The Commons on Flickr, comprised of an international community of select libraries, museums, and archives, was a project initially launched in 2008 by the Library of Congress and Flickr. Primary goals of The Commons are to broaden exposure to rich cultural heritage photographs and to observe and participate in the communities of engagement and…

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) uses a Blackboard course management system (CMS) to support faculty and students. To supplement the CMS, the university created a custom "Check My Activity" (CMA) self-service feedback tool for students. In addition to comparing their online course activity against a class average,…

To assess research methods and analysis of statistical techniques employed by educational researchers, this study surveyed unpublished doctoral dissertation from 2003 to 2007. Frequently used research methods consisted of experimental research; a survey; a correlational study; and a case study. Descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA, factor…

The aim of the study was to assess the medical teachers' preference for various lecture delivery methods like the lectures using chalkboard, utilizing transparencies with an overhead projector (OHP) or lectures using a PowerPoint presentation and their frequency of use of teaching aids. The faculty of the medical college was asked to fill in the…

Books are traditionally set aside at the request of teachers from the main, normal loan collection to be put on reserve temporarily for checking out for a much shorter loan period to ensure that, at the expense of convenient, long-term loans for other users, all the students enrolled in a course have an opportunity to use them. Many studies have…

This paper reports on a completed field study that examined the usability and effectiveness of learning objects designed for Australian and New Zealand primary and secondary schools. It focuses on student engagement by observing the ways students interacted with learning objects and by listening to what they said about them. Questions that guided…

The present paper examines student use of and satisfaction with the Learning Management System (LMS), and how these dependent variables are correlated with organizational variables at one Israeli university. Data on 1212 course websites was gathered in 2007 from the LMS warehouse, the student-management database, the instructor-management…

This article provides a citation analysis of Lave and Wenger's work on "communities of practice" and "situated learning" over the period 1991-2001. The data relate to educational research in the UK, although comparisons are made with the USA. The findings indicate that although the text was incorporated and heavily used within…

Admissions officers around the country are hearing consistent calls to enhance their social media presence. Whether the pressure is from administrators, influential alumni, or peers across institutions, social media are touted as the next big thing in admissions marketing. But are social media strategies truly "strategic," or are they merely…

In 2009, the author spearheaded the Thunder Bay Public Library's (TBPL) service audit on kiosks. A task force comprising staff from the children's, reference, and adult services departments was formed to work on the audit. Task force members worked together and studied how patrons and staff use kiosks, conducted a literature review, surveyed other…

In response to the vast amounts of data associated with the accountability movement and the rhetoric of data-informed decision-making, we interviewed 16 principals to find out what streams of data they used and what decisions they made by using the data. We found that: (a) student achievement data are predominantly used to the extent of neglecting…

This study examines language attitudes among Mongols in Inner Mongolia, using an extensive questionnaire. Forty Mongolian students who are studying at Inner Mongolia Normal University participated in this study. The results show that Mongols hold more positive attitudes toward putonghua and English than toward the Mongolian language in many…

With advances in information and network technologies, lots of data have been digitized to reveal information for users by the construction of Web sites. Unfortunately, they are both overloading and overlapping in Internet so that users cannot distinguish their quality. To address this issue in education, Hwang, Huang, and Tseng proposed a group…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the influence of technology proficiency and clicker use on students' perceptions of clickers, engagement and class grade point average. Four hundred and five students completed a questionnaire that measured Student Technology Proficiency (STP; Garcia and Zapf, in press), and participated in the…

In this paper the author compares the use of digital materials that have been deposited in The Ohio State University (OSU) Knowledge Bank (KB). Comparisons are made for content considered in scope of the university archives and those considered out of scope, for materials originating from different campus sources, and for different types of…