Educational systems endemic of demotivation might signify a stagnating rather than nurturing ecology of learning, due in part to an obstruction in the loops of shared information between the organisms within these systems, i.e., teachers, educational researchers, teacher educators, school administrators, and educational policymakers. Working…

With decreasing numbers of students studying German at Higher Education Institutions in the United Kingdom, there is an increasing demand for graduate Germanists. This project, designed for C1/C2 level students according to the Common European Framework of Reference for languages, prepares finalist students for a job market in which UK and German…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present an e-learning system that integrates the use of concepts of virtual learning environments, personal learning environments, and social network sites. The system is based on a learning model which comprises and integrates three learning contexts for the adult learner: the formal, instructional…

Policy and practice in higher education today are defined and limited by what many have claimed are "new realities" confronting colleges and universities. Gary Rhoades contends that three of these are embedded in the just-in-time hiring practices, the at-will conditions of work, and the depersonalized curricular delivery models assigned…

The University of California Cooperative Extension used social media to solicit donations to support research on the Pacific fisher, a rare forest-dwelling weasel, conducted by UC scientists. The social media campaign included blog and Facebook postings, news releases, and tweets requesting donations of single socks. Socks were donated from around…

With an audience of over 1 billion users per month, YouTube is an attractive medium for delivering Extension programming. Amidst growing competition for viewership, determining content that is in demand by Extension clientele on YouTube is a daunting challenge that Extension educators face. The YouTube Search function of Google Trends and…

Some courts have upheld school districts' decisions to discipline teachers for their behaviors outside of school if there was a connection back to the school. Specifically, many courts have adopted a nexus theory that suggests that a teacher's off-duty conduct might have a negative impact on his or her teaching effectiveness.…

Over the last three decades, public understanding of science (PUS) has been one of the foremost research topics in the Korean society where numerous social scientific conflicts have taken place. As a lead channel of risk communication, Twitter has been studied in experimental research designs or among target user groups, leaving the measurement of…

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results…

Young people's interaction online is rapidly increasing, which enables new spaces for communication; the impact on learning, however, is not yet acknowledged in education. The aim of this exploratory case study is to scrutinize how students frame their interaction in social networking sites (SNS) in school practices and what that implies for…

This chapter focuses on two remote rural communities that engaged young people in meaningful community development efforts to build social capital. One community connected youth to the assets of the community and created opportunities for young adults to strengthen social networks. The other created partnerships and networks to build…

In the context of the complexity of today's organizations, help seeking behavior is considered as an important step to problem solving and learning in organizations. Yet, help seeking has received less attention in organizational literature. To increase the potential impact of help seeking on learning, it is essential to understand which…

Purpose: This article, based on analysis of data from a mixed methods study, builds on a growing body of assisted living (AL) research focusing on the link between residents' social relationships and health. A key aim of this analysis, which uses the social convoy model as a conceptual and methodological framework, was to examine the relative…

The author's Coursera course, "The Modern and the Postmodern," might have been labeled "course least likely to become a massive open online course (MOOC.)" In many ways, it is an old-fashioned "great books" course, and in the 20 years the author has been teaching it, it has always relied heavily on student interaction in the classroom. Last summer…

The Editors of The Reading Teacher introduce a new column, "By Educators, for Educators" through sharing ideas from the Interesting Ways series edte.ch/blog/interesting-ways/. Curated by Tom Barrett, the Interesting Ways Series is an example of crowdsourcing or the power collaborative thought. The Interesting Ways Series has more than 30…