Purpose: This paper aims to contribute to the knowledge base on leading and facilitating the growth of school improvement networks by describing the activities and challenges faced by network leaders. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 19 co-leaders from 12 networks were interviewed using a semi-structured schedule about the growth of their…

This paper reports a 5-year design experiment on cumulative knowledge building as part of an international project. Through a longitudinal study and analysis of cumulative research data, we sought to answer the question, "what happened and why in knowledge building?" Research data constitute messages which participants have written into a shared…

In this study, the aim was to examine how small-group collaboration is shaped by individuals interacting in a virtual multiplayer game. The data were collected from a design experiment in which six randomly divided groups of four university students played a voice-enhanced game lasting about 1 h. The "eScape" game was a social action adventure…

In the knowledge society, the appearance and development of new networked working and learning environments is increasingly common. In the "Accelera" project, which is the basis for this paper, we have developed an online community of practice which enables experiences and knowledge to be shared between various educational agents, and…

This study accepted the theoretical framework of Friedkin and Thomas (1997), who proposed that tracking systems in large comprehensive high schools are emergent. The study replicates a network analysis methodology used by Heck, Price, and Thomas (2004) to understand the way tracking emerged in one high school in Hawaii. However, this study…

If six degrees of separation is all that is needed for anyone to find anyone else, and if three clicks can find almost anything on the World Wide Web, perhaps analyzing how social networks form and connect people to each other offers a useful way to reconsider how the rehabilitation profession pursues job placement and employer development. Social…

Twitter provides rapid information in a short form, and it is extremely easy to follow the updates of others because of myriad software applications with which it works on both mobile devices and traditional computing hardware. Currently, most academic librarians are using Twitter primarily as a tool at library conferences and seminars to capture…

Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic research in three New York City small high schools, this study examines the role of the school in managing school choice and asks what social processes are associated with principals' disparate approaches. Although district policy did not allow principals to select students based on their performance,…

The trend to adopt more online technologies continues unabated in the higher education sector. This paper elaborates the means by which such technologies can be employed for pedagogical purposes beyond simply providing virtual spaces for bringing learners together. It shows how data about student "movement" within and across a learning community…

Along with the increase and demographic shift of contemporary immigrant populations, there has been a reemergence of research and debate on immigrant adaptation and assimilation theories. Under what contexts newly arriving immigrants actually adopt or resist assimilation as a means of achieving social mobility is one of the more important…

The proliferation of policy think tanks and more broadly the rise of "policy networks" can be viewed as indicative of important global transformations in the nature of the state. That is, the emergence of new state modalities, with a shift away from government towards forms of polycentric governance, where policy is produced through…

Twitter. Facebook. These names stir up feelings, opinions, and experiences in just about everyone. As these services rise in popularity, libraries have begun to use them to reach out to patrons. Some libraries use Twitter but not Facebook. Some use Facebook but not Twitter. Some use both Facebook and Twitter, while others use neither. Yes, the…

This article reports on the investigation of collaborative learning processes in an online course that examined students' communication during whole-group discussions and small-group activities. Content analysis and social network analysis methods were employed to code and categorize text messages to uncover students' communication behaviour. The…

Journal impact ratings are often used by authors, promotion/hiring committees, and grant review teams as a proxy for scholarship quality. Journal citation data (2002-2005) from Social Sciences Citation Index were used to rank journals in the field of communication. A journal relatedness algorithm was applied to ascertain the 19 semantically…

This study reveals how the social networks of immigrant workers play a key role in mediating critical learning towards a particular political attitude. Theoretical relationships between critical learning and political attitudes were set up and four types of political attitudes were identified. A "resistant political attitude" was conceptually…