This article is an abbreviated version of the BAICE Presidential Address held at the 11th UKFIET International Conference in Oxford on September 16, 2011. It discusses debates on the use of a foreign and ex-colonial language as a language of instruction (LOI) in African schools and argues that the quality of education cannot be seen as an issue…

Online discussion forums have become an essential part of university courses, whether the course is conducted online, or face to face, or in mixed or blended mode. Discussion forums are considered to engage students better with the course content and encourage them to share and gain knowledge from each other. However, online engagement does not…

Advances in technology are having a profound impact on distance education as online learning is becoming a preferred educational option. Within these online learning experiences, the asynchronous online discussion has evolved into one of the most commonly used communication tools. However, a lack of cognitive processing and interaction in the…

In this study, the Design Collaboration Model (DCM) was developed to provide a medium for the on-line collaboration of the design courses. The model was based on the situated and reflective practice characteristics of the design process. The segmentation method was used to analyse the design process observed both in the design diaries and the…

Making annotations on books and learning materials is part of students' everyday life. Although there are many computer-based annotation systems, many people prefer to print digital documents and make annotations on physical paper. We introduce a classification scheme for computer-based annotation systems and provide an overview of different…

Internet connectivity in tertiary institutions in Africa has been summarized in three characteristics-- too little, too expensive and poorly managed (African Tertiary Institutions Connectivity Survey (ATICS), 2006 report). The Internet portal system offers educational organizations the ability to track students needs and promote their programs and…

The article presents Chapter One of my recent the book entitled, "Teaching English as a Foreign Language from a New Literacy Perspective: A Guide for Egyptian EFL Student Teachers." The chapter deals with the new reality of Teaching English as a Foreign in this ICT-dominated age in which the Internet has been playing a vital role in…

Electronic mentoring through asynchronous methods using technologies such as e-mail or the Internet is used in the education industry whereby undergraduate and graduate students can be matched with either university professors or career professionals. However, corporate organizations with mentoring initiatives predominantly use traditional…

Since the 1990s, the rise of some online communities as well as the decline of others has caught the attention of academia as well as of practice. One assumption for the decline of some online communities is the lack of the rich knowledge content that is believed to be the source of competitiveness and sustainability of any online community.…

This study utilized symbolic interaction as a framework to examine the impact of mobility on four veteran elementary general music teachers' identities, roles, and perceptions of role support. Previous research has focused on teacher identity formation among preservice and novice teachers; veteran teachers are less frequently represented in the…

For over two years the National Dropout Prevention Center (NDPC) at Clemson University has been supporting the Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) in NW Alaska with their efforts to reduce high school dropout in 23 remote Yup'ik Eskimo villages. The Rural Alaska Mentoring Project (RAMP) provides school-based E-mentoring services to 164…

School administrators rarely have the opportunity to confer and share their challenges with colleagues. To address this problem in 2005 the Educational Administration Department (EAD) at Central University (a Midwestern PhD granting institution located in a thriving city of about 100,00 people) created a virtual/local doctoral cohort for 14 school…

The aim of this paper is to bring theoretical concepts from other areas of scholarly research to bear on synchronous online education in a cross-disciplinary effort to shed light on what is going on by introducing systems of thought from other areas. The liminality and associated communitas which are found in synchronous online learning…

This article reports on an investigation into whether writing centre (WC) respondents at an institution of Higher Education (HE) encourage or discourage draft dialogue (a conversation in writing) with students submitting drafts electronically to the WC for feedback. The writing respondents insert local feedback responses or comments directly onto…

Social networking sites are those Websites that allow for a variety of social interactions with friends and family. Literally hundreds of social sites exist, but those most frequently used are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Linkedln. These sites are most commonly used by 20-somethings to folks in their mid-40s. In this article, the author…