Background: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are increasingly included in general education classrooms in an effort to improve their social involvement. Methods: Seventy-nine children with ASD and 79 randomly selected, gender-matched peers (88.6% male) in 75 early (K-1), middle (2nd-3rd), and late (4th-5th) elementary classrooms…

Relational aspects in the life-designing of young people are the focus of this article. These aspects consist of the involvement and use of one's relational network in life-designing. The data consists of 146 narratives of young people, 111 ninth graders in comprehensive school and 35 students in upper secondary school. The research question…

Cyberbullying and threats of Internet predators, not to mention the enduring consequences of postings, may lead to dangerous, unspeakable consequences. Cyberbullying and threats of Internet predators through social networking sites and instant messaging programs are initiating numerous problems for parents, school administrators, and law…

This paper aims to reveal mechanisms of language maintenance and shift in the rural post-colonial multilingual island community of Palau in the Western Pacific, using social networks as an explanatory framework. I explore the usefulness of social networks from three perspectives, investigating whether and how social networks can explain changes in…

This article presents an investigation based on in-depth interviews with 33 university students and eight discussion groups, aimed at finding out which discourses and positions mobilize college students in terms of social networking practices. It analyses how they construct meanings and question or legitimize their own actions or those of others,…

The internet of the mid-to-late 1990s was defined by static web pages created by people with specialized technical skills. Today, that barrier has been all but eliminated with the emergence of easy-to-use online tools for creating and sharing content. "Web 2.0," or the read/write web, has dramatically altered the way we communicate and share…

True global enlightenment. That's how YouTubeEDU is being promoted by company officials who have announced the launch of a YouTube section devoted to academic content. Calling the new site "a free, self-organizing, democratic website containing all the world's knowledge," YouTubeEDU promises an environment in which "any qualified teacher can…

Virtual worlds for children are becoming increasingly popular, and yet there are few accounts of children's use of these worlds. Young children are spending increasing amounts of time online as technology continues to create significant changes in social and cultural practices in the 21st century. Some of children's online interactions can be…

Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) has been trialled and used by users from many countries around the globe, but despite the positive attitude towards its potential benefits to pedagogical processes its adoption in practice has been uneven, reflecting how difficult it is to make a new technology based concept an integral part of the…

Professional learning (PL) is an essential ingredient in the professional and personal lives of contemporary educators. PL can take many forms but large-scale conferences remain a touchstone in many fields, including languages education. In this paper, we review the evaluation of the 18th biennial conference of the Australian Federation of Modern…

The dramatic advancements in technology over the last 5 years have created an environment that could support learning that surpasses anything we would have seen, experienced or imagined before. While new technologies offer considerable opportunities for improved learning, their use however has remained as a plug-on to traditional teaching methods.…

Three-quarters of Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers say that the internet and digital search tools have had a "mostly positive" impact on their students' research habits, but 87% say these technologies are creating an "easily distracted generation with short attention spans" and 64% say today's digital…

Social capital (or the ways in which people in an organization collaborate and to a greater extent the quality of professional community in that context) has a variety of implications for organizations, specifically schools. This study examined the relationship between attitudes of administrators and faculty at the secondary level toward…

Being a teenager is not easy, but most of us live through it. Cyberbullying suicide victims will not have this luxury. Advancements in and access to social technologies (social networking sites, instant messaging systems, cell phone texting) are rewriting interaction patterns as they provide a majority of our nation's students with 24-hour-a-day,…

Social scientists usually are more interested in consumers' dichotomous choice, such as purchase a product or not, adopt a technology or not, etc. However, up to date, there is nearly no model can help us solve the problem of multi-network effects comparison with a dichotomous dependent variable. Furthermore, the study of multi-network…