This column addresses the importance of acknowledging the knowledge-making practice of Chicana bloggers. The author argues the online practices of Chicanas can be used to determine ways to develop 21st-century literacies of students, especially students of color. The author presents findings from a case study of three Chicana bloggers that reveal…

Asynchronous online discussion forums are increasingly common in blended learning environments but the relationship to student learning outcomes has not been reported for anatomy teaching. Forums were monitored in two multicampus anatomy courses; an introductory first year course and a second year physiotherapy-specific course. The forums are…

The authors' intent was to show the effect of student discussion board activity on academic outcomes, after accounting for past academic performance. Data were collected from 516 students enrolled in a junior-level required business course. Controlling for students' grade point average, stepwise regression showed a significant…

Social media provide a multitude of opportunities for knowledge contribution and sharing. However, the content reliability issue has caused comprehensive attention, especially on credible social media, such as Wikipedia. Despite Wikipedia's success with the open editing model, dissenting voices give rise to unreliable content due to two…

A mixed-methods research study was designed to test whether undergraduate engineering students were better prepared to learn advanced topics in biomedical engineering if they learned physiology via a quantitative, concept-based approach rather than a qualitative, system-based approach. Experiments were conducted with undergraduate engineering…

As online education continues to expand, colleges are demanding faculty to keep up with the pace and add new online classes. Oftentimes, online instructors rush the course creation process by focusing more on the course content than creating a sense of human presence in the virtual online community of learners. It was theorized that by simply…

Location-based services have been identified as a promising communication paradigm in highly mobile and dynamic vehicular networks. However, existing mobile ad hoc networking cannot be directly applied to vehicular networking due to differences in traffic conditions, mobility models and network topologies. On the other hand, hybrid architectures…

The recent trend toward patients participating in their own healthcare has opened up numerous opportunities for computing research. This dissertation focuses on how technology can foster this participation, through user interfaces to effectively communicate personal health status and care progress to hospital patients. I first characterize the…

This dissertation examines the spatio-temporal practices of a distance learning class in a graduate institution in the Northeast United States. Guided by a multispatial and temporal perspective, the case study builds on Hine's (2003) and Leander and McKim's (2003) connective ethnography of offline and online research sites, and frames the research…

There is a severe shortage of rural physicians in America. One reason physicians choose not to practice, or persist in practice, in rural areas is due to a lack of professional community, i.e., community of practice (CoP). Online, "virtual" CoPs, enabled by now common Internet communication technology can help give rural physicians the…

People are increasingly looking to online social communities as ways of communicating. However, even as participation in social networking is increasing, online communities often fail to coalesce. Noted success factors for online communities are linked to the community's purpose and culture. They are also related to structures that allow for…

This study examined the effectiveness of using a Facebook group to increase preservice teachers' knowledge when one was used as a forum to share, answer, and discuss content-related questions in a technology course required for all students seeking teacher licensure. Further, it examined the students' prior use of Facebook groups, how the…

Unlike previous research on computer-mediated discussions that has focused analysis on the final conversation as a completed product, this study was focused on the process by which the conversation was created. Using screen-capturing software, the on-screen actions of the nine participants in an online classroom discussion were recorded and…

The research presented in this dissertation studies and describes how technical standards, protocols, and application programming interfaces (APIs) shape the aesthetic, functional, and affective nature of our most dominant mode of online communication, the World Wide Web (WWW). I examine the politically charged and contentious battle over browser…

The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent the use of e-collaboration tools when used as a primary channel of communication affected virtual team members' trust and motivation, in a spatially dispersed environment. Structured interviews were conducted with 18 project managers, who were responsible for leading virtual projects…