As classrooms across the U.S. are becoming increasingly more multilingual and multicultural, there is a need for research that provides insight into literacy instruction that builds on students' linguistic knowledge. The qualitative study of a fourth-grade dual-language classroom examined the ways that peer mediation in Spanish and English…

Conflict can shut down communication, the key to social justice advocacy. In this article, the author shares his insights on how some communication strategies can help manage conflict and sustain open conversation with students about contentious issues. Recently, the author participated in an extremely heated discussion session for student affairs…

Adult, professional students in a doctoral-level course used Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, and online discussions to develop answers to six "Big Questions" related to higher education finance and also produced a research paper that used original data or the research literature to improve understanding of a specific topic. At the close of the…

Interactive relationships in online learning communities can influence the process and quality of knowledge building. The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships between network structures and social knowledge building in an asynchronous writing environment through discussion forums in a learning management system. The…

A CMI-based online forum is designed to address the need for a system to manage students' online participation. The proposed system may reduce the time required to manage online participation. The system was evaluated by a total of 64 students enrolled in an academic semester. The evaluation has two objectives. The first was to determine the…

The challenge of providing authentic experiences and interactions for fostering oral proficiency and motivation in foreign languages is an opportunity for innovation in educational technology and instructional design. Although several recent innovations have received the attention of scholars, empirical investigation and validation is often…

This paper discusses findings of a study investigating how students, in four online courses, engaged in inquiry-based learning with and without support from a facilitator. The investigation was conducted by analyzing discussions of the online courses using the community of inquiry model. The results of the study imply that students in online…

The purpose of this study was to understand the role of non-formal education and training in the organizational change process of Civil society organizations (CSOs) in post war Liberia. CSOs are the local foundation for democracy and development in Liberia, and serve a wide range of roles in local communities. For example, in post-war Liberia,…

This study examined community leadership education programs employed in rural communities and organizations of several states to empower both local leaders and residents. In particular, the study investigated the relationships between community leadership education program design and structure (contact hours and content) and six outcome indices of…

Middle grades teachers should create meaningful learning activities involving stimulating literature and interesting composition prompts. This article describes a unit in which eighth graders read short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Using multiple learning and teaching approaches, they expanded their vocabularies, responded artistically to "The…

This study examined the effect of civil servants' Self-Directed Learning Readiness (SDLR) and network literacy on their online learning effectiveness in a web-based training program. Participants were 283 civil servants enrolled in an asynchronous online learning program through an e-learning portal provided by the Regional Civil Service…

In this paper, the authors first discuss the main rationales of situated cognition and its connections with innovation in teacher education. The challenges that might occur in applying situated cognition in teacher education programs, including insufficient opportunities for cognition apprenticeship, limited social interactions, and constraints in…

What specific learning behaviors are important to students and faculty members? Does the campus provide spaces that foster these behaviors? Where are those spaces? Asking these three questions at six colleges and universities reveals notable differences in the ways students and faculty members answer them. Student and faculty member answers also…

Notions of what it is to be knowledgeable and skilled in one's profession have evolved in recent decades. For instance, medical practitioners are expected to think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, and to be a professional and community leader. While these attributes have always been well regarded, it is only relatively recently…

This study explored the use of the Web-based virtual environment, Adobe Connect Pro, in a postgraduate online teacher education programme at the University of Waikato. It applied the tenets of Moore's Theory of Transactional Distance (Moore, 1997) in examining the efficacy of using the virtual classroom to promote quality dialogue and explored how…