The experiences of students in an online learning community were explored in this qualitative case study using social presence theory as an interpretive lens. Participants included five undergraduate students in a certificate program at a large Midwestern university. Students who felt a sense of community online most highly valued the friendship…

This case study investigated educators as they learned about, embraced, and attempted to implement information technologies. It describes the systems that foster continuing use and the implementation successes and difficulties. This was accomplished by documenting one group of educators enrolled in an intensive graduate course about educational…

Vocational educators are using the Internet in various ways. The director and associate professor of vocational-technical education at Dakota State University uses the Internet primarily for electronic mail. Students in a secondary vocational teacher's international trade and marketing class have participated in real-time conferences with schools…

Not only do computers offer rich motivational appeal with students, but they also boost speech communication professors' credibility. Research indicates that the use of multimedia leads to enhanced learning on criteria such as acquisition of content, development of skills, efficiency, learning, and satisfaction with instruction. Multimedia…

This paper describes practical issues involved in using LISTSERVs as a means of enhancing graduate-student education. During the spring semester of 1995, two classes in the Educational Administration and Educational Technology Departments of the College of Education, Kansas State University, utilized LISTSERVs as a means to continue class…

NEAT (iNtegrated Environment for Authoring in ToolBook) provides templates and various facilities for the rapid prototyping of computer-based presentations, a capability that is lacking in current authoring systems. NEAT is a specialized authoring system that can be used by authors who have a limited knowledge of computer systems and no…

A study analyzed postings over a week-long period to two electronic discussion lists to position them as communication forms and to assess their potential value to journalism educators, students and researchers. The lists--"Journet" and "Stumedia"-- were examined using both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Results indicated that the…

In June 1995, New York's Genesee Community College hosted "The Written Text and Human Dialogue," a 4-week faculty development seminar for 30 professors in the humanities and technical disciplines across the United States. The seminar sought to explore the history of human communication and writing, to expand participants' knowledge of writing…

This study examined what high-end users (those who use e-mail many times during the day) do with e-mail and how they feel about it. The sample consisted of 12 students and faculty in the Instructional Systems Technology (IST) department at Indiana University. Participants were divided into three groups: faculty, non-first year students, and first…

Silverplatter's Electronic Reference Library (ERL) provides wide area network access to its databases using TCP/IP communications and client-server architecture. ERL has two main components: The ERL clients (retrieval interface) and the ERL server (search engines). ERL clients provide patrons with seamless access to multiple databases on multiple…

A study investigated the effects of inserting questions in a computer-mediated text that required readers to review relevant portions of the text when a question was answered incorrectly. Undergraduate students (n=36) served as their own controls while reading a scientific text under 3 treatment conditions that varied as to the consequences of an…

For the past three years, a bulletin board system (BBS) has provided messaging and computer conferencing facilities for the students and staff of the Graduate Diploma in Information and Communication Technology Education course at the University of Melbourne (Australia). In order to more accurately assess how these students coped with the use of a…

This paper describes a computer conferencing experiment carried out at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland. The conference provided the students an interactive learning environment appropriate for practicing argumentation and developing their argumentation skills. Participants were 31 undergraduate students. Two tutors, who were top students in…

Just as a classroom where teacher and students are physically present develops into a community over the course of a semester, classes taught via the Internet become virtual learning communities, communities unbounded by physical space. This paper describes a course on information design that was implemented entirely via the Internet, including…

This paper draws on research that was conducted in a computer-mediated basic writing class taught during the Fall of 1994--the study focused on how computer mediated communication influences students' discourse strategies. The paper discusses how the act of "writing up" a research report constructed the subjectivity of the researcher and…