Supporting undergraduate students with their academic literacies has recently been a major focus in higher education in the UK. This paper explores the value of tutor mediation in the context of academic writing development among undergraduate business studies students in open and distance learning, following the dynamic assessment (DA) approach…

Teaching communication policy to young college students can be a challenge. Students often consider law and policy as difficult, abstract, or even unrelated to their lives. Yet experienced teachers note that students--especially those who are first exposed to regulatory concepts--benefit when they actively participate, engage, and deliberate for…

This newsletter is published four times a year. It offers articles on school improvement, organizational planning, training, and managing change. This issue contains: (1) Link Up & Learn: Use Technology to Create a Personal Learning Network to Connect with Experts and Mentors Everywhere (Valerie von Frank); (2) NSDC Tool: Get Connected with…

Virtual Research Environments (VRE) are electronic meeting places for interaction among scientists created by combining software tools and computer networking. Virtual teams are enjoying increased importance in the conduct of scientific research because of the rising cost of traditional scientific scholarly communication, the growing importance of…

This research offers a model of online impression formation that explains how different impression-bearing cues may carry more or less informational value. This research considers the possibility that impression-bearing cues have greater informational value when those cues are distinctive and are task-relevant. This research refers to such cues as…

When product pipeline first covered Twitter back in July 2007, the tool was so novel that only a very few libraries and librarians were experimenting with it. Now, over two years later, Twitter has gone mainstream, thanks to promotion by high-profile stars. From its early beginnings as a microblogging application, Twitter morphed into a…

This study investigated what Christian schools were doing with peer-mentoring programs. A total of 344 secondary schools accredited by the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) received a 19-question electronic survey that focused on the specifics of their peer-mentoring programs. A total of 80 schools responded, with 55% reporting…

In this paper, the authors provide a brief description of written (letter) assignments that use student pairs in a virtual Blackboard-based discussion board. The authors begin their discourse with the purposes for employing this teaching and learning method: (1) To allow students to function in a team structure; (2) To provide written knowledge…

Electronic writing offers the opportunity to be creative, impromptu, personal, even improper--unstructured, in other words--while academic writing traps them, catches them up in, an impersonal, uncreative, unimaginative, structured, mechanical--and perhaps even ultimately noncommunicative--experience.

This dissertation is a study of scientific collaboration at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a modern, multi-disciplinary, distributed laboratory involved in sensor network research. By use of survey research and network analysis, this dissertation examines the collaborative ecology of CENS in terms of three networks of…

Widespread and continuous spatial and temporal environmental data is essential for effective environmental monitoring, sustainable natural resource management, and ecologically responsible decisions. Our environmental monitoring, data management and reporting enterprise is not matched to current problems, concerns, and decision-making needs.…

In the decade following Columbine High School, educators, communities, and even state legislatures have acknowledged that we can no longer treat bullying as a natural rite of passage. There are strong legal implications for administrators and teachers who ignore bullying behavior. While many districts have increased awareness and ramped up…

This presentation introduced Skype and how it can be used to: (1) connect teachers with other professionals - and save on long distance charges - even internationally (2) empower language teachers and tutors (3) give presentations and workshops (4) be a stepping stone to using more sophisticated technology in the classroom. It was noted that for…

The use of social and technological intermediaries to seek intimate partners has a long history. Yet the affordances and limitations of modern computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems built for this purpose--specifically, online dating sites--present new challenges and opportunities for those who use them to initiate intimate relationships.…

The proliferation of web-based communication tools like email clients vis-a-vis Yahoo mail, Gmail, and Hotmail have led to new innovations in web-based communication. Email users benefit greatly from this technology, but lack of security of these tools can put users at risk of loss of privacy, including identity theft, corporate espionage, and…