Over an 18-month period four New Zealand educational institutions--a university, a private tertiary enterprise, a wananga, and an institute of technology/polytechnic--have engaged in a process of change influenced by technology. Their e-learning capability was benchmarked using the E-Learning Maturity Model, and this information was used to…

"Research Library Issues" ("RLI") is a quarterly report from ARL (Association of Research Libraries), CNI (Coalition of Networked Information), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This issue includes the following articles: (1) Digitization of Special Collections and Archives: Legal and Contractual Issues (Peter B.…

The Northeast United States just experienced one of the region's worst natural disasters. Fortunately, because of the confluence of modern computing power and scientific computing methods, weather forecasting models predicted Sandy's very complicated trajectory and development with a precision that would not have been possible even a decade ago.…

Students and teachers are increasingly embracing tablets and e-book readers in their personal lives, but do these devices have a place on community college campuses? Several institutions are exploring answers to that very question by piloting mobile technologies inside and outside college classrooms. Scottsdale Community College (SCC) in Arizona,…

As a university president who was also the institution's vice president for information technology and CIO for ten years, the author is often asked: "What do you now think about technology? From your point of view as a president, what are the major issues in information technology today? What has changed in your thinking?" So in his…

The magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) often relies on problematic rhetorics that privilege youth-centered ideals and create limited representations of older adults' literacy in digital times. These rhetorics rest on a metaphor of repair, which labels aging adults as primarily bodies in need of fixing or protection. In…

Introduction: Members of the millennial generation (born after 1982) have come of age in a society infused with technology and information. It is unclear how they determine the validity of information gathered, or whether or not validity is even a concern. Previous information search models based on mediated searches with different age groups may…

This study uses survey and focus group methods to explore attitudes toward and experiences of nature among millennial-aged students in northern Colorado. First, results confirm that young people possess a strong interest in the outdoors yet time, transportation, and new technologies hamper their ability to visit public lands and outdoor spaces.…

Although it is pretty easy to find colleagues who will express fatigue or frustration about the constant need for libraries to prove their value proposition, there is also an upside to the exercise of crafting a message that justifies librarians' mission. The catch is that however good their crafted message may be, they must forget about ever…

As the web continues to morph, creating a more interlinked, connected, and hybridized human experience, educators are experiencing a generational shift in terms of comfort with technology. The number of technologies becoming available to students and teachers is dizzying. Within the array of possibility, this research considers three technological…

This article is critical of the implementation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) by institutions seeking the deep student learning often found in general education learning outcomes. Customized student interaction with an expert in the field is rendered impossible by the scale of mooc enrollment. Concerns are also raised about the economic…

This study explores pre-service teachers' past interactions with "place" in outdoor settings and how these experiences contribute to their current perceptions of the importance of taking their own students into the outdoors. Specifically, the researchers were interested in investigating if current pre-service teachers are part of the…

This paper reports a quantitative study on gender differences in attitudes when learning oral skills via technology. The study was conducted at Tafila Technical University, Jordan, with 70 female and 30 male students, to find out if female students are better and faster in learning a language than male. Specifically, it seeks to investigate…

As a field of study, international business (IB) has evolved with accelerated tempo in the last four decades. The subject has brought with it an increasing plethora of textbooks. We analyze the contents of major textbooks, both classic and new, to find the extent to which these textbooks cover the various components of the common body of knowledge…

This conceptual, interdisciplinary inquiry explores Complex Dynamic Systems as the concept relates to the internal and external environmental factors affecting computer assisted language learning (CALL). Based on the results obtained by de Rosnay ["World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution", 67(4/5), 304-315 (2011)], who observed…