A lack of good information about what youth are doing with new media stimulates fears and hopes about the relationship between young people and digital technologies. This article focuses on new modes of inquiry into youth new media use, highlighting the challenges, complexities, and opportunities inherent in studying young people's digital…

In November 2008 the Sloan Consortium published "Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States." This study produced survey statistics relating to enrollments in online courses. The study confirmed what most administrators and faculty members already suspected: the growth of online higher education continues to be astounding;…

This article reviews current research on the use of Web 2.0 technologies in second language (L2) learning. Its purpose is to investigate the theoretical perspectives framing it, to identify some of the benefits of using Web 2.0 technologies in L2 learning, and to discuss some of the limitations. The review reveals that blogs and wikis have been…

In the last decade, we have seen the emergence of virtual learning environments. Initially, these environments were a little more than document repositories that tutor used unicast to the students. Informed in part by social constructivist theories of education, later environments included capabilities for tutor-student and student-student,…

This article focuses on the potential of free tools, particularly inquiry tools for influencing participation in twenty-first-century learning in science, as well as influencing the development of communities around tools. Two examples are presented: one on the development of an open source tool for structured inquiry learning that can bridge the…

Significant resources of time, money and expertise are invested in leadership development programs, and networking is often cited as a benefit of participation in these programs. Previous research has traditionally focused on leadership as an individual attribute, but researchers and practitioners are increasingly recognizing leadership as a…

Denver Seminary formulated a program that used mentoring (one-on-one mentoring and small group participation) and practical application of learning (character and competency contracts) to help prepare its graduates for the actual demands of ministry work. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate how Denver Seminary's training and mentoring…

User-centered design is a principle stating that electronic resources, like library Web sites, should be built around the needs of the users. This article interviews Web developers of library and non-library-related Web sites, determining how they assess user needs and how they decide to adapt certain technologies for users. According to the…

Affiliation with substance using peers is one of the strongest predictors of adolescent alcohol use. This association is typically interpreted causally: peers who drink incite their friends to drink. This association may be complicated by uncontrolled genetic and environmental confounds because teens with familial predispositions for adolescent…

"Coming to America" is a journey filled with obstacles for some new faculty from abroad. This paper reports the findings of surveys conducted with foreign-born faculty and their students in order to explore the key issues these faculty face at US institutions. They identify substantial concerns about cultural differences, including…

Peer interactions among children have long interested social scientists. Identifying causal peer effects is difficult, and a number of studies have used random assignment to produce evidence that peers affect each other's outcomes. This focus by sociologists and economists on whether peers affect each other has not been matched by direct evidence…

This article differentiates two ways of understanding family diversity--objectively and interpretively. The search for objective diversity is rooted in the assumption that there are many different kinds of families in the United States and around the world; the search for interpretive diversity is rooted in the assumption that any given…

Background: Many breast cancer outreach programs assume that dissemination of information through social networks and provision of social support will promote screening. The authors prospectively examined the relationship between social network characteristics and adherence to screening guidelines. Method: Employed women age 40 years and older…

Leadership for learning (LfL) is conceived as a network rather than as a centre within the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education. This paper explores what is understood by the term network, both within LfL and in the wider educational and research communities, and how these understandings are reflected in a number of projects carried out…

As the integration of community-centred teaching practices intensifies, an understanding of the types of relationships that manifest in this network and the associated impact on student learning is required. This paper explores the relationship between a student's position in a classroom social network and their reported level of sense of…