The rapid developments Social Network Service (SNS) have offered opportunities to re-visit many seminal theoretical assumptions of technology usage within socio-technical environment. Online social network is a rapidly growing field that imposes new questions to the existing IS research paradigm. It is argued that information systems research must…

As budget cuts loom in school districts across the nation, school librarians are expected to show artifacts and share data to cement their credibility as instructional leaders, since according to Zmuda (2007) and many others, the effectiveness of the school library media program must be measured by what students learn as a result of their…

Online learning is in its infancy compared to other types of learning in the history of academe. Because of its limited history, there is much to be discovered about the ontological, axiological, and epistemological aspects of this technology-driven learning environment. While literature is saturated with online student experiences, and the…

Display took a wide variety of forms ranging from students presenting their initial planning and thought processes, to displays of their finished work, and their suggestions for extending the task should they, or others, have time to return to it in the future. A variety of different media were used from traditional posters in many shapes and…

This article explores "Second Life"[TM] (SL) from an educator's perspective. As instructional designers transform instruction from real world to SL, understanding how more traditional forms of teaching and learning transfer to the immersive spaces of virtual life may be critical. This article identifies principles of instruction for virtual worlds…

This study examines students' reactions to the virtual biosciences laboratory developed in Second Life[R] (SL) at the University of East London. Final year undergraduates and masters students studying biotechnology took part in a trial of a virtual Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) experiment in Second Life and evaluated their experience by…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the performance of commercial virtual learning environment (VLE) systems, which helps the decision makers to select the appropriate system for their institutions. Design/methodology/approach: This paper develops an integrated multiple criteria decision making approach, which combines the analytic…

Video games and new communication metaphors are quickly changing today's young people habits. Considering the actual e-learning scenarios, embedded in a fully technological enabled environment it is crucial to take advantage of this kind of capabilities to let learning process gain best results. This paper presents a virtual campus created using…

The UK Government's recent funding cuts in higher education, coupled with the importance of maintaining competitiveness at a global and national level--a competitiveness that has worsened lately due to a gloomy recession--have placed even more pressure on UK academic institutions to adopt innovative curricula and, most importantly, to increasingly…

In public schools today, students who are identified as individuals with gifts and talents are generally confronted with education that is not fitted to their learning needs and self-regulatory potentials (Colangelo, Assouline, & Gross, 2004). The mismatch between needs and services is particularly true of those students who, in addition to…

The instructional design and the corresponding research on student learning of two virtual laboratories that provide an engineering task situated in an industrial context are described. In this problem-based learning environment, data are generated dynamically based on each student team's distinct choices of reactor parameters and measurements.…

The authors report the results of a cross-class project involving sophomore-level students in an Operations Analysis (OA) class with junior-level students in an Operations Management (OM) class. The students formed virtual teams and developed a simulation model of a call center. The OM students provided the management expertise, while the OA…

In the online environment, students and instructors are virtually, but not physically, present in the same environment. In the online environment, technology mediates learning: it mediates communications and information transfer between the student and the instructor, between the student and the content, and among the students. Critics fear that…

The use of virtual environments to support as well as to complement language teaching and learning processes is becoming a recurrent practice and sometimes policy in several educational institutions. This paper reports the results of an inquiry carried out at the language center of a private university in Bogotá. Those results intended to describe…

In this article I report the findings of a descriptive and interpretative qualitative study carried out in a public school in Bogotá, Colombia. The study aimed at analyzing, describing and exploring teenage students' social identity representation as observed in their participation in a learning community on Facebook. Data were collected from…