Computers may not be able to master poetics like Aristotle, but they have become smart enough to know a metaphor when they see one. An online database called The Mind Is a Metaphor, created by Brad Pasanek, an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a searchable bank of phrases, verses, and lines from literature that…

A number of projects over the past decade, in a range of educational contexts, have sought to link forms and patterns of communicative interaction to improvements in knowledge, conceptual understanding and reasoning skills. These initiatives have produced dialog models, methodologies for developing these in ways that lead to the design of…

Presents an evaluation of one postgraduate subject (Information Technology for Teaching and Learning at the University of New South Wales), which is taught entirely online and uses public-domain browsers, e-mail and file transfer, and is integrated with software developed by the authors, WebTeach (c) to facilitate teacher/learner and…

The methodological sensibility that will lead to the consideration of the new forms of cybersociality is advanced. Cybersociality refers to the new expressions of "being together," sharing emotions, and communicating in networked social environments. Social interactions in the wired city of Blacksburg, Virginia are analyzed and three groups of…

This book focuses on what it feels like and what it means to spend substantial portions of one's everyday life in the chat rooms, support groups, and virtual communities of cyberspace. Interviewing heavy users online, and becoming one herself, the author creates and ethnographic site for inquiring into the meanings of life online, a place where…

Discusses uses of technology in distance education and describes a study of college graduate students that illustrated the effects of two different instructional delivery technologies on the nature of interaction in online education systems: one used a synchronous video link-up and one used an asynchronous computer-mediated communication system.…

Computer mediated communication (CMC) tends to erase power structures because such communication somehow undermines or escapes discursive limits. Online discussions seem to promote rhetorical experimentation on the part of the participants. Finding a way to explain disparities between electronic discussion and oral discussion has proven difficult.…