Second Life is a three-dimensional (3D) electronic environment where members can socialize, hold virtual meetings, or conduct economic transactions. Utilizing virtual environments like Second Life is believed to provide educators with a new medium for teaching and information dissemination that bypasses the normal boundaries associated with…

Information technologies are often depicted as possessing the potential to correct social inequalities by democratising information access and economic opportunity. This view of technology, however, tends to overemphasise virtual spaces to the neglect of the material and social conditions of technological infrastructures. The goal of this article…

The semantic web or Web 3.0 makes information more meaningful to people by making it more understandable to machines. In this article, the author examines the implications of Web 3.0 for education. The author considers three areas of impact: knowledge construction, personal learning network maintenance, and personal educational administration.…

In the past five years, social networking has rocketed from a leisure activity to a "phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit that follows the impact of the internet in differing social environments. In a recent national survey on teenagers and social networking…

Students use the Internet for schoolwork in ways that reach far beyond what schools require or support, and they conceive of information literacy in paradigms different from those of adults. Recent surveys by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Levin and Arafeh 2002) on the role of the Internet in schools suggest that there is a…

The majority of the population of Vietnam lives in rural areas and depends on agriculture for their livelihood. Consistent growth of the agriculture sector over the past two decades has contributed to a remarkable reduction in the poverty rate and the virtual elimination of hunger in the rural areas of Vietnam. In order to continue the growth…

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an…

Virtual environments (VEs) are growing in popularity among educators and have unique potential for online learning. This paper describes the unique characteristics of VEs that make them an effective venue for online learning due to increased environmental presence. Unique characteristics of VEs include nature of visual stimuli, control of the…

Technological innovation undoubtedly offers many potential benefits for education and the assessment of learning, which have been acknowledged elsewhere. One area that is relatively under-researched relates to the practice of how assessors interact with longer texts that are presented on screen. This is an important area of study because there…

As the potency of science and its impact upon society grow, the need for a humanistic perspective on science education becomes ever more urgent. Although there is not a consensus about a humanistic conception of science education, this monograph presents a normative conception of humanistic science education, which places primacy on the notion of…

The global nature of the new information and communication network has been questioned because of the obvious exclusion of developing countries in the development of the contemporary structure. Leaving aside the troublesome term "developing countries", it is still very obvious that the poorer southern countries are in a different…

It is not uncommon today to hear university leaders and students lament higher education's failure to more fully capitalize on its investments in information technology (IT), especially in support of residential instruction. While instructional technology's potential is being realized in isolated pockets of innovation, its impact at the…

The impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the process and products of education is difficult to assess for a number of reasons. In brief, education is a complex system of interrelationships, of checks and balances. This context is not a neutral backdrop on which teaching and learning are played out. Rather, it may help, or…

The technological developments of the late 20th century opened up a whole vista of possibilities, both social and professional, that transformed millions of lives around the world. However, for the Millennial Generation, or people born in or after 1980, it also had a profound effect on shaping how they view and interact with their world: their…

The author begins his classic book with "I want to talk about video games--yes, even violent video games--and say some positive things about them." With this simple but explosive statement, one of America's most well-respected educators looks seriously at the good that can come from playing video games. In this revised edition, new games like…