Scholars have argued that the Internet could bring about the realization of an electronic global village, with no race, gender, infirmities, or the social problems that often accompany these physical indicators of difference. In this study, we explored this issue by conducting content and discourse analyses of online conversations about race and…

Purpose: To illustrate the need for social network metadata within semantic metadata. Design/methodology/approach: Surveys properties of social networks and the semantic web, suggests that social network analysis applies to semantic content, argues that semantic content is more searchable if social network metadata is merged with semantic web…

It is commonly agreed that professional development of teachers in the use of information and communication technologies should be sustained over time. Most professional development, however, is delivered in single or short sequences of face-to-face sessions, paying little heed to this requirement. Once the face-to-face training is completed, a…

Arguments about whether or not the Internet is creating new people or simply helping us to see ourselves in new ways are threaded through the literature on digital culture. People make new technology and exploit it for their own purposes and so it is reasonable to suggest that any changes in our social identities are wider in their reach than the…

This investigation compared 267 students with a hearing loss and 178 students with no declared form of disability who were taking courses by distance learning in terms of their scores on an abbreviated version of the Academic Engagement Form. Students with a hearing loss obtained lower scores than students with no disability with regard to…

With gym time getting squeezed out by standardized tests and extracurriculars, schools are beginning to digitize physical education. This alternative method is first being offered by Minneapolis public schools in spring of 2005. In digital physical education, students can perform physical activities like they would in a traditional PE class but…

Computer-mediated communication in individuals with Asperger syndrome, Tourette syndrome and normal controls was explored with a program called Bubble Dialogue (Gray, Creighton, McMahon, & Cunninghamn (1991)) in which the users type text into speech bubbles. Two scenarios, based on Happe (1994) were adapted to investigate understanding of figure…

This commentary discusses 4 issues relevant to interpretation of A. S. Green, E. Rafaeli, N. Bolger, P. E. Shrout, and H. T. Reis's (2006) article: (a) Self-reported compliance in medical settings has generally been substantially higher than verified compliance, suggesting that this is not a rare phenomenon; (b) none of the studies reported in…

The advent of electronic and digital communication as an integral part of academic discourse has profoundly changed the ways in which universities and their faculties pursue teaching and scholarship. Such changes are manifest in the methods by which information is obtained and disseminated, the means of storing and retrieving such information, and…

Achieving active participation has been argued to be an intrinsic part of learning and has become a central issue in debates on online education. This research examines whether an emerging synchronous communication medium, instant messaging (IM), may enable students in participating more actively in a distance learning course. In doing this, it is…

The digital materials that faculty produce for their classrooms often are saved only to storage devices that might become obsolete in a few years. Without an institutional effort to provide access systems, storage, and services for their digital media, are campuses in danger of creating "Disposable Scholarship"? In this article, the author…

Purpose: The increased pressure to incorporate communication technologies into learning environments has intensified the attention given to the role of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in academic settings. However, the issue of how and why these technologies, especially synchronous CMC applications, has been given less attention in…

Reports of teens and pre-teens stalked or abducted by predators who got personal information the students provided on websites like MySpace.com now worry many school officials. These popular websites let students write just about anything about themselves for the world to see. Many don't grasp that not only their friends and classmates are reading…

In this essay, the author describes the difficulties email has introduced to the academic world, from monopolizing faculty's down time to adding a new dimension to interpersonal problems. He discusses the "withdrawal" symptoms he felt when he decided to go without email during a family vacation, and his realization, upon examining the emails sent…

In its most basic form, a blog is simply a Web-based journal in reverse chronological order. It allows the writer to post ideas and thoughts quickly using conversational language for many to read. It allows the writer to link easily to other sites for support as well as for examples. And it provides a repository for such items. Also, both readers…