For parents living with children diagnosed with autism, advocating for their child presents a new reality in parenthood, often unexpected and with more questions than answers. Once they have passed the various stages of denial and sadness, questioned the experts, and finally accepted the reality of the challenges their child will face, it is time…

Social media usage has grown rapidly in recent years, as individuals have incorporated social networks such as Facebook into their daily activities and businesses have begun to use social tools to interact with consumers. Many social media tools, likewise, have applications relevant for marketing education. This study assesses the adoption of…

Since the early 1980s, exposure to digital technologies/devices has occurred on a wide cultural/societal level. Numerous writers have posited their impressions of these encounters often times suggesting an ease, comfort, and acceptance on the part of the users, especially those born in 1980 or later. This study examined the ongoing relationship…

Automation can mitigate issues when scaling and managing quality and identity in public discourse on the web. Discourse needs to be curated and filtered. Anonymous speech has to be supported while handling adversaries. Reliance on human curators or analysts does not scale and content can be missed. These scaling and management issues include the…

This work will focus on how different social relationships, namely shared identity and personal tie, will impact cooperative behavior, a form of social capital. I designed and conducted an economic game study to show that shared identity and personal ties work differently on cooperation among people and resource flow in social groups. Many factors…

Student access to the Internet has dramatically increased during the first decade of 2000. A recent study indicated that over 85% of US teens have regular access to a cell phone (Rideout et al., 2010). The cell phone coupled with an Internet plan has created the smart phone. This technology allows students to decide when and where they want to…

According to polls, today's "Millennial" college students are the most politically progressive generation in U.S. history. They are deeply concerned about social and economic inequality, they support egalitarian relationships among nations and peoples, and they believe that the government should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.…

This study contributes to a growing body of literature focused on the role of the teacher's "invisible hand" in managing students social relationships. The authors focus on one specific aspect of attunement, teachers' social network knowledge, which they conceptualize as the completeness and accuracy of the teacher's social network…

This qualitative study examined a culture of teacher leadership that has evolved in North Carolina over the past 20 years, conveying the professional journey of teachers who had moved out of the classroom into other educational leadership roles after attainment of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification. The study…

Precollege science education in the United States has virtually always been influenced by university scientists to one degree or another. Partnership models for university scientist--school district collaborations are being advocated to replace outreach models. Although the challenges for such partnerships are well documented, the means of…

Although reports of identity theft continue to be widely published, users continue to post an increasing amount of personal information online, especially within social networking sites (SNS) and e-learning systems (ELS). Research has suggested that many users lack awareness of the threats that risky online personal information sharing poses to…

A growing number of people study languages online, and little is known about their attitudes toward this new learning approach, what practices they engage in, or what kinds of interaction they are involved in. This dissertation investigates users' attitudes, practices, and interactions on the largest language-learning social network site,…

As the violence in the Mexican drug war escalates, a proliferation of social media sites about drug trafficking in Mexico was followed by the murder of some of their users, and the eventual disappearance of many of those sites. Despite these events, there still exist a number of drug-dealing related social media outlets in this country with a…

The U.S. Surgeon General's report "Mental Health: Culture, Race and Ethnicity--A Supplement to Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General" (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001) identified significant disparities in mental health care for Latinos and recommended directions for future research and mental health services. We update…

A month ago, the author wrote about the "official" materials one submits for a tenure-track academic hire, like a statement of one's teaching philosophy and a list of references. But in the Internet age, the "unofficial" part of an application is what exists about a person online. In 2009 the author wrote columns about the role of social media,…