National Heritage Areas (NHAs) are an alternative and increasingly popular form of protected area management in the United States. NHAs seek to integrate environmental objectives with community and economic objectives at regional or landscape scales. NHA designations have increased rapidly in the last 20 years, generating a substantial need for…

Presence describes the ways in which human beings interact with each other. This qualitative study sought to understand the techniques experienced online teachers learned in order to be "present" with their students. Data were gathered primarily through interviews and syllabus reviews. The findings included techniques the teachers used…

The present study analyses the use of Twitter in the course Social Media and Digital Learning, taught as part of a master's programme at Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (Spain). The main purpose of the use of this resource was to develop a learning community. This was implemented through the micro design of activities. A mixed…

Preliminary efforts to examine teachers' online participation and depth of messages have tended to focus solely on message metrics (e.g., counting the number of messages). However, such efforts do not address online messages in relation to one another. Taking relations of messages into account is important as the messages are not individual online…

Objective: To evaluate the partnership structure of the "Network for a Healthy California" ("Network"), a social marketing program, from 2001-2007, to determine if California's program was able to establish and maintain partnerships that (1) provided access to a local audience, (2) facilitated regional collaboration, (3)…

What are the relational dimensions of politics? Does the way that people and organizations are connected to each other matter? Are our opinions affected by the people with whom we talk? Are legislators affected by lobbyists? Is the capacity of social movements to mobilize affected by the structure of societal networks? Powerful evidence in the…

There is a pressing need for an evaluation rubric that examines all aspects of educational apps designed for instructional purposes. In past decades, many rubrics have been developed for evaluating educational computer-based programs; however, rubrics designed for evaluating the instructional implications of educational apps are scarce. When an…

Family day-care (FDC) educators work autonomously to provide care and education for children of mixed ages, backgrounds and abilities. To meet the demands and opportunities of their work and regulatory requirements, educators need access to context-relevant and high quality information. No previous research has examined how and where these workers…

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of mobile instant messaging on collaborative learning processes and outcomes. The collaborative processes were measured in terms of different types of interactions. We measured the outcomes of the collaborations through both the students' taskwork and their teamwork. The collaborative…

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…