Upcoming statutory UK government guidance for keeping children safe in education reflects the use of social media, which is one of the most common activities undertaken by young people. This study explores how and why young people are using social networking sites (SNS) and whether there are age or gender differences. A key feature of the study…

Old age is a period when the social environment of the elderly person shrinks due to reasons such as loss of social role, health, decline of income and empty nest situation. This research was carried out in order to determine, how elderly people use the social relationship networks and communication with their environment, to satisfy the needs for…

The emergence of videoconferencing tools in the 1990s provided language learners with opportunities to carry out speaking practice anytime and anywhere. However, the presence of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) in this interactional setting can hinder such ubiquitous benefits as FLA inhibits learning and communication in the Foreign Language (FL)…

Recent research suggests that language use outside the classroom is vital for students who want to reach high levels of proficiency and that a balance between classroom and out-of-class learning is important (Lai, 2015). This is all the more so for students of English in Australia, where there is often a strong expectation that students will be…

Effective science teaching critically requires content focused professional development (PD), particularly in life sciences where content evolves rapidly. How subject matter knowledge related to teaching (SCK) is most effectively incorporated into PD has not been investigated. We studied how a professional learning community of high school…

The research studied the effectiveness of the integration of Facebook as a flexible ubiquitous learning space into the educational process for speaking skills development of undergraduate students learning English as a second language. For this purpose teaching was organised via a specially created and moderated Facebook group where various media…

This chapter provides strategies for harnessing the power of social media to better help Millennial students connect with course content.

Educators are realizing that individuals working in isolation can't adequately address the teaching and learning problems that face us today. Collective action networks are needed. Sharing networks use collective energy to support individual action and agency, whereas execution networks typically address complex problems that require sustained…

This article argues that certain established vocabularies that are used to interpret the circulation of educational discourse and its transformation in different settings have significant limitations to capture the complexity inherent to new geographies of power/knowledge in education and that, consequently, we need to develop new concepts to…

Two of the original authors of "Giving a Virtual Voice to the Silent Language of Culture: The Cultura Project", published in "Language Learning & Technology" in 2001, look back on the origin of the Cultura project, its goals, and the approach and materials used. Their commentary then focuses on the features and the…

Adult educators know that adults and families change their lives through adult education. Adult education also positively impacts a host of social and economic issues. Yet this fact is largely unknown or misunderstood by the general public. Resources have become increasingly scarce, while at the same time adult educators are asked to do more with…

Induced by a literature review, this paper presents a framework of dimensions and indicators highlighting the underpinning aspects and values of social learning within teacher groups. Notions of social networks, communities of practice and learning teams were taken as the main perspectives to influence this social learning framework. The review…

Although Twitter and other social media sites have grown in popularity with educators, we still do not know what is happening within this online space or how it supports teachers. The purpose of this case study of #Edchat, a group of educators who meet weekly on Twitter, was to investigate informal professional development through the lens of…

Utilizing potential cross-pollinations of theoretical insights taken from approaches to educational and social research that have mostly emerged outside of the university and been generated by critical theorists and most recently indigenous researchers as work that has not only challenged the epistemological and ontological foundations of the…

In the current study, 247 articles dealing with the use of SNSs (social network sites) in education and published in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) journals up to 2015 were analysed. The articles' demographic (year, learner type, used SNS, major contributing countries, and academic discipline) and topic trends were determined. As a result…