Around one table, four 4th-grade girls chat quietly as they write on their laptops: Ruby interviews Alejandra about her experience crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as a 6-year-old. Meanwhile, Cindy turns notes from an interview with her uncle into a narrative about his immigration experience. Next to them, four boys work on the "Sin Fronteras…

It is widely recognized today that a teacher's surrounding professional community inevitably affects the kind of teaching that students are offered. However, until recently, it has been difficult to quantify and systematically study the nature of professional relationships in schools and districts. The articles in this special issue provide a…

Knowing whether Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) could transfer Web 2.0 affordances, which have been focused on the non-educational or recreational sphere, to the institutional sphere is important to move the research agenda beyond "cool uses" and to understand how the learning process is affected when students use this new type of…

The study examines the relationship between social presence and students' learning outcomes. An emerging body of research connects social presence with learning outcomes in online coursework. Social presence is the "degree to which a person is perceived as a 'real person' in mediated communication" (Gunwardena &…

In rural areas, transition planning for young adults with disabilities presents considerable challenges, including linkage to employment upon completion of special education services. Two assessment programs, described in this article, work in concert to assist transition teachers and youth with disabilities in rural areas and include: (a)…

Case studies have documented the impact of family-school-community collaboration in afterschool programs on increasing awareness about the problems of at-risk youth, initiating dialogue among leaders and community representatives, developing rich school-based information systems, and demonstrating how to build strong relationships between public…

Despite the burgeoning rhetoric from political, social and educational commentators regarding creativity and learning and teaching, there is a paucity of scalable and measurable examples of creativity-centric pedagogical practice. This paper makes an argument for the application of social network visualisations to inform and support…

The authors used social network analysis of citation data to study the flow of information and relative influence of 17 professional counseling journals. Although the "Journal of Counseling & Development" ranked very highly in all measures of journal influence, several division journals emerged as key players in the flow of information within the…

In considering two extended examples of educational reform efforts, this discussion traces relations that become visible through analytic approaches associated with actor-network theory (ANT). The strategy here is to present multiple readings of the two examples. The first reading adopts an ANT approach to follow ways that all actors--human and…

This article argues the importance of including significant technologies-in-use as key qualitative research participants when studying today's digitally enhanced learning environments. We gather a set of eight heuristics to assist qualitative researchers in "interviewing" technologies-in-use (or other relevant objects), drawing on concrete…

Interactive relationships in online learning communities can influence the process and quality of knowledge building. The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships between network structures and social knowledge building in an asynchronous writing environment through discussion forums in a learning management system. The…

Prior research shows that school leadership matters when it comes to instructional improvement. However, the common conceptualization of school leadership is typically associated with principals. Studies show that a large number of the nation's principals are predicted to retire or leave the profession. A potential shortage of quality school…

Despite the swift spread of social network concepts and their applications and the rising use of network analysis in social science, there is no book that provides a thorough general introduction for the serious reader. "Understanding Social Networks" fills that gap by explaining the big ideas that underlie the social network phenomenon.…

The twenty first century student demands more from universities in terms of engagement that is flexible, accessible and immediate. This means universities revisiting their engagement agenda at a time when financial constraints can least afford expensive technologies and resource dependent engagement solutions. Solutions are likely to be varied…

A teacher network was formed at an Australian university in order to better promote interdisciplinary student learning on the complex social-environmental problem of climate change. Rather than leaving it to students to piece together disciplinary responses, eight teaching academics collaborated on the task of exposing students to different types…