Mobility can affect a learner's participation in different communities that support language learning. In this paper we report on our experience with supporting a course in which language students are encouraged to travel to a country where the target language is spoken. On the one hand, students who travel abroad get in contact with local…

Knowledge Cartography is the discipline of visually mapping the conceptual structure of ideas, such as the connections between issues, concepts, answers, arguments and evidence. The cognitive process of externalising one's understanding clarifies one's own grasp of the situation, as well as communicating it to others as a network that invites…

It was 1,000 years ago that King Ethelred ordered the building of a large fleet of ships to blockade England from Viking invaders in a last-ditch effort to stop a series of invasions that had plagued England for decades. Although teachers may already have a personal and professional fascination with this and other events surrounding the Viking…

Things are failing everywhere. A few years ago, several large companies disappeared almost overnight in a series of scandals. This year, the mortgage industry imploded. More recently, stalwart financial and insurance corporations have been dropping like flies. Failures happen on a smaller scale too. Recently, the all-caps word "FAIL" became a…

In 2005 and 2006 the National Library of Australia (NLA) carried out two whole-domain web harvests which complement the selective web archiving approach taken by PANDORA. Web harvests of this size pose significant challenges to their use. Despite these challenges, such harvests present fascinating research opportunities. The NLA has provided…

In this article, the author explores how to use "PowerPoint" to support the mathematics itself, not just to "present" but actually to "enhance" learning. For the purposes of this article, she has explored three tools: colour, animation and hyperlinks. (Contains 1 note.)

This article talks about a course at Texas A&M University at College Station that teaches students how to detect spin in political blogs. In the new course, "Communication and Political Blogging," students are analyzing blogs from the far right of the political spectrum all the way to the far left. They are also writing their own…

Many professors have been traumatized by academic bullies. Unlike bullies at school, the academic bully plays a more subtle game. Bullies may spread rumors to undermine a colleague's credibility or shut their target out of social conversations. The more aggressive of the species cuss out co-workers, even threatening to get physical. There is…

A parallel between plagiarism and corporate crime raises eyebrows--and ire-- on campuses, but for John Barrie, the comparison is a perfectly natural one. In the 10 years since he founded iParadigms, which sells the antiplagiarism software Turnitin, he has argued--forcefully, and at times combatively--that academic plagiarism is growing, and that…

This study explores faculty deposits in institutional repositories (IR) within selected disciplines and identifies the diverse navigational paths to IR sites from library Web site homepages. The statistical relationship between the development of an IR and the presence of a Web site dedicated to the reform of traditional scholarly communication is…

This brief describes an evaluation of academic intervention supports available to high school students in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) during the 2012-2013 school year. A website review identified information about academic supports available to students or parents within each high school's web pages. A survey of school staff gathered…

The HTML title tag information should identify and describe exactly what a Web page contains. This paper analyzes the "Title element" and raises a significant question: "Why is the title tag important?" Search engines base search results and page rankings on certain criteria. Among the most important criteria is the presence of the search keywords…

The Web has always been an alluring storehouse of information. When it comes to today's online world, the just-put-it-on-the-Web mentality will not do. Community colleges must understand that the Internet is a vital tool in their marketing arsenal. What does this mean? Essentially, if enrollment is the primary goal, making the most of the college…

Drawing on a study of a photo-sharing website (Flickr.com), this paper explores ways in which everyday life is reconfigured through an online photo-sharing space, where traditional boundaries between the public and private spheres are being extended, challenged or eroded. The paper reflects on the presentation and subjects of the images; the…

This article reports that long-established college associations and a nascent national organization are either building or planning five free, Web-based college-information platforms that may diminish the influence of the "U.S. News and Report's" annual rankings of "America's Best Colleges" and its influence among high school counselors, students,…