This article examines the significance of place and location at a time when mobile and networked technologies allow students access from a diversity of contexts. The article reports a cultural probe exercise. Over a 24-hour period, undergraduate students received SMS text messages and recorded answers to a fixed set of prompt questions using a…

This article presents results from a longitudinal survey of first-year students' time spent on living and learning technologies at university, their frequency of using specific learning technologies and their competence with these tools. Data were analysed from two similar surveys at the start and at the end of the academic year for students…

Faced with increasingly complex and technologically sophisticated research questions, academics are working with others through collaboration and research teams. To be effective, these research teams need to maximize the factors that contribute to success while minimizing the potentially negative impact of associated challenges. One particular…

Continuing moves towards more flexible approaches to the provision of higher education have been reflected in the increased provision of social work education through distance learning and the related increase in the use of online technologies for social work education. This article reports on the use of a wiki in a final year social work subject.…

Facilitation is a key factor in ensuring the success of class discussions. Traditionally, instructors are the ones who assume the role of facilitators in discussions. Online learning environments open opportunities for students to assume the role of facilitators. In well-designed online learning communities, spontaneous facilitation would likely…

This article explores collaboration between a rural school in upstate New York and an international school in Amman, Jordan. The authors describe how they provided their students with real audiences for their writing, and, over time, built an international community of writers. Classroom walls were blurred as the authors "team-taught"…

Upgraded with new features and components, the learning management system (LMS) has transformed into a platform that allows teachers to answer the challenges of 21st century education. Educators are taking full advantage of the new features that LMS vendors are regularly adding to their platforms. Although the formative years of LMSs trace back…

Drawing upon the cultural risk perspective and writings on risk taking, this paper seeks to develop ideas relating to the effective use of school cyberspace. It is argued that some individuals respond to exaggerated, yet seductive, discourses of online risks by over-blocking, unreasonably restricting students' Internet activity. At the same time,…

The purpose of this article is to examine the communication behaviors of online leaders, or those who influence other members of online communities in triggering message replies, sparking conversation, and diffusing language. It relies on 632,622 messages from 33,450 participants across 16 discussion groups from Google Groups that took place over…

The purpose of this article is to explore how and why younger Internet users of social networking platforms such as MySpace and Facebook maintain connections with those who have died or been killed. This article, therefore, examines the blurring or blending of interpersonal communication and mass communication via the web as what once was very…

As online learning continues to grow each year, so do the number of new media and Web 2.0 technologies faculty have at their disposal, yet the majority of online courses remain heavily text-based. Online learning often mirrors the traditional classroom, with a focus on read and write (and at times discuss)--sometimes with good reason. One of the…

Learning management systems (LMSs) have dominated the teaching and learning landscape in higher education for the past decade, with a recent Delta Initiative report indicating that more than 90 percent of colleges and universities have a standardized, institutional LMS implementation. While the LMS has become central to the business of colleges…

This article reports on a study that explored the use of e-journals to understand through students' personal narratives what factors (gender, living situation, classroom dynamic, social network) may have influenced their learning during the study abroad semester. Pretests on language measures were compared with posttest results, and information…

New or beginning teachers are well received by the education profession, yet for a large portion of new teachers the assessment of how successful their transition into the first year of teaching tends to be overtly negative. Research reports indicate that the often traumatic and difficult nature of new teachers' experiences is not a new phenomenon…

The present study focuses on comparing the impact of role assignment and cross-age peer tutors on students' level of knowledge construction in 15 asynchronous discussion groups of nine students each in a first-year university course (N=135). Content analysis was applied to analyse the level of knowledge construction in students' online postings.…