Background/Context: With the ever increasing diversity of schools, and the persistent need to develop teaching strategies for the students who attend today's urban schools, hip-hop culture has been proposed to be a means through which urban youth can find success in school. As a result, studies of the role of hip-hop in urban education have grown…

Bookstores, record stores, libraries, Facebook: these places--both physical and virtual--demonstrate an established and essential purpose as centers of community, expertise, convenience, immediacy, and respect. Yet as digital, mobile, and social shifts continue to transform culture and interactions, these spaces and places transform, too.…

The present study investigated the impact of social support on the psychological well-being of mothers of adolescents and adults with ASD (n = 269). Quantity of support (number of social network members) as well as valence of support (positive support and negative support) were assessed using a modified version of the "convoy model" developed by…

The development of new tools for collaboration, such as social software, plays a crucial role in leisure time and work activities. The aim of this article is to summarize the research in the field of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). This is done particularly from the perspective of the blurred line between individual (personal)…

This article highlights a middle ground for academic publishing between formal peer-reviewed journals and informal blogging that we call "Small "p" Publishing." Having implemented and tested a publishing network that illustrates this middle ground, we describe its unique contributions to scholars and learning communities. Three features that…

Although arguably one of the most popular education conversations to follow on Twitter, #edchat is hardly alone. Hashtag conversations have been popping up over the last few years, and many have caught on for specialized conversations on elementary schools, technology, professional development, mobile learning, principals and administrators, among…

The aim of the study was to investigate the process of desistance from sexual crime by comparing two groups of child molesters: One group was deemed to be "desisting", while men in the other group were deemed as being still potentially "active" offenders. Men in the desisting group reported being optimistic for the future,…

This paper engages two core ideas: first, that status mobility is facilitated through connectivity, or having a large number of ties to others, as suggested by theories of social capital and social networks; and second, that aggression is an expressive or irrational reaction to frustrations, humiliations, or social pathologies. In contrast, I…

Busy educators who want to ask advice, offer opinions, and engage in discussions with colleagues increasingly turn to professional learning networks (PLNs)--online communities that allow the sharing of lesson plans, teaching strategies, and student work, as well as collaboration across grade levels and departments. As budget cuts limit…

There are increasing numbers of parents with a learning disability living in the community although the exact numbers are unknown. Existing research suggests that this group of parents faces disadvantage and discrimination on a number of levels. This study reports on the findings of a small pilot study that examined the lived experience of five…

Student reliance on social media is undeniable. However, while we largely regard social media as a new phenomena, the concepts underlying it come directly from social network theory in sociology and organizational behavior. In this article, the authors examine how the social network concepts of size, quality, complexity, diffusion, and distance…

Social work students have few guidelines to help them evaluate the implication of their posted information on Internet-based social networking sites (SNSs). There is a national trend among employers of human services to cross-check publicly available online information on applicants. Based on data from a survey of 105 baccalaureate and master's…

This paper explores how our "digital world" shapes the ways that young people want to be engaged and how those desires subsequently shape academic theatre spaces. The paper uses artefacts developed in a university classroom to demonstrate that pre-service theatre educators can create educational materials that interrogate and deploy multiple media…

And so a middle school language arts teacher begins her Saturday. Before coffee, Facebook. In this themed issue on professional development in an era of nick.com, the authors propose that teachers' new literacy learning is as close as their own screens. Teachers, too, live literate lives online in this new age of composition, with impulses to…

Knowledge exchange between employees is an essential feature of recent commercial organisations on the competitive market. Based on the data gathered by various information technology (IT) systems, social links can be extracted and exploited in knowledge exchange systems of a new kind. Users of such a system ask their queries and the system…