Today Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs, are presenting both teachers and learners with new horizons in the field of language teaching and learning. A blog is an online journal which can be continuously updated by its users (Matheson, 2004). People can write their views at their own pace without space and time constraints. Blogs aid in the…

Success of Wikipedia has opened a number of possibilities for crowd sourcing learning resources. However, not all crowd sourcing initiatives are successful. For developing countries, adoption factors like lack of infrastructure and poor teacher training can have an impact on success of such systems. This paper presents an exploratory study to…

This study explored the impact of using best practices identified in previous studies in designing age-appropriate websites for middle and high school youth. Utilizing a mixed-method approach, 31 middle and 22 high school youth took part in six focus groups across four states. Participants were introduced to a website specifically designed for…

Online video sharing websites have had a profound impact on the ways that students learn about the world, about the culture, and about mathematics. However, we would like to challenge McLuhan's assertion that changing the media has necessarily changed the message. In fact, the authors posit that the majority of online videos are seen as…

Risk has now become a feature of science curricula in many industrialized countries. While risk is conceptualized within a number of different theoretical frameworks, the predominant model used in examination specifications is a utility model in which risk calculations are deemed to be objective through technical expert assessment and where the…

The real potential of ICT is the way it changes learners to become autonomous in their learning process. E-learning also plays a crucial role in today's life and in modern education. Its importance lies in the fact that people are finding that e-learning can make a remarkable change in teaching/ or learning: to how quickly they master a skill; how…

Five years ago in the February, 2007, issue of LLT, I wrote about developments in digital video of potential interest to language teachers. Since then, there have been major changes in options for video capture, editing, and delivery. One of the most significant has been the rise in popularity of video-based storytelling, enabled largely by…

This study examines how blogs and their interactive and collaborative features help academically-advanced graduate students process academic writing knowledge and make sense of their writer identity. Seven graduate students undertaking Master's level study in TESOL and Linguistics participated. The research questions are: (a) What kinds of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore teenagers' and young adults' use of social networking sites (SNS), in light of certain personal, social and educational outcomes and attitudes. Design/methodology/approach: Data were gathered on the basis of surveys, and were analyzed through a series of multivariate models. Findings: It was found…

How do open and distance learning institutions review and renew themselves to ensure their continued fitness for purpose? Here we report on the work of a change team in the UK Open University, a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning created to examine, innovate and improve student support. The existence of the Centre for five years from…

This case study highlights the use of the social bookmarking site "Delicious" on a Level 2 module "Governing the EU." The nature of politics as a discipline is that it is constantly evolving such that new developments and policies emerge almost every day. It is therefore imperative that the students keep on top of these…

This article describes a project that studied 15 preservice teachers' perceptions of and reactions to responding to children's and young adult literature using a Ning blog. These perceptions and reactions provided insight into various practical aspects of using a social networking blog to facilitate literature response in a teacher education…

Studies have found that general use of Facebook influences subjective well-being. However, fewer studies have explored the impact of specific use behaviors, such as information posted in status updates. The current study uses data collected from 251 Facebook-using undergraduate students through an online survey, and examines the valence and…

Current literature provides many examples of rubrics that are used to evaluate the quality of web-quest designs. However, reliability of these rubrics has not yet been researched. This is the first study to fully characterize and assess the reliability of a webquest evaluation rubric. The ZUNAL rubric was created to utilize the strengths of the…

Web-based communication technologies that enable collaboration and sharing of information among users - such as podcasts, wikis, blogs, message boards, and others--are used commonly in contemporary organizations to increase and manage employee learning. In this investigation, we identify which of these collaborative communication technologies are…