A nomadic collaborative partnership model for a community of practice (CoP) in Design for Learning (D4L) can facilitate successful innovation and continuing appraisals of effective professional practice, stimulated by a "critical friend" assigned to the project. This paper reports on e-learning case studies collected by the UK JISC eLIDA…

A survey asked medical students studying the basic sciences to identify effective learning strategies. The purposes of the survey were three-fold: firstly, to identify learning strategies that students prefer; secondly, to encourage students to evaluate their learning strategies; and thirdly, to inform faculty about their students' learning…

This article describes "Youthscapes," a year-round afterschool program in the San Francisco East Bay Area (CA) that offers urban youth the opportunity to use technology to reconstruct their identities in at least two ways: (1) by encouraging its apprentices to create media content that directly counteracted stereotypes about urban youth;…

A study into how academics learn to assess student performance affirms the significance of context in understanding learning in the academic workplace. The study involved three case studies in academic departments with significant differences in the teaching, research and professional dimensions of academic life. This article reports on the…

Introduction: Virtual communities play an important role in innovation. The paper focuses on the particular form of collective action in virtual communities underlying as Open Source software development projects. Method: Building on resource mobilization theory and private-collective innovation, we propose a theory of collective action in…

The purpose of this article is to provide a model of an academic intervention and support program in literacy that focuses on the needs of individual students and revalues them as readers, goals that are of extreme importance when working with adolescents who have repeatedly experienced academic failure and view themselves as poor readers. This…

This case study offers an in-depth look at how one school achieved change in its culture and in its approach to curriculum and instruction. The unit of analysis for this single case study is South Loop Elementary School (SLES) and the time period is from August 2002 to June of 2007, during which SLES students demonstrated sharply improved…

This correlation study examines the relationship between participation in online embedded professional development communities and student achievement gains in a College Algebra course taught by high school teachers to high school students for college credit. The participating teachers met weekly through a web-based meeting format using…

Overcome budget cuts, lack of leadership, top-down mandates, and other obstacles to professional development by using this book's take-charge approach. Joseph H. Semadeni guides you through a systemic method to professional development that: (1) Motivates teachers to continuously learn and apply best practices; (2) Makes adult learning activities…

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the updated DeLone and McLean's information systems (D&M IS) model can identify the determinants of success of online communities in terms of member loyalty (Lin and Lee 2006). This study is similarly concerned with the challenge of identifying the determinants of success of online communities, but it…

This paper describes the signature role played by accomplished, experienced teachers in professional learning communities, and the importance that these practitioners make their teaching public and shared. In so doing, the authors describe how accomplished practices can be shared between classrooms and between practitioners with varying levels of…

This article previews the emergence of "homo virtualis." Drawing on data from seven research studies, peer-reviewed published research articles, and selected excerpts of 30 months of field notes taken in Second Life [SL], the article examines virtual learning environments and embodiment through the lens of interactions of avatars with…

This study positioned the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002 as a reified colonizing entity, inscribing its hegemonic authority upon the professional identity and work of school principals within their school communities of practice. Pressure on educators and students intensifies each year as the benchmark for Adequate Yearly Progress…

The purpose of this study was to observe, describe, and analyze the aspects of school capacity within an urban turnaround school. School capacity factors included: "Teacher Knowledge, Skills and Disposition"; "Professional Community"; "Program Coherence"; "Technical Resources"; and "Principal…

Today's engineering graduates will solve tomorrow's problems in a world that is advancing faster and facing more critical challenges than ever before. This situation creates significant demand for engineering education to evolve in order to effectively prepare a diverse community of engineers for these challenges. Such concerns have led to the…