For their 57th annual conference, the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers (ALER) met in Dallas, Texas at Addison Marriott Quorum by the Galleria. This year's conference theme was Exploring the World of Literacy, which was also used as the title for this year's Yearbook, Volume 36. Included are double-peer reviewed papers,…

This dissertation examines the social affordances of workplace email use. Through group and individual interviews of six knowledge workers in a distributed real estate firm, it explores the extent workplace writers recognize and rely on extra-textual devices (i.e., copy, blind-copy, and forward devices) and email applications (i.e., email…

Engaging elementary students in evidence-based reasoning is an essential aspect of science and engineering education. Evidence-based reasoning involves students making claims (i.e., answers to questions, or solutions to problems), providing evidence to support those claims, and articulating their reasoning to connect the evidence to the claim. In…

The present study examined the usage pattern of electronic game devices among primary school children in Hong Kong. Commonly used types of games devices were grouped into three main categories: large-screen/TV-based games, small handheld game devices and active game devices. A survey was conducted among 476 students in a local primary school, with…

BeaverTracks Historical Locations and Walking Tour is a mobile project at Oregon State University (OSU), where the author serves as programmer/analyst. It connects the past to the present by linking historic images to current campus locations. The goal of BeaverTracks is to showcase and bring attention to OSU Libraries' digital collections as well…

Although the use of clickers and peer discussion is becoming common in large-lecture undergraduate biology courses, their use is limited in small-enrollment seminar-style courses. To investigate whether facilitating peer discussion with clickers would add value to a small-enrollment seminar-style course, we evaluated their usefulness in an…

We evaluated an intervention procedure for teaching three students with developmental disabilities to independently operate a portable multimedia device (i.e., an iPod Touch[R]) to listen to music. The intervention procedure included the use of video modeling, which was presented on the same iPod Touch[R] that the students were taught to operate…

The increase in cell phone use has manifested a growing interest in using this technology for health promotion. The portability and "always on" features of the cell phone, along with increasing capability for the devices to carry and transfer data suggest that they will reach more people than computers and the Internet in coming years.…

Technology in higher education has exploded within the last decade, as educators become more knowledgeable about its uses and students become more demanding of access and convenience to teaching and learning. This article shares results of an exploratory study that determined graduate students' perceptions of podcasting access and utility in…

The author has been using mobile phones actively in her adult education classes for the last two years. She has found that, with a bit of cell phone etiquette, students are responsible and will use phones as learning tools instead of just as toys. In this article, the author describes how she uses them and suggests effective techniques for…

Microscopes are especially useful for observing fine detail in biological specimens. However, there are many other small items that may be examined with microscopes, and it is important to introduce children to low-magnification images of items they can recognise before moving on to such large magnification that what they observe has no obvious…

The Forest Hills Local Schools board in Ohio had always been supportive of a 1-to-1 program, but it simply did not have the resources to buy every student a computer. The district had some laptops available, but only enough for about one out of every five students. So, when a teacher wanted to integrate technology into a lesson, the machines had…

Language immersion from birth is crucial to a child's language development. However, language immersion can be particularly challenging for hearing parents of deaf children to provide as they may have to overcome many difficulties while learning sign language. We intend to create a mobile device-based system to help hearing parents learn sign…

This article describes how a demonstration of statistical (or other) software can be recorded without expensive video equipment and saved as a presentation to be displayed with software such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Work carried out on a tablet PC, for example, can also be recorded in this fashion.

Described is a simple low cost home-made device that converts the radio wave energy from a mobile phone signal into electricity for lighting an LED. No battery or complex circuitry is required. The device can form the basis of a range of interesting experiments on the physics and technology of mobile phones. (Contains 5 figures.)