A growing trend in post-secondary education is the supplementing of classroom discourse with online discourse. This new discourse is often situated in social networking and course management applications. There are several reasons for the move toward online discourse. Wide availability of new hardware and software has played a role. Even more…

This study examined the dynamics of popularity in adolescent friendship networks across 3 years in middle school. Longitudinal social network modeling was used to identify selection and influence in the similarity of popularity among friends. It was argued that lower status adolescents strive to enhance their status through befriending higher…

This paper investigates the use of new media technologies, in particular wikis, for the compiling and grading of group assessment tasks. Wikis are open web pages that can be viewed and modified by anyone with internet access and are well known for their collaborative nature. Wikis are also transparent, which means that any edit/modification is…

Descriptions of faculty practice that illuminate nuances of how course planning and classroom instruction occur in specific contexts are important to inform pedagogical interventions. The study reported in this article draws on systems-of-practice theory to focus on the dynamic interplay among actors, artifacts, and tasks that constrains…

Given the prevailing spirit of teacher frustration regarding current educational policy, the authors perused frequently visited teacher blogs and discussion boards in the summer of 2009 to determine whether teachers are effectively using them to express professionally informed political dissent regarding educational policy. While many teachers are…

This article presents the findings from the evaluation of the pilot of a new entry qualification for school principals in South Africa. The programme, Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) School Leadership, had networking as a distinctive feature, and this article examines candidates' perceptions and experiences of networking as a leadership…

The study examined the relationships between the usage mode of four kinds of computerized mediated communication (CMC) by students with and without learning disabilities (LD) and perceived social and emotional support. Little is known about how undergraduate students with LD interpret and perceive CMC. We investigated the impact of the use of CMC…

Biology has been revolutionized in recent years by an explosion in the availability of data. Transforming this new wealth of data into meaningful biological insights and clinical breakthroughs requires a complete overhaul both in the questions being asked and the methodologies used to answer them. A major challenge in organizing and understanding…

The 21st century workplace is being shaped by ever-changing technological innovations, shifting demographic patterns, globalization and power shifts, in addition to different economic players such as policymakers, employers, education and training institutions that shape the quality of the future workforce. In today's work environment,…

Organizational learning contributes to organizational performance. One research question that remains inadequately explained is how learning occurs. Can it be explained by using the acquisition or participation perspectives? Or is there a need for some other view? This paper suggests that learning networks form an important learning environment…

In this article, centrality is explored as a measure of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in networked learning. Centrality measure is quite common in performing social network analysis (SNA) and in analysing social cohesion, strength of ties and influence in CMC, and computer-supported collaborative learning research. It argues that measuring…

The author has been encouraging teachers, students, and others to join Twitter and build their personal learning networks (PLNs) ever since she delved into this great social networking site. In this article, she offers a few other tools and tips that can improve the Twitter experience of those who have opened up an account and dabbled a bit but…

This paper links the micro and macro levels of analysis by examining how different aspects of community sentiment are affected by one's personal ties to the community compared with the organizational network structure of the community. Using data collected from residents of six communities in Washington State, network analysis combined with…

In Pacific Rim countries parents of children with developmental disabilities have organized peer support organizations. One form of peer support is Parent to Parent based on one to one connections between two parents. The movements to create and sustain peer support in the U.S., New Zealand, China, and Korea are described. Qualitative evidence…

Purpose: The main aim of this paper is to develop guidelines on the critical issues to consider in research design in an action research (AR) environment for SME network capability development. Design/methodology/approach: The issues in research design for AR studies are developed from the authors' experience in running learning sets but, in…