Peer mentoring is one of the most important guidance practices for first-year students entering higher education and academic life. We are interested in mentors' roles and apply the ideas of group counseling in order to increase the understanding of peer mentoring. Other aspects of guidance--content, methods, and collaboration--are approached on…

Employers want students who are able to work effectively as members of a team, and expect universities to develop this ability in their graduates. This paper proposes a framework for a collaborative writing assignment that specifically develops students' ability to work in teams. The framework has been tested using two iterations of an action…

The aim of this study is to investigate learners' transforming participation as they enter and engage in a learning community. To do this, we investigated the micro-development of two students' learning and collaborative practices in the context of a unique learning community that was fostered within a graduate level course.…

This paper presents findings from research that investigated students and academic staff working in partnership to co-create curricula. Using case study methodology, the study investigated three examples within higher education in the UK, Ireland and the USA, where academic staff and students co-designed curricula. Findings focus on the approach…

This article explores the effect of web-based journaling on changes in group cohesion within experiential growth groups. Master's students were divided into 2 groups. Both used a web-based platform to journal after each session; however, only 1 of the groups was able to read each other's journals. Quantitative data collected before and…

Learning as part of a group on the mat is a common experience in children's early education and socialisation. Indeed, many classrooms would have a mat, to which the children are called in addition to chairs and tables (Poveda, 2001). Nonetheless, very little research exists about activity using the mat in junior classrooms either locally or…

In winter 2011, I traveled to 12 communities located throughout the state of Idaho to moderate focus groups with teachers, parents of kindergarten-to-12th-grade (K-12) students, and community members with no children in K-12 education. The focus groups were conducted the first year of a 5-year study using multiple methods to explore the cultural…

In this essay, we conceptualize first-year learning communities as worldviews that, during the first year and residually in subsequent years, allow students to recognize and engage difference and acknowledge and articulate their biases. Students who take part in a learning community have an opportunity to develop the biases and presuppositions of…

This paper provides a concept and a notation for optimizing the design of social processes in gaming and learning for individuals, groups of individuals and society as a whole. Traditional approaches to the mapping and designing of the emerging social dynamics in a joyful, social education setting have fallen short of producing desirable results…

Implementing a library advisory committee (LAC) is one of those fundamentals taught in the Master of Library Science program: gather shareholders, create consensus, and build a community. But the day-to-day reality of K-12 schools often is not conducive to vision building, and if there is no administrator support for such a committee, faculty and…

Course instructors across a wide range of disciplines have implemented computer-based learning resources such as online discussion boards. While the benefits of implementing an online discussion board in teaching have been well-documented, investigation into the social aspects of online learning environments is still needed in order to develop a…

Cognition in work teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of shared cognition with a focus on the similarity of static knowledge structures across individual team members. Inspired by the current zeitgeist in cognitive science, as well as by empirical data and pragmatic concerns, we offer an alternative theory of team…

The article considers challenges faced in undertaking research work that examines issues of abuse and neglect, with young people acting in the role of co-inquirer. Based on a research process devised to support a qualitative study exploring why young people think they are frequently not believed when they report abuse and neglect, consideration is…

We approach the construct of social presence (SP) from a socio-cultural perspective, taking it as an essential component of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) process. We present a qualitative case study in which sixteen student-teachers carried out a computer supported collaborative writing activity in small groups during six weeks.…

The overwhelming amount of information available today makes it difficult for users to find useful information and as the solution to this information glut problem, recommendation technologies emerged. Among the several streams of related research, one important evolution in technology is to generate recommendations based on users' own social…