Schools flush with students' parents showing up and helping out have long been the envy of those where classrooms echo on back-to-school night. But in recent years, incidents reported in the news media have dabbed shadows on that glowing picture of parent involvement, raising issues about whether demanding adults have made teachers' jobs harder…

Enrollment managers are awash in a sea of change. With each academic year, they attempt to harness the new recruitment opportunities that arise through a varying array of technologies. Technology allows them to reach more students than ever before, given all the ways that students now choose to communicate. But, some caveats come with choosing…

Cloud computing, one of the latest technology buzzwords, is so hard to explain that Google drove a bus from campus to campus to walk students through the company's vision of it. After students sat through a demo at computers set up nearby, they boarded the bus and got free T-shirts. The bus only stopped at colleges that had already agreed to hand…

Some professors, librarians, and administrators have begun using Twitter, a service that can blast very short notes (up to 140 characters) to select users' cell phones or computer screens. The practice is often called microblogging because people use it to send out pithy updates about their daily lives. No need to wait until you are back at your…

"Maths by Email" (MbE) is a free fortnightly email newsletter produced through a partnership between CSIRO Education and the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI), with funding from the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). The principal aim of MbE has been "to…

This study examined the content of email messages to the listserv "CESNET-L" in order to identify trends, common themes, and "hot topics;" to clarify its purpose; and to offer suggestions for the future of CESNET-L and similar email lists in higher education. CESNET-L is an unmoderated listserv mostly used by counselor educators and doctoral…

Text messaging has gained widespread popularity in higher education as a communication tool and as a means of engaging students in the learning process. In this study we report on the use of text messaging in a large, year-one introductory chemistry module where students were encouraged to send questions and queries to a dedicated text number both…

This research explores what constitutes an educational tool for students in the Sultanate of Oman, using a quantitative questionnaire with face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Students and teachers at Nizwa College of Technology and Salalah College of Technology participated in the study. Educational tools are widely used as part of…

Using situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) as our theoretical framework, we focused on two female graduate students in applied linguistics as each attempted to negotiate memberships in multiple communities during an international exchange program. Eleven students at six universities took part in an…

This paper reports on Stage 1 of a learning and teaching project focused on students studying in the Chinese and English language delivery of transnational Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs of an Australian university. The programs are delivered using limited and intensive face-to-face teaching augmented by self-directed and…

Submitting an article to an English journal for publication requires enclosing an accompanying cover letter. Yet, the phraseology and rhetorical conventions of such letters are not comprehensively documented in literature. This article investigates two English corpora of genuine electronic submission letters to journal editors by Iranian English…

Metadata is information about computer-generated documents that is often inadvertently transmitted to others. The problems associated with metadata have become more acute over time as word processing and other popular programs have become more receptive to the concept of collaboration. As more people become involved in the preparation of…

Recent negative media attention surrounding the use of text speak (shorthand abbreviations of words such as "gr8" for "great") and the potentially detrimental effects of text speak on literacy prompted this study of texting and literacy in 80 college students. Thirty-four text speak users and 46 nontext speak users were assessed on their…

Long gone are the days of parent phone chains. Today, faster communications and instant alerts for any situation can empower school administrators to handle difficult events and put parent concerns at ease with better prepared school safety management. Keeping students safe and families informed in an increasingly uncertain world is a top priority…

This paper attempts to identify the patterns of email use by schoolteachers. The findings are based on a survey of 2998 Singapore teachers whose teaching experiences ranged from 24 to 48 months. The result shows that teachers use email mainly to communicate with colleagues, and the degree of email use varies according to the school level that the…