The open-ended, informal, and socially negotiated nature of role-playing games creates a distinct learning challenge for newcomers to the hobby. The explicit rules of the game provide only an incomplete framework for structuring the actions of players, and the expectations and mores of a given group will add other, unspoken rules that discourage…

The American public often wonders what goes on in the White House and how domestic and foreign policy are made. Designed for use by the research and teaching communities, whitehousetapes.org provides teachers and students the opportunity to learn more about how American presidents have made decisions and exercised leadership during pivotal moments…

The effects of accompanying lectures with computer-mediated PowerPoint presentations or PowerPoint generated overheads on students' self-efficacy, attitudes, course performance, and class-related behaviors were examined. Two Introduction to Developmental Psychology sections were initially taught with lectures accompanied by either overheads or…

The purpose of this case study is to better understand the relationships between Web usability and students' perceived learning in the design and implementation of Web-based multimedia (WBMM) tutorials in blended courses. Much of the current research in this area focuses on the use of multimedia as a replacement for classroom instruction rather…

The portability and immediate communication properties of mobile devices influence the learning processes in interacting with peers, accessing resources and transferring data. For example, the short message and browsing functions in a cell phone provide users with timely and adaptive information access. Although many studies of mobile learning…

This paper describes chat widgets, chunks of code that can be embedded on a web site to appear as an instant messaging system, and how they can be used on a science library web site to better serve library users. Interviews were conducted concerning experiences at science and humanities libraries and more similarities than differences were…

As more users access library services remotely, it has become increasingly important for librarians to reach out to their user communities and promote the value of libraries. Convincing the faculty and students in the sciences of the value of libraries and librarians can be a particularly "hard sell" as more and more of their primary…

Wikis provide new opportunities for learning and for collaborative knowledge building as well as for understanding these processes. This article presents a theoretical framework for describing how learning and collaborative knowledge building take place. In order to understand these processes, three aspects need to be considered: the social…

With the advent of e-learning technologies in the past decade, the accessibility of training, teaching, and learning has drastically increased. The challenge for the education enterprise now is how to attract learners to their e-learning services. In this study, a technology adoption model is developed to predict the users' intention of adoption…

Despite a large volume of research examining instructional strategies and student learning, very little research has examined relationships between students' perceptions of the value of specific instructional techniques and academic motivation. In the current research, college students (172 undergraduates) completed scales assessing the perceived…

Today's young people seem to live in an even faster fast-paced society than previous generations. As in the past, they are involved in sports, music, school, church, work, and are exposed to many forms of mass media that add to their base of information. However, they also have instant access to computer-generated information such as the Internet,…

This paper represents an earnest attempt to identify specific pedagogical roles for blogs in language learning. After briefly describing various types of blogs and defining their purposes (Herring "et al.", 2005) we attempt to accommodate their position and application within language teaching (Thorne & Scott Payne, 2005), relating evidence from…

Most music educators are unaware that one of the earliest known electronic music keyboards for children dates back to 1952. It was unsophisticated in appearance, but much like the inventions of today, the mid-century electronic musical toy piqued the interest of children, and they begged their parents to buy it for them. The invention was named…

The present study examined continuity of learning between face-to-face and online environments in a "blended" professional development program designed for 16 physics teachers. The program had nine face-to-face meetings as well as continuous online exchanges between them through a website. The program focused on "knowledge…

An essential instructional goal in foreign language education is the enhancement of students' intercultural competence. This article reports on a study that examined how intercultural competence developed between study abroad and at home students (in Spain and the United States, respectively) who used blogs as a mediating tool over the course of a…