Through a critique of the rhetorical configurations of identity theft, this article contributes to the emerging body of theory contending with the social effects of digital information technologies (DIT). It demonstrates how the politics of fear manipulate technosocial matrices in order to derive consent for radical changes such as the…

A traditional distance learning system requires supervisors or teachers always available on online to facilitate and monitor a learner's progress by answering questions and guiding users. We presents an English chat room system in which students discuss course contents and ask questions to and receive from teachers and other students. The…

Collaborative learning is well suited to online learning environments built around threaded discussion. Research frameworks have developed around these practices providing methodological guidance for examining learning as a collective endeavor within the boundaries of a course. Understanding how to use the powerful learning techniques involved in…

This paper explores cultural production in online internationalised education. The analysis samples interactions in a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) unit offered online by an Australian university to a student group including enrolments through a Malaysian institution. Part of the curricular content was a consideration of how different…

The challenges of online learning include ensuring that the learning outcomes are at least as robust as in the face-to-face sections of the same course. At the University of Baltimore, both online sections and face-to-face sections of core MBA courses are offered. Once admitted to the MBA, students are free to enroll in any combination of…

Cyberculture has been more celebrated as establishing sites of possibilities than critiqued as a source of limitations for identity representation. Few researchers have explored through "in situ" interviews and their own online participation how electronic forums may actually prevent young women's representations of themselves in cyberspace.…

With the advance in information and communication technologies, computer-mediated communication--more specifically computer conferencing systems (CCS)--has captured the interest of educators as an ideal tool to create a learning environment featuring active, participative, and reflective learning. Educators are increasingly adapting the features…

At the heart of social studies education is the notion that social studies teachers teach core civic values that educate citizens and perpetuate democracy. The author of this article asserts that as the democratic system continues to evolve, technology is playing a greater role in how people learn and communicate. It makes sense, then, that social…

Senior executives who completed the two-year distance education program of the United States Army War College showed significant development of their strategic-level cognitive skills. The Modified Career Path Appreciation (MCPA) survey was administered to seventy participants at the beginning of their graduate program in strategic studies and at…

Distance education (DE) practices around the world use a wide range of audio-visual technologies to overcome the lack of direct contact between teachers and students. These are not universally adopted by DE teachers, however, nor even encouraged by their institutions. This article discusses the organisational attitudes that can lead to outdated…

In this paper, an application of one aspect of the Internet technology, namely Internet groups, into the teaching of American and British literatures is evaluated by means of a content analysis of the Internet group which was used as the course component. The aim of this paper was to see how students used the Internet group in the learning of…

In the broad context of adult and higher education, this article argues that to allow the "e" of e-learning to disappear would be to lose the opportunity to grasp the enabling and emergent properties of digital networked technology. Through examining cycles of educational technology, current trends in e-learning research, the practices and…

A common challenge in many situations of computer-supported collaborative learning is increasing the willingness of those involved to share their knowledge with other group members. As a prototypical situation of computer-supported information exchange, a shared-database setting was chosen for the current study. This information-exchange situation…

In this article, the authors argue that online learning conversations need to go beyond the common "information exchange" to a deeper level of interaction in order to help learners build situated knowledge that is useful in their local contexts. The article begins by looking at the commonly-used framework of a Community of Practice (CoP) and, in…

Blogs are a hot topic in academia. A search on "blog" in the "Chronicle of Education's" Web site returns nearly two hundred articles, covering such topics as the dangers an impolitic blog can do to an institution's leaders (Read, 2006) or the blogger's career (Tribble, 2005) and the mutual use of blogs by instructors to lambaste students (Lipka,…