport company have a general perception of influence of the organisational defensive patterns on learning of ICT; and whether skilled incompetence, organisational defensive routines and fancy footwork are positively associated with each…

Formation is an important stage of partnership development. Purpose: To describe the systematic approach to process evaluation of a Turning Point initiative in central Oklahoma during the formation stage. The nine-month collaborative effort aimed to develop an action plan to promote health. Methods: A sound planning framework was used in the…

The present experiment examined whether or not the type of associations (close (e.g. apple-pear) and distant (e.g. apple-fish) word associations) and memory instruction (paying attention to the ideas of others) had effects on the idea generation performances in the brainwriting paradigm in which all participants shared their ideas by using paper…

Research indicates that the uncertainty created when students are required to work in groups for assessed projects induces anxiety, which can manifest itself both cognitively and affectively. Such anxiety may influence student attitudes towards the selection and formation of the groups. This study explored whether different methods of group…

This paper explores the complex and shifting dimensions of the social, cultural and bodily differences that impact on learners and their learning. Our theoretical argument proceeds in five stages. First, we build a typology of terms used to classify demographic differences for the purposes of designing, implementing and evaluating the…

This volume represents the first collection of empirical studies focusing on peer interaction for L2 learning. These studies aim to unveil the impact of mediating variables such as task type, mode of interaction, and social relationships on learners' interactional behaviors and language development in this unique and pedagogically powerful…

We examine how extended engagement in argumentation with peers leads to enhanced metalevel understanding of argumentive discourse. Following such engagement, young adolescents demonstrated enhanced understanding of counterargument and use of evidence as objectives of skilled argumentation, relative to a nonparticipating comparison group. Among the…

This study investigates student interactions in a blog-based learning community in a university course. In addition, this study explores the dynamics of group interactions in individual blog-based environments compared with collaborative "wiki"-based educational activities. A learning community of 56 graduate students wrote individual…