Recent emphases on prospects for difference-sensitive virtual communities rely implicity or explicity on some optimist accounts of cyberspace and globalization. It is expected that hybridity, diaspora and fluidity, marking new understandings of spatiality and temporality in a globalized postmodern era, will create new forms of belonging that will…

There is growing recognition that the economic climate of the world is shifting towards a knowledge-based economy where knowledge will be cherished as the most prized asset. In this regard, technology can be leveraged as a useful tool in effectually managing the knowledge capital of an organisation. Although several research studies have advanced…

A year ago, my colleague Charles Grisham and I wrote an EDUCAUSE Review article entitled "Why IT Has Not Paid Off As We Hoped (Yet)." In short, we argued that information technology has not yet transformed higher education because the areas of teaching and scholarship, the "heart" of colleges and universities, have remained relatively untouched by…

With increasing frequency, communities are seeing the arrival of a new class of noncommercial broadband providers: community wireless networks (CWNs). Utilizing the same wireless technologies that many colleges and universities have used to create wireless networks on campus, CWNs are creating broadband access for free or at costs well below…

On the one hand, contemporary corporations want people who are geographically, culturally and temporally remote to work together to generate new knowledge and accomplish routine work--they want to generate multi-disciplinary, globally dispersed communities of practice. On the other hand, they need to exert some control over this divergent,…

An understanding of the structure and functions of expressive communication in face-to-face communication and audiovisual media can inform the development of new educational services for human development across cultures in the emerging broadband environment.

Handheld computers give students access to the larger world of information beyond the classroom. Wireless access allows students real time access to all networks resources, including downloading e-books and documents, searching the library media centres catalog and searching databases to which the library has subscribed.

Leadership development and the creation of school networks are two major strands of the government's reform agenda for education. This study examines the use of a senior team leadership programme as a vehicle for supporting school improvement across an Education Action Zone (EAZ). The study shows that senior team effectiveness is a critical…

Starting from the social construction of technology approach and proposing a literature review of the concept of technological frame, the distinction or continuity between contexts inside and around technology is analyzed as constitutive of a thicker frame. A multilayered articulation of the technological frame is proposed. Organizational history,…

Like many parents in the US, teen mothers regularly have professional portraits taken of their children. This article, based on an ethnographic study of a diverse group of teen mothers in urban California, analyzes these baby pictures as representations of childhood, motherhood and family, and as material objects used in the construction of kin…

Whereas great advances have been made in the statistical sophistication of assessments in terms of evidence accumulation and task selection, relatively little statistical work has explored the possibility of applying statistical techniques to data for the purposes of determining appropriate domain understanding and to generate task-level scoring…

We examine the degree to which ethnic diversity in social networks relates to the frequency of interethnic romantic relationships for 318 college students. In a multi-nomial logit, we find that the odds of having an interethnic relationship once or twice, versus never, increase significantly if the respondent has a relatively ethnically diverse…

Despite the tremendous implications that financial decisions have for socioeconomic well-being, the study of financial decision-making has been left largely to economists. This paper places this topic firmly within sociological terrain and demonstrates that the search for financial information is embedded within broader systems of social…

Wireless Local Area Networks are the most widely adopted networking technology to hit the market in the last three years. They have the potential to make network applications and the Internet available anywhere on a campus so that students and faculty are no longer tethered to their offices or shared computer laboratories in order to connect to a…

Suggests that networks of schools help improve school performance, and that one reason some networks are successful is that they promote the creation of sound institutional environments in member schools. Describes three such networks: the Matte Schools of Santiago, Chile; the Fe y Alegria schools in Latin American countries; and the Accelerated…