As adolescent Internet use grew exponentially in the last decade, with it emerged a number of correspondent expectations. Among them were the following: (1) that gender predicts usage, i.e., that boys spend more time online, surfing the web and playing violent games, while girls chat or shop online; (2) that Internet use causes social isolation…

Two prominent trends are simultaneously occurring in our society today: the aging of our population and an increased reliance on computers. Through a federal grant, Iowa Legal Aid provides computers in 85 rural senior citizen centers across Iowa to foster increased knowledge about program services for the elderly and to enhance their social…

With the rapid development of technologies, online learning, especially email dialogue journaling, has been playing an increasingly important role in foreign language learning and teaching in recent years. While many studies have examined the effect of email learning on student learning performance, few have looked into students' attitudes towards…

The paper reports the results of a naturalistic enquiry into written request strategies in emails sent by Chinese learners of English to their teachers. A corpus of 600 emails was collected in the course of an academic year. CCARP (Cross-Cultural Speech-Act Realisation Project) segmentation and coding was used to analyse the requests contained in…

In this article, the author describes the liberatory and critical classroom she tried to create with preservice teachers. She reflects on how the perceptions of her teaching and of her class by one student led him to feel silenced inside the classroom but liberated to express his views of the community in e-mail dialogues. Anthony's actions in…

When armed police officers, with no warrant, confiscated and searched the computer from this author's state university office, she began to cross-examine her relationship to computers and to investigate professors' computer privacy at public universities. She had violated no university policy. She had simply received an anonymous e-mail (an e-mail…

On June 2003, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) faced a frightening crisis when an employee was diagnosed with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). In this article, the author looks back and identifies four factors that enabled the university to navigate this crisis. These factors were: (1) leadership at every level; (2)…

This paper focuses on the experiences of an early career researcher involved in a mentoring relationship at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), Australia. A discussion of the research literature is reported to highlight the attributes of mentoring relationships and the different forms of mentoring. The mentoring relationship that the author is…

With tuition on the rise, Auxiliary Services departments at a variety of colleges and universities are proving that they can innovate and still save their parent institutions cash. Primary areas of innovation include: (1) With advancements in technology, institutions are moving campus purchasing programs into the wireless space; (2) As junk mail …

In this article, the authors report on an assignment which tries to raise students' intercultural awareness. The assignment, an intercultural e-mail project, was developed during the past 2 academic years for the course Introduction to Intercultural Communication for 1st-year students of Business Communication of the Radboud University (Nijmegen,…

Purpose: This article reports a study in which referential communication in 11 individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) and 11 controls was compared between text chat and telephone, using a route-solving task. Method: Participants deduced routes by asking closed questions, and the dependent variables were (a) accuracy in working out the route, (b)…

This article reports on how foreign language instructors at Arizona State University at Tempe are encouraged and taught to use technology in their teaching. Section one introduces the reasons why technology is helpful for foreign language instruction. Section two describes foreign language instructors' attitude toward using technology in their…

Like most composition courses at large state universities, basic writing classes at the University of Minnesota are primarily taught by graduate teaching students. Graduate students and basic writers share a similar position in the university, sitting on the boundaries of the scholarly communities in which they eventually hope to participate. As…

This book provides beginning Internet users with basic information about what's out there, how to find it, and what to do with it when you find it. Instructions are provided on connecting to the Internet and using it effectively and appropriately. Aspects of Internet communication are reviewed, including e-mail, netiquette, mailing lists, and…

Although there are earlier experiences from computer mediated communication (CMC) applications in which e-mail has been used as a forum for argumentation and debate, the literature lacks systematic analyses on the use of CMC for this purpose. This kind of analysis would produce knowledge on the relevance of CMC for practicing argumentation that is…