In the research literature on interactional competence in talk among second language speakers and their coparticipants, this volume of "Pragmatics & Interaction" is the first to focus on interaction in Japanese. The chapters examine the use and development of interactional practices in a wide range of social settings, from everyday…

Introduction: The inherited hemoglobin disorders constitute a major public health problem. Facilitators (experienced hemoglobin counselors) were trained to deliver knowledge and skills to "frontline" practitioners to enable them to support parents during antenatal screening via a cascade (train-the-trainer) model. Objectives of…

The focus of this study was to examine the leadership role as lived by teaching principals in a selection of small primary schools in the west of Ireland and in particular the implications information and communications technology (ICT) has for that role. The study involved the use of individual one-to-one semi-structured interviews with a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on a study into how a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world (Second Life) can facilitate socialisation and team working among students working on a team project at a distance. This models the situation in many commercial sectors where work is increasingly being conducted across time zones and between…

The aim of this study was to identify social patterns in mobile technology mediated collaboration among distributed members of the professional distance education community. Ten participants worked for 12 weeks designing a master's programme in information sciences. The participants' mobile technology usage activity and interview data were first…

The study that informs this article investigated how online learners' participation in and perception of their sense of learning community contributed to or affected their relationship to their workplace environment and their workplace colleagues. The findings support contentions that, in the workplace, the work itself constitutes the most…

Mobile learning is variously viewed as a fad, a threat, and an answer to the learning needs of time-poor mobile workers, so does it have a place in delivering mainstream learning? Based on a 2005 comparative research project, commissioned by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, the paper reports on research into Web-based information…