Healthcare information technology is at a crossroads today. As legacy data systems converge with bleeding edge technologies, the technology environments of today's hospitals and clinics are evolving rapidly, producing new care delivery models. As a result, we need to reassess how information technology education is meeting the needs of healthcare…

Approximately 26 million Americans have no access to broadband's social and economic benefits. A persistent level of non-adoption stems from adults' lack of perceived need or benefit. Florida's unique move to all digital instructional materials and required online learning by 2015 may make home broadband essential for maintaining a learning…

Connectivism is an emerging learning theory positing that knowledge comprises networked relationships and that learning comprises the ability to successfully navigate through these networks. Successful pedagogical strategies involve the instructor helping students to identify, navigate, and evaluate information from their learning networks. Many…

With the current milieu of current legislation and continued budget reductions for higher education, institutions are faced with being more creative in their efforts to reduce spending while achieving their stated mission. The purpose of this paper is to inform college administrators and faculty about the sources used to inform faculty development…

Social web services catalog users' activities across the Internet, aggregating, analyzing, and selling a vast array of user data to be used largely for consumer profiling and target marketing. This article interrogates the tacit agreements and terms-of-use policies that govern who owns user data, how it circulates, and how it can be used. Relying…

As educational attainment grows increasingly more essential to individual and societal prosperity and simultaneously more expensive, policymakers' appetite for evidence of the return on the investment in a college education has swelled and they increasingly want to equip prospective college students and their families with concrete information…

Many rural areas of the country lack an on-ramp to the information superhighway for people who are looking for educational and professional advancement, which leaves these rural communities frustrated by a situation that puts their residents at a significant disadvantage. This article describes Quick Start and Advanced Internet Regions (AIR.U) as…

Data in many growing fields has an underlying network structure that can be taken advantage of. In this dissertation we apply data and network science to problems in the domains of systems biology and healthcare. Data challenges in these fields include noisy, heterogeneous data, and a lack of ground truth. The primary thesis of this work is that…

Many institutions implement a distributed antenna system (DAS) as part of a holistic approach to providing better wireless coverage and capacity on campus. A DAS provides wireless service within a particular area or structure via a network of separate antenna nodes that are connected to a common source through fiber or coaxial cable. Because DAS…

Most school business officials have heard the term "cloud computing" bandied about and may have some idea of what the term means. In fact, they likely already leverage a cloud-computing solution somewhere within their district. But what does cloud computing really mean? This brief article puts a bit of definition behind the term and helps one…

A fifth of US children live in rural areas with limited access to the informal learning opportunities available to their metropolitan counterparts. High-speed broadband internet access can be an important vehicle for delivering opportunities at home and outside of the classroom. In an attempt to explore what current data say about children's…

This article describes a classroom project developed in a course on diversity education that required pre-service teachers to use media literacy as a way to cross cultural borders and reach out to an online partner to exchange information and learn about different ways of relating to the world and interpreting cultural phenomena. Students kept a…

Twitter is a microblogging site, one where users send out messages of no more than 140 characters. The messages, known as tweets, can be seen by anyone who follows the account. Twitter is free, but free as in kittens, not as in pizza. To use it effectively, it will take time to learn the language and develop content. When used effectively, Twitter…

The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) is dedicated to helping everyone with a stake in education, including parents, teachers, education leaders, and policymakers, effectively and appropriately understand and use education data. DQC helps parents and educators understand the value of data--why data matter and how they can help students be successful in…

Every state can create secure, robust linkages between early childhood and K-12 data systems, and effectively use the information from these linkages to implement initiatives to support programs and children, answer key policy questions, and be transparent about how the state's early childhood investments prepare students for success in school and…