Adolescents' time spent messaging, exploring websites, and studying on the computer increased between 2003 and 2008. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement, this study examines how such changes have influenced individual achievement and behavior from childhood to adolescence. Greater communications and…

This descriptive study using survey design sought to establish the efficacy of the Community of Inquiry instrument utilized in a study published by Shea and Bidjerano in 2009 exploring an online community of business students in a multi-institutional study. The current study sought to validate the instrument with a population of students in three…

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine cases in which Social Networking Sites (SNS) are being utilized for scholarly purposes by higher-education institutes in Israel. The research addresses questions regarding content patterns, activity patterns, and interactivity within Facebook and Twitter accounts of these institutes. Research…

On September 4 2010, a massive 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck the Canterbury region in the South Island of New Zealand. The response from the University of Canterbury was immediate and carefully co-ordinated, with the university's web-based environment and a responsive site developed on the social media platform "Facebook" becoming…

Supporting undergraduate students with their academic literacies has recently been a major focus in higher education in the UK. This paper explores the value of tutor mediation in the context of academic writing development among undergraduate business studies students in open and distance learning, following the dynamic assessment (DA) approach…

Teaching communication policy to young college students can be a challenge. Students often consider law and policy as difficult, abstract, or even unrelated to their lives. Yet experienced teachers note that students--especially those who are first exposed to regulatory concepts--benefit when they actively participate, engage, and deliberate for…

This newsletter is published four times a year. It offers articles on school improvement, organizational planning, training, and managing change. This issue contains: (1) Link Up & Learn: Use Technology to Create a Personal Learning Network to Connect with Experts and Mentors Everywhere (Valerie von Frank); (2) NSDC Tool: Get Connected with…

Virtual Research Environments (VRE) are electronic meeting places for interaction among scientists created by combining software tools and computer networking. Virtual teams are enjoying increased importance in the conduct of scientific research because of the rising cost of traditional scientific scholarly communication, the growing importance of…

This research offers a model of online impression formation that explains how different impression-bearing cues may carry more or less informational value. This research considers the possibility that impression-bearing cues have greater informational value when those cues are distinctive and are task-relevant. This research refers to such cues as…

When product pipeline first covered Twitter back in July 2007, the tool was so novel that only a very few libraries and librarians were experimenting with it. Now, over two years later, Twitter has gone mainstream, thanks to promotion by high-profile stars. From its early beginnings as a microblogging application, Twitter morphed into a…

This study investigated what Christian schools were doing with peer-mentoring programs. A total of 344 secondary schools accredited by the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) received a 19-question electronic survey that focused on the specifics of their peer-mentoring programs. A total of 80 schools responded, with 55% reporting…

In this paper, the authors provide a brief description of written (letter) assignments that use student pairs in a virtual Blackboard-based discussion board. The authors begin their discourse with the purposes for employing this teaching and learning method: (1) To allow students to function in a team structure; (2) To provide written knowledge…

Electronic writing offers the opportunity to be creative, impromptu, personal, even improper--unstructured, in other words--while academic writing traps them, catches them up in, an impersonal, uncreative, unimaginative, structured, mechanical--and perhaps even ultimately noncommunicative--experience.

This dissertation is a study of scientific collaboration at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a modern, multi-disciplinary, distributed laboratory involved in sensor network research. By use of survey research and network analysis, this dissertation examines the collaborative ecology of CENS in terms of three networks of…

Widespread and continuous spatial and temporal environmental data is essential for effective environmental monitoring, sustainable natural resource management, and ecologically responsible decisions. Our environmental monitoring, data management and reporting enterprise is not matched to current problems, concerns, and decision-making needs.…