This paper discusses writing as a social practice and speculates on how wikis might be used to promote higher quality academic writing and support collaborative learning. This study of undergraduate teacher trainees' online learning activities focuses on how shared spaces--wikis--might be used to communicate ideas and generate course-specific…

School students' immersion in a rich entertainment media environment has implications for classroom listening. Increasing interaction among media, design, games, communications and arts fields has led to a growing trend in the creative alignment of music and moving image. Video sharing sites such as YouTube are assisting in the proliferation and…

Stephen Downes reviews Facebook, one of the most widely popular of social networking sites that has emerged in recent years. In his review, Downes notes that Facebook is distinctive because its stronger roots in the academic community, and he proposes that the site's varied and distinctive functions allow it to provide a very different model of…

While college educators have long recognized the intensely social quality of campus life, many faculty and administrators have watched student culture become even more social in recent years as various interactive technologies, including online social networks, have emerged. Starting before students arrive on campus and continuing into their days…

There is general recognition that increased demand for information about programme quality has accompanied the nearly universal massification of higher education, the consequential pressures on public expenditure, and the associated requirements of greater accountability. The UK government has sought to respond to this demand by establishing an…

Early care and education center directors have a whole host of reasons for printing comprehensive and informative parent handbooks. The parents of the children who attend early care and education centers have their own set of expectations and needs for information contained in parent handbooks. When these sets of needs and expectations collide, it…

Little is known about the organization, characteristics or services offered by academic interdisciplinary gerontology centers located in higher education institutions. This article presents a description and an emerging typology of academic interdisciplinary gerontology centers based on information collected from the Websites of 47 centers. The…

Evidence conflicts as to whether students of social work hold positive attitudes toward the importance and usefulness of social work research. For this study, WebCT[TM] sites were developed to supplement a graduate course on research methods. Students were surveyed to measure the extent to which their attitudes toward research changed over the…

The author has been using critical evaluation techniques since 1995 when she was choosing sites to add to her then-new portal, Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators. She then created Web site critical evaluation tools for teachers and students to use to determine the authority of the author and the validity of the information. As social…

Just as many people log onto a Web mail site (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) to read, write and store their email, there are Web sites out there with word processing, database, and a myriad of other software applications that are not downloadable but used on the site through a Web browser. The user does not have to download the applications to a…

This article describes a small-scale research project undertaken as part of the coursework in a Doctor of Education programme. The project investigated the organisational images or identities portrayed by ten secondary schools in Auckland, New Zealand on their school websites. The recent proliferation of school websites has provided schools with a…

Web-based productivity tools help people collaborate, communicate, and save time--and the good news is most are free. This article presents five good strategies for using web-based productivity tools: (1) Clean out your inbox and focus your professional development with RSS; (2) Share your documents online with wikis or online productivity…

The authors, both of whom are working at the Musselman library, relate how they are always looking for ways to improve and update their reference service. When they introduced a chat reference service to their online library services, they received only four inquiries in the entire year 2002-2003. The authors found out later that the paltry number…

The Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University Technology Malaysia is currently moving towards a Problem-Based Laboratory implementation rather than the conventional instructional-based laboratory for final year students. The laboratory has commenced session with about 500 students' registration in the 2007/08/1. The Problem-Based Laboratory…

This paper traces the development of the BBC Learning English [http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/] online community, focusing on tools such as e-mail discussion lists, message boards, comments boards, student/teacher blogs, competitions, and voting. It describes how relationships between the intermediate level users of all…