Not long after its introduction into the consumer market in October of 2001, the first iPods began turning up on college campuses nationwide. Today, there are active iPod academic programs on many campuses around the country. And where there are no formal academic programs--yet--there are countless students making their own use of the iPods in…

The author's conceptualization of an Information Commons (IC) is revisited and elaborated in reaction to Bailey and Tierney's article. The IC's role as testbed for instructional support and knowledge discovery is explored, and progress on pertinent research is reviewed. Prospects for media-rich learning environments relate the IC to the…

Corporations employ data mining to analyze operations, find trends in recorded information, and look for new opportunities. Libraries are no different. Librarians manage large stores of data--about collections and usage, for example--and they also want to analyze this data to serve their users better. Analysts use data mining to query a data…

The digital materials that faculty produce for their classrooms often are saved only to storage devices that might become obsolete in a few years. Without an institutional effort to provide access systems, storage, and services for their digital media, are campuses in danger of creating "Disposable Scholarship"? In this article, the author…

This article outlines how a group of primary school teachers from a cluster of nine schools in a networked learning community enquired into their classroom teaching. The teachers each identified an area of practice that they were developing in their classroom and wanted to evaluate, such as the benefits of pupils working in teams, or the creation…

This study focused on the relationship between mentoring constellations and intrinsic career success. Hierarchical regression analyses on the data of 416 female and 594 male university members showed that mentoring was positively associated with intrinsic career success i.e., career satisfaction and intrinsic job satisfaction. Several…

The Hartlepool Networked Learning Community has focused on promoting teacher enquiry as a vehicle for professional learning and raising standards of achievement in schools. This article highlights how the enquiry programme was designed and managed. It describes the ways that teachers have approached their enquiry work, including how some of the…

Successful models of statewide library consortia are evident in many locations. Academic libraries in independent institutions of higher education in Mississippi must seek alternate affiliations since they do not participate in the MAGNOLIA consortium for public institutions. What does the future hold, especially for database licensing for…

This paper gives an overview of the situation of home education in Germany. The first results from a predominantly qualitative research project are presented. This combines participant observation, content analysis and qualitative interviews for a thorough sociological analysis of the German home education movement. Compulsory school attendance…

Ongoing technical support is often under-funded in district budgets. Most rail far short of the Consortium for School Networking's (CoSN) recommended ratio of one technician for every 50 to 70 computers, or one technician for every 500 computers in a closely managed networked environment. Add to this the fact that teachers' needs for instructional…

Gerontological research has emphasized family members' continued involvement in the lives of loved ones following institutionalization. However, many of these studies are cross-sectional in design and do not ascertain how family members' visits change over time. The present study utilized a growth curve analysis to examine preplacement and…

Social partnership in the sphere of education is characterized by a set of relations among educational institutions, associations of employers, trade unions, and structures of authority on the basis of agreements and contracts for the purpose of further developing the system of education, improving the country's cadre potential, shaping the…

"The network" has achieved a form of "institutionalized utopianism" in the recent past and is posited as a neo-liberal solution to social scientific researchers and education practitioners learning with and from one another. This paper first outlines why the metaphor of the network is so persuasive. It goes on to problematize some of the key…

Doctoral students become so focused on the classroom, exam and dissertation burdens of the moment that they graduate without really being prepared in terms of networking, intellectual development, and publication-ready texts. Hence, certain strategies that have proved reliable indicators are recommended, including starting the dissertation,…

Third grade children (N = 404) and their mothers completed questionnaires and participated in interviews designed to identify children's friendships across multiple contexts, determine levels of social network closure for these friendships, and assess child well-being. Cluster analyses revealed distinct patterns in the contexts in which…