As computers and the Internet are increasingly employed in language teaching and learning, preparing teachers for the impending reality of online teaching is of paramount importance. This study investigated 10 in-service teachers participating in an online role-play as part of a digital education methods course to acquire an understanding of the…

The paper highlights the main aspects and characteristic features of teacher-teacher Wikis, which are considered to be the most effective teaching and learning tools. The research studies the effectiveness of using Wikis by teachers during collaborative lesson planning. It also traces the impact of teacher-teacher Wikis on the teachers'…

This study explored the effectiveness of a self-access website as a tool to teach expressions of gratitude to learners of Mandarin Chinese. The web-based instruction included explicit instruction on how to express gratitude appropriately in Mandarin and various consciousness-raising exercises/activities. Two groups of learners who differed in…

This study considers how pre-service teachers envision disciplinary literacy through an online social bookmarking project. Thirty secondary pre-service teachers participated in the project through an undergraduate literacy course. Online bookmarks and post-project reflections were collected and analyzed using a constant comparative approach to…

This qualitative study documents three main strategic models used by Russell Group Careers Services to support students' preparation for graduate careers. It is framed against the backdrop of a challenging graduate labour market, discussions of employability in the literature and the policy assumption that universities are responsible for…

Nonscience majors often rely on general internet searches to locate science information. This practice can lead to misconceptions because the returned search information can be unreliable. In this article the authors describe how they used the social media site Twitter to address this problem in a general education course, BSCI 421 Diseases of the…

This paper concerns the impact and reception of gamification elements that were added to the online homework system "WeBWorK." After performing two studies, we found that the students felt that the gamification system rewarded them for their effort. However, we did not find any indication that gamification elements improved student…

This paper examines the possible characteristics and the value of designing learning activities grounded in connectivism--an emerging learning theory. It is an exploratory attempt to connect the theory to the prevailing technology adoption archetypes used in African contexts with the aim of extracting influences that could shape pedagogical…

There has been a growing interest in incorporating social media in education and in language teaching in general. From a pedagogical perspective, as mentioned in Kleanthous (2016), blogs (or weblogs) appear to be effective in enhancing writing and/or reading skills, as their interactive platforms enable learners to exchange comments and offer…

The author started writing a "What I Learned..." column back in 2007. However, in the 2011 edition, he wants want to make a few comments about the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) annual meeting, a couple of the general sessions, and an NCSS initiative that he is proud to support. The author mentions that Secretary Arne Duncan…

Rising cost and declining revenues have hampered the financial affairs of state governments, forcing many to curtail services, reduce employee benefits, and trim the workforce, calling into question the fiscal sustainability of many state governments. As a result, stakeholders are demanding greater accountability and increased transparency into…

How will your library serve mobile device users? By building apps from scratch? By offering entirely separate content? Or by modifying your site for mobile devices? This author found that the best fit for a joint library serving Victoria College and the University of Houston-Victoria was to build a mobile website in HTML and CSS using mobile…

Empirical research has shown that when making choices based on probabilistic options, people behave as if they overestimate small probabilities, underestimate large probabilities, and treat positive and negative outcomes differently. These distortions have been modeled using a nonlinear probability weighting function, which is found in several…

Student retention has become a challenging problem for most of the academic institutions and it becomes more challenging with the increased use of Internet to convey information, deliver instructional materials, and make online instruction modality more interactive in educational environment. Even though the technologies for establishing a new…

By conducting usability testing on a multilanguage Web site, this study analyzed the cultural differences between Taiwanese and American users in the performance of assigned tasks. To provide feasible insight into cross-cultural Web site design, Microsoft Office Online (MOO) that supports both traditional Chinese and English and contains an almost…