Pre- and postcourse assessment has become a very important tool for education research in physics and other areas. The web offers an attractive alternative to in-class paper administration, but concerns about web-based administration include reliability due to changes in medium, student compliance rates, and test security, both question leakage…

The paper reports the theoretical underpinnings for the pedagogical role and rationale for adopting 3D virtual worlds for socialisation and knowledge creation in distance education. Socialisation or "knowing one another" in remote distributed environments can be achieved through synchronous technologies such as instant messaging, audio and…

In this essay, the author examines the digital circulations of representations of one Afghan women's rights organization--the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)--to demonstrate the importance of a global and digital field for feminist rhetorical analysis. Specifically, this analysis traces how women's self-representations are…

Blogs, wikis, and social-networking sites such as Facebook may get media buzz these days, but for scientists, engineers, and doctors, they are not even on the radar. The most effective tools of the Internet for such people tend to be efforts more narrowly aimed at their needs, such as software that helps geneticists replicate one another's…

"Welcome to Buckeye City" is an adolescent online community that was maintained by 25 Korean students who attended American schools. On the website, the students engaged in "relay writing"--a writing activity in which each person contributed a portion of an evolving story in a relayed manner. Relay writing offers teachers a new and valuable window…

Prior research has identified four kinds of interaction that affect the learning process in distance education (D. Hillman, D. Willis, and C. Gunawardena, 1994; M. Moore, 1989). This paper defines, characterizes, and describes a fifth form of interaction of particular importance to certain learners, especially within the context of…

Discussion of Internet 2, a partnership in educational efforts, focuses on the Internet 2 Commons which is a collaborative framework for the advancement of research and pedagogical activities. Discusses the use of videoconferencing to improve communication and to create an environment for group collaboration; networking and collaboration; video…

In addition to giving an overview of Delphi methodology and describing the methodology used by the researchers in two Delphi studies, the authors provide information about electronic communication in Delphi studies. Also provided are suggestions that can be used in a Delphi study involving any form of communication. (SLD)

Discusses the term distributed education and its relationship to distance education. Topics include distributed training on corporate intranets; distributed expertise, which refers to the use of mediated communication for education and training by experts in different locations; and distributed, or situated, cognition, which would include…

Reports on one professor's use of integrated synchronous electronic office hours (i.e., a "chat room") with asynchronous course conferencing (i.e., email) in a class on introductory marketing. Describes its uses, limitations, benefits, potential problems, and results from a student survey. (EV)

This article describes a system that autonomously mediates threaded discussions in distance learning environments. The objective is to produce large-scale threaded discussions among an arbitrary number of participants with no human mediation effort.

Questionnaire data have many important uses, but is laborious for the subjects to provide. EDUFORM tries to alleviate this problem by enabling the creation of adaptive online questionnaires. The idea is to build a probabilistic model from previously gathered data, and employ it for predicting the profiles of new users on the basis of a subset of…

This column describes the latest innovation in iPod use, podcasts, which are audio files that can be downloaded and played either through a computer or an MP3 player such as an iPod. Because they are feeds, users can subscribe to podcasts and have them downloaded automatically to their computers. The author discusses ways in which podcasts may be…

Previous computer conferencing research has been concerned with the organizational, technical, social, and motivational factors that support and sustain online interaction. This article studies online interaction from a different perspective. Rather than analyze the processes that sustain discourse, the following research examines how and why…

Instant digital communication is going to say and the wise teacher needs to acknowledge and keep pace with the technology that eases and speeds up the way the DIG (digital immediate gratification) generation learns. Some DIG- friendly strategies that teachers can employ to make learning more attractive and meaningful are presented.