Communication and discussion are keys to student learning and understanding in online environments. With more teachers and K-12 school systems adopting course management tools such as Blackboard and SharePoint, online discussion has become another means of engaging students in curriculum-based learning. Online discussions provide opportunities for…

Storytellers know that stories are "formed" in their telling. Stories, whether oral or written, personal or mass communicated, ultimately express the boundaries of their medium (their "embodiment" through mediated forms). Religious Educators must always address the medium as well as the message in any theory of narrative accounting. Media often…

Currently, for educators and researchers, diagnosing the online interactions specifically related to knowledge and expertise exchanges is challenging. To address the problem, this paper describes a framework for the understanding and measurement of expertise presence in computer conferences. Expertise presence is defined as a persistent…

A facilitator or moderator is often responsible for supporting processes and their progress in learning communities. In this article we present an approach for supporting moderators of asynchronous processes in learning communities. This approach follows the socio-technical perspective: it includes a theory-based development of moderator tasks and…

The author found the academic blog of Gwynn Dujardin interesting for two reasons. Dujardin was newly hired into a tenure-track position, which she started in the fall at Queen's University at Kingston in Ontario. And her scholarly research concerned spelling reform and education in Renaissance England, so her posts provided witty and…

The focus of this paper is on knowledge-building in a technology-supported learning environment in higher education through a longitudinal study of a graduate course from 2003 to 2007. The primary question is: how do learning conditions designed into a graduate course contribute to collaborative knowledge building? In particular, two major…

Web conferencing software enables distance learners to attend classes. This paper recounts student reactions to this delivery method and makes suggestions for conducting virtual classes.

The purpose of this study was to find out if students were utilizing Web 2.0 applications. Since the applications in question are often employed by the media industry, the study aspired to find out if students majoring in mass communication and journalism utilized the applications more often than other students. The "digital divide" is a term used…

Technology has dramatically changed the world--now almost anyone can "move" at Internet-speed; people who were marginalized are able to find information on acquiring micro-loans to start businesses, and villages previously unconnected to the telecommunications grid now have affordable cell phone access. As technology becomes easier to…

The current study investigates the effects of preparing learners for an online debate through a worked example in terms of student perception, participation, level of cognitive skill, and electronic interaction patterns. There has been a change in the focus of distance learning research from comparative media studies to the means to improve the…

Electronic media play an integral role in the lives of all people. Over the years, the rapid evolution of technology in various forms has significantly influenced the way people live and interact. Televisions, record players, computers, and VCRs changed how people learned, were entertained, stayed connected, and explored. In the past two decades,…

Over the last decade, the needs of educational organizations have been changing in accordance with increasingly complex pedagogical models and with the technological evolution of e-learning environments with very dynamic teaching and learning requirements. This book explores state-of-the-art software architectures and platforms used to support…

The Internet promotes computer-mediated communications, and so asynchronous learning network systems permit more flexibility in time, space, and interaction than synchronous mode of learning. The key point of asynchronous learning is the materials for web-aided teaching and the flow of knowledge. This research focuses on improving online…

Traditional educational and training settings have dictated that the act of learning is an activity that is motivated by learners, directed by a teacher expert and based on information transfer and data manipulation. In this scenario, it has been assumed that learners more or less acquire knowledge or develop sets of skills as a result of such…

This paper analyses Gen Y pre-service primary school teachers' conceptualisations of lifelong learning. It is situated within a context of improving the provision and delivery of pre-service teacher education. This paper argues that Gen Y's understanding of lifelong learning has been influenced by their engagements with digital technologies and…