This paper reports on the students' experiments of using blogs to encourage themselves to do pre-class reading assignment and reflections after class. The sample in the study included five ESL (English as a Second Language) graduate students in a course of teaching methods, and 90 software engineering students in an undergraduate information…

Knowledge Building is approached in this study from an organizational perspective, with a focus on the nature of school-university-government partnerships to support research-based educational innovation. The paper starts with an overview of what is known about effective partnerships and elaborates a conceptual framework for Knowledge Building…

Web 2.0 communication tools have considerable promise for supporting collaborative learning. But there is a need for research examining learners' and teachers' experiences of the newer communication tools, such as wikis, in comparison with well-established tools, such as discussion forums. This paper reports on an initiative where distance…

As global digital communication continues to flourish, the Children's Web pages become more critical for children to realize not only the surface but also breadth and deeper meanings in presenting these milieus. These pages not only are very diverse and complex but also enable intense communication across social, cultural and political…

In this age of high accountability, teacher quality is receiving more attention than ever before. Research that investigates ways to increase teacher quality is much needed, making this study a timely addition to the literature. Although increases in student achievement related to teacher quality have yet to be adequately documented, the research…

Explains how the Web can be modeled as a mathematical graph and analyzes the graph structures of three national university publicly indexable Web sites from Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Topics include commercial search engines and academic Web link research; method-analysis environment and data sets; and power laws. (LRW)

These two articles discuss the design and production of pop-up books, focusing on the work of Robert Sabuda. Discusses books as an art form, producing prototypes, factory production, pop-up projects for children, Web sites, and a history of pop-ups, and includes a bibliography of relevant materials. (LRW)

Considers the need to make Web sites accessible to foreign users, by localizing it for another country or globalizing it for users from many countries or cultures. Discusses online images; customer support issues; language translation, including quality control; and using Global English, which avoids jargon, includes useful headings, and proper…

Discusses search engines and describes a prototype system that provides dynamic ranking of search engine results for geospatial queries based on the URL of the host site. Evaluates this approach using user queries and random Web pages, making a contribution to Web retrieval by providing an alternative ranking order for search engine results.…

Reports on a study that compared counts of links to the Web home pages of academic journals with the citation based Journal Impact Factor (JIF) for two disciplines: library and information science, and law. Highlights include compiling the lists of journals (which are appended); locating Web pages; and correlations between JIF and link counts.…

Highlights the role that instruction librarians need to play in assessing and creating usable Web sites, based on experiences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Discusses the importance of needs assessment to determine instructional issues and outlines the Web site redesign process currently underway at UNC, including…

Library media specialists need tools to help them manage the school library media program. The Internet includes a vast array of tools that a library media specialist might find useful. The websites and electronic resources included in this article are only a representative sample and future columns may explore additional tools. All the tools are…

School library media centers should be warm and inviting places where the environment entices children to read and explore. Creative bulletin board and case displays along with other exhibits help to make the library media center an exciting place. Bulletin board displays that promote authors, books, and exciting ideas motivate children to find…

This article presents a brief review of some new school science reference works. Two of the sources are traditional, while one is considered experimental. The two traditional reference works reviewed are "The American Heritage Children's Science Dictionary" for upper elementary grades, and "The American Heritage Student Science Dictionary" for…

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, disease is "a pathological condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms" (2000). Students in upper elementary school and in middle school…