This document is a compilation of 14 papers from presentations and posters of the Second Life Education Workshop at the Second Life Community Convention, presented at the Fort Mason Centre in San Francisco, California in August 2006. Following a foreword (John Bransford and Drue Gawel); preface (John Lester); and word from the chairs (Daniel…

"The Achiever" is a monthly newsletter designed expressly for parents and community leaders. Each issue contains news and information about school improvement in the United States. Highlights of this issue include: (1) Proposed Budget Invests More Into NCLB, Neediest Students; (2) Making History: L.A. County School With Disadvantaged…

In many places across the country, public school students no longer automatically attend their neighborhood school. Instead, parents may decide that their child's needs are better met elsewhere, for example, at a small alternative school, an arts magnet school, a charter technology high school, or a media academy operating within a larger school.…

This guide is based on a model developed from experience with hundreds of online courses. The authors are members of The Concord Consortium, a nonprofit educational technology lab dedicated to improving teaching practices through the appropriate integrated use of technology in the classroom. Based on their experience, the authors offer the Concord…

This study compares the learning styles of community college students who have enrolled in an online course via the Internet with the learning styles of comparable community college students who are taking the same course on-campus in the community college setting. The students taking the online course were off-campus students. A sample consisting…

In many organizations, collaborating with peers, sharing resources, and codifying know-how are not typical facets of work activity. For such organizations, knowledge management support must help people identify and orient to opportunities for collaboration and sharing, articulate values and best practices, and assimilate sharing knowledge as an…

The "Les Chansons de la francophonie" web site is based on French songs and was developed using HTML and JavaScript for the advanced French Comprehension Course at the Second Language Institute of the University of Ottawa. These interactive listening activities include true-false and multiple-choice questions, fill in the blanks,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe educational MOOs--MUD, object-oriented (text-based, network-accessible virtual environments) and explore how teaching and learning in such a context impacts on students' inhibitions. Design/methodology/approach: Students enrolled in a course on the psychology of cyberspace interacted for 12 weeks…

This paper summarizes the activities of the Darmstadt University Department of Computer Integrated Design (Germany) related to: (1) distributed lectures (i.e., lectures distributed online through computer networks), including equipment used and ensuring sound and video quality; (2) lectures on demand, including providing access through the World…

At the University of Birmingham, Information Services, together with the Staff Development Unit and the Learning Development Unit have been working together to set up a number of initiatives to support staff to use WebCT to underpin its learning and teaching strategy within a flexible framework. The framework seeks to invest in developing…

For the twenty-eighth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the National AECT Convention in Orlando, Florida. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

This collection of essays, which is separated into 4 sections, concerns open and distance learning at school level, or grades K-12. The first section, "The Knowledge Society," includes the following chapters: "Classroom Open Learning: A Case of Old Wine in New Bottles?" (Jenkins); "Living and Learning in the Information…

Teaching and learning online is one of several risky practices in higher education today that threaten to disfigure academics' work and identity. For many academics, accustomed to the tempo and practices of face-to-face teaching, it threatens disorientation. In this article the author examines the teaching beliefs of a computer science lecturer,…

Virtual environments are more and more used in primary schools. One of the most interesting potentialities of these environments is to foster cross-national applications. Yet, this specific feature is not fully exploited. This paper presents a successful virtual learning environment for primary education involving two European countries and…

This paper presents a review of recent research that examines the relative instructional utility of text-based synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC). As a mechanism for limiting the number of studies reviewed as well as controlling for emergent technologies, only research published since 2000 was reviewed. The goal was…