English 302: Writing about the Arts is a practicum course offered at the University of Windsor for upper-level English undergraduate students. The course asks students to write about a variety of art forms and requires engagement with multiple genres of writing as a way for students to effectively order their experiences, reconstruct meaning in…

The "International Society for the Social Studies (ISSS) Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. The following papers are included in the 2014 proceedings: (1) Legal Profession in the Technological Era with Special Reference to Women Lawyers in…

The assessment of oral language is now quite commonly done in pairs or groups, and there is a growing body of research which investigates the related issues (e.g. May, 2007). Writing generally tends to be thought of as an individual activity, although a small number of studies have documented the advantages of collaboration in writing in the…

King Saud University (KSU) launched the SharePoint Server in September 2007. A website was created for each faculty and all faculty had to upload their publications, conference presentations and course materials. Since SharePoint is also a Learning Management System (LMS) with tools such as forums, blogs, wikis, a calendar, announcements, RSS…

This study reports on student initiated attention to form within the collaborative construction of a wiki among pre-service Non-Native Speaker (NNS) English teachers. Forty NNS pre-service teachers from a large Mexican university were observed over a period of a sixteen week semester in an online content-based course aimed at improving their…

It is now generally agreed that "output" functions to promote language learning through focus on form. Empirical studies reveal that oral communicative tasks can arouse learners' negotiation of meaning, but they are not so effective in bringing about focus on form. Hence, researchers have suggested using collaborative writing tasks to…

This paper investigates authentic writing through the use of wikis by Year 7 ESL learners in a secondary school in Hong Kong. The wikis were used as a collaborative writing platform to produce--with minimal input and support from their teachers--wiki content that describes the different facilities and features of their school. Over a period of two…

This paper discusses a case study of a small cluster of 10- and 11-year-old multilingual children, all first- or second-generation Canadians living in suburban Toronto, who collaboratively wrote an elaborate adventure book in English as a Grade 5 enrichment activity. We explore the language worlds of these gifted young writers to trace their…

This article contains critical reflections of a multidisciplinary research group studying the human and technological dynamics around some newly offered electronic services in a specific rural area of Finland. For their research, the group adopted ethnography. On facing the challenges of doing ethnographic research in a multidisciplinary setting,…

A regular feature of the Nigerian tertiary education context is large numbers of students crammed into small classrooms or lecture theatres. This context had long begged for the creation of innovative learning spaces and adoption of engaging pedagogies. Recourse to technology support and experimenting with the WIKI as a learning tool at the…

E-learning is a combination of learning services and technology that allow us to provide high value integrated learning any time, any place. It is about a new blend of resources, interactivity, performance support and structured learning activities. This methodology makes use of various types of technologies in order to enhance or transform the…

Outlines a planned panel discussion on ways the Internet facilitates collaborative work in researching, interviewing, and writing; using computer mediated communication systems in a virtual conference; and experiences in building a virtual community of practitioners and researchers in information and communications technology in Latin America and…

Emerging social writing platforms offer possibilities for language learners to collaborate around joint assignments. One such environment is the wiki, generally hosting two prominent modes of usage, web pages and discussion forums. This study investigates software engineering students' use of a wiki as an integrated tool within the frames of a…

This paper introduces intersubjectivity as a concept playing a crucial role in collaborative tasks, even when performed between partners at a distance. Two 5th grade classes from two European countries (Italy and Greece), collaborated in writing fairytales inspired by philosophically relevant issues. The software supporting the task is an…

Describes how groups of authors can create electronic books through unsupervised collaborative work. Proposes a Web-based groupware system that allows building Web sites that can be considered as electronic books without the need of an editor, and describes experiences at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain). (Author/LRW)