Guided by the Boundary Activity based Learning (BABL) principle, mobile technology-supported inquiry learning activities were implemented in a primary four science class in Hong Kong. An exploratory study was conducted to examine the effects of the BABL guided inquiry activities on students' learning performance and to explore how the key element,…

Research on innovative, integrated outreach programs guided three separate week-long outreach camps held across two summers (2018 and 2019). These camps introduced computer science through real-world applications and hands-on activities, each dealing with cybersecurity principles. The camps utilized low-cost hardware and free software to provide a…

Our study is focused on the field-experience of a unique ideological group. The prospective teachers are community activists who are dedicated to meeting the social needs of communities through education, mainly in the periphery and in weakened populations. Their vision is to become "community teachers." We focused on a new mentoring…

Forty-one pre-service elementary teachers (PSETs) enrolled in a science methods course participated in a service-learning project on energy and sustainability. The goal was to help PSETs and elementary students to understand concepts regarding energy, energy saving, and sustainability through an oncampus Family Energy Day event for 65 elementary…

Purpose: Ethiopia operates a large agricultural extension service system. However, access to extension-related knowledge, technologies and agricultural inputs is unequally distributed among smallholder farmers. Social learning is widely practiced by most farmers to cope with this unequal distribution though its practices have hardly been…

Social media have affected daily activities, communication practices, and business practices throughout society. Social media are more frequently embraced in higher education as well. One indication of this growth is the fact that more than half of all teaching faculty use social media at least monthly for professional reasons, with professors in…

This article posits that schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa has so far failed to yield the results expected of it on two grounds. First, the population of persons accessing both basic education and other levels of education is negligible in comparison with those who ought to access them (1 out of every 4 primary school age children; less than half of…

Software developers rely on the abundance of online resources to meet their informal learning needs. Designing systems to effectively support this relies on a sound understanding of the informal learning process. In this paper, we show how the development and implementation of an ontological model can be used to increase understanding of informal…

This paper focusses on peer education and specifically on young women peer educators working within the charity Home-Start in the north of England. This work is undertaken in a social context where educational achievement is increasingly measured by certification and occupational hierarchies have been 'professionalised' whilst notions of…

Background: Informal learning environments increase students' interest in STEM (e.g., Mohr-Schroeder et al. School Sci Math 114: 291-301, 2014) and increase the chances a student will pursue a STEM career (Kitchen et al. Sci Educ 102: 529-547, 2018). The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of an informal STEM summer learning experience…

Music education has faced considerable challenges in trying to bridge the gap between music in young people's lives and that taking place in the classroom. The 'Musical Futures' initiative aimed to devise new and imaginative ways of engaging young people, aged 11-19, in music activities through a process of informal learning based initially on…

The current study explores patterns of informal science experiences among youth in urban and rural middle schools by gender and socioeconomic status. Data come from surveys in two Midwestern middle schools, one in a mid-sized city, and the other in a rural-remote town. We asked about participation in informal science activities (e.g. visiting zoos…

This article reports an ethnographic study of resistance in an informal education context: an NGO Day Centre and Hostel for socially excluded adults in Bilbao, Spain. The purpose of this research is to contribute to the field of resistance theory by focusing on a non-school setting. Our analysis uncovered four resistance strategies ("The…

This chapter highlights opportunities in the digital space for student affairs professionals. A blended approach, grounded in the new technology competency recently added in the ACPA and NASPA student affairs professional competencies, is proposed for student affairs professionals' digital identity development. It includes the awareness of one's…

Recent research into Japanese as a foreign language education has strongly emphasized the link between Japanese popular culture and learning Japanese. However, these studies have only targeted Japanese language learners in formal education contexts and have largely ignored those who are not studying Japanese or studying Japanese informally. This…