Understanding the merits and demerits of new technology and how it may or may not work within traditional pedagogical methods is important. This study, therefore, examined the effects of traditional versus digital peer-editing to understand how digital peer-editing affects student writing achievement in a rural public middle school environment. It…

Automation can mitigate issues when scaling and managing quality and identity in public discourse on the web. Discourse needs to be curated and filtered. Anonymous speech has to be supported while handling adversaries. Reliance on human curators or analysts does not scale and content can be missed. These scaling and management issues include the…

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned a report called, "Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education", asking educators to, "...test new teaching methods, content deliveries, and innovative pedagogies using technology-based collaborative applications" (p. 6). Fittingly, technology-based collaborative…

The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate if wiki collaboration among Latino high school chemistry students can help reduce the science achievement gap between Latino and White students. The study was a quasi-experimental pre/post control group mixed-methods design. It used three intact sections of a high school chemistry course. The first…

Important to issues of writing instruction are the ways in which teachers, specifically those who teach in the discipline of language arts and English, understand and see themselves as writers. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how secondary English teachers positioned themselves and were positioned by others as writers through…

The need for twenty-first century learning skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and the use of technology are paramount to success in today's classroom. The purpose of this study was to explore what happened when children engaged in collaborative and critical discussions of themes related to social skills and social…

This study investigates the dynamics in the Spanish classroom between heritage language learner (HLL) dyads, second language learner (L2L) dyads, and mixed HLL-L2L dyads. Specifically, it examines oral, written and embodied discourse that informs our understanding of how learners attend to language. Analysis for this dissertation examined…

This dissertation uses theoretical explorations and participant conversations to consider the constitutive possibilities of ethnographic writing that works between students, faculty, and communities and uses those possibilities to describe the philosophy and key elements of an ethnographic composition pedagogy. The project begins with an…

From word processing computers, to mobile telephones, to the advent of the Internet, and finally to online communication venues like Instant Messenger (IM), the past four decades have brought an increasing prevalence of technology into our culture that is altering the English language. While decried by parents and lamented by teachers, these…

This grounded theory study highlights the words of urban career teachers who participated on a wikispace (wiki). The purpose of the investigation was to offer urban career teachers a space, outside of their daily work, in which to recognize and understand their professionalism. The grounded theory content analysis is carried out by way of a study…

The purpose of this study was to explore the codependencies of the social and technical structures that yield Wikipedia the website and Wikipedia the community. In doing so, the research investigated the implications of such a sociotechnical system for the maintenance of the project and the emergence of collective intelligence. Using a theoretical…

Technology and knowledge seem to be at hand for everyone, but evidences show that both still are eluding us. University of Guadalajara (UDG) as well as other Higher Education Institutions creates knowledge from research in a daily basis. Nevertheless, in UDG there is not system that promotes creation, preservation and, sharing of knowledge created…

This dissertation is a study of scientific collaboration at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a modern, multi-disciplinary, distributed laboratory involved in sensor network research. By use of survey research and network analysis, this dissertation examines the collaborative ecology of CENS in terms of three networks of…

The purpose of this study was to develop an instructional theory for using a class wiki to support collaborative learning in higher education. Although wikis have been identified in theory as one of the most powerful emerging technologies to support collaborative learning, challenges have been revealed in a number of studies regarding student…

Wikis have been gaining attention in the academic literature, suggesting their use as knowledge repositories in organizational environments and even as collaborative tools for reviewing scholar publications. And yet, little is known about factors that foster or discourage adoption of this technology. Taking elements from similar artifacts such as…