These days, many children do not enjoy the freedom to play outside. However, one of the advantages for children growing up now is the new technology that allows them to communicate with people their age, anywhere in the world. The author's company, Illumination Educational Software, decided to take advantage of these advances in technology to get…

This study examined social network centrality (i.e., social salience, peer group linkages) and peer affiliations in 20 rural high schools across the United States. The total sample consisted of 1,672 students in Grades 9 to 12, including 164 students with disabilities (69 females). In comparison to their peers without disabilities, students with…

Despite the funding challenges nearly all school libraries face, many media specialists are optimistic about the role of technology in the school library, according to "School Library Journal's" ("SLJ") 2011 Technology Survey. But in spite of the general optimism, others point to some significant obstacles: technological innovations are often…

This article presents the findings of a case study examining the relationship between social capital and individual participation in collective action on a Caribbean island recovering from devastation inflicted by Hurricanes Ivan and Emily. Using data drawn from 114 residential surveys on the island of Carriacou, Grenada, over the summer of 2006,…

This study examines the role of content professionalism and public outreach, along with partisanship in the availability of online local public information. Comparing county and school board websites in Florida, the author suggests that online public records serve as a proxy for the entity's overall level of transparency. A content analysis of 134…

The need to maintain an unpolluted learning environment is no easy task for schools and districts that have incorporated social networking sites into their educational life. The staff and teachers at Blaine High School in Minnesota's Anoka-Hennepin District 11 had been considering the pros and cons of establishing a school Facebook page when the…

This article addresses an effort to incorporate wireless sensor networks and the emerging tools of the Geoweb into undergraduate teaching and research at a small liberal arts college. The primary goal of the research was to identify the hardware, software, and skill sets needed to deploy a local sensor network, collect data, and transmit that data…

This paper explores how newcomers experience their transition to work as they strive to move from a position of "educational" knowledge to professional knowing. Hence, we focus on how newcomers learn to transform knowledge to knowing at work. We do this through the analysis of two ethnographic case studies: one with a focus on new office workers…

This summer's "make a statement" statement was simple to understand: "I have moved." Facebook friends and colleagues marked their mass exodus from the social networking giant with these words as they left to start a new colony of peers on the newly announced Google+ (Google Plus). G+, as it is abbreviated, offered an appealing alternative from the…

This paper describes a learning experience called EduCamp, which was launched by the Ministry of Education of Colombia in 2007, based on emerging concepts such as e-Learning 2.0, connectivism, and personal learning environments. An EduCamp proposes an unstructured collective learning experience, which intends to make palpable the possibilities of…

Too often, organizations make the mistake of treating malware infections as a series of independent occurrences. Each time a malicious program is discovered, IT simply cleans up or rebuilds the affected host, and then moves on with routine operational tasks. Yet, this approach doesn't allow the institution to keep up with the increasingly…

The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) is a comprehensive survey administered online to the arts alumni of participating institutions. Completion time for the survey is generally 20 to 30 minutes. Founded in 2008, SNAAP is based at the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research of the School of Education and administered in…

School library media specialists are information and communication specialists who lead and model these roles in schools and at their major professional events making use of the relevant new Web 2.0 tools available to them to network, collaborate, and share. Using these tools effectively helps them become leaders in their buildings and districts.…

In Russia, sociologists do not have reliable statistical data as to the number of same-sex unions and the number of children being brought up in these families, and non-Russian studies on the topic are flawed and misleading. Russians are said to be antagonistic to the idea of children being raised in same-sex households. People are concerned over…

When students engage with technology to produce media, impetus and inspiration often come from the work of others. In today's new media environment in which students blur the line between school-based technologies and personal devices and engagement, educators find themselves standing on a railroad track facing a speeding high-tech train. If…