Overburdened with athletics, play rehearsals, band practice, volunteer work, after-school jobs, friendships, and--if their parents are lucky--quality time with their families, it is hardly surprising that even the most dedicated students resent homework as an incursion on their time. Meanwhile, their teachers watch the growing stacks of unread…

Implementing student-centered, inquiry-based science pedagogy in secondary classrooms, though identified as the goal by all science education professional organizations, is rarely a reality in today's classrooms. Therefore, teachers committed to reform often lack a "local" network with whom they can interact around this new professional discourse…

The National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for England places much emphasis on creating partnerships at both national and local levels between government, the drinks industry, health services, police, individuals and communities to tackle alcohol misuse and associated harm and disorder. This article describes the characteristic structures and…

This study examined how participation in one of four learning community models influenced first-year college students' perceptions of their academic environment, relationships with other members of the college community, and sense of belonging at the institution. The research was conducted at a private, mid-sized university and employed a…

In this article, the author provides an overview of Second Life[trademark], or simply SL, which was developed at Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based corporation. SL is an online society within a threee-dimensional virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents, where they can explore, build, socialize and participate in their own economy.…

As American schools increasingly are called on to ensure students have the skills necessary to succeed in the 21st century, school districts nationwide are responding with a renewed interest in systemic change. The revived attention notwithstanding, educators, policymakers and the public still misunderstand the true meaning of systemic change in…

This case study describes efforts to promote collaborative research across traditional boundaries in a business-oriented university as part of an institutional transformation. We model this activity within the framework of social network analysis and use quantitative tools from that field to characterize resulting impacts. (Contains 4 tables and 2…

New modes of everyday communication--textual, visual, audio and video--are already part of almost every high school and college student's social life. Can such social networking principles be effective in an educational setting? In this article, the author describes how the students at his school, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), are provided…

Students in the US are increasingly discovering that online socializing is far from private and that sharing personal details on social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook, can have unintended consequences. A growing number of colleges are moving to disabuse students of the notion that the Internet is their private playground and what they type…

Michael L. Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, was writing a paper about social networking and other interactive tools, which are collectively referred to as Web 2.0, when he decided to make use of the technology to spread his message. So he put together a short video with examples of Web 2.0…

Faculty development in distance education does not happen in a vacuum. It is often interwoven with efforts to increase adoption of distance education programs and increase the effectiveness of online teaching. Training might not be the only way to meet these needs. This article presents a new faculty-development model, based on a systematic…

This study examined age differences in topics that generate interpersonal tensions as well as relationship level characteristics that may account for variability in the content of interpersonal tensions. Participants aged 13 to 99 years (N = 184) diagramed their close and problematic social networks, and then provided open-ended descriptions of…

The study of people's social ties, the resources they obtain from them, and the communication tools--such as the Internet--that facilitate the flow of expertise and resources makes up an evolving science of networks that can help school leaders better understand how to support and promote school change. The science of networks is not new in…

Short-term stability in adolescents' self-reported friendship networks was examined as a function of (1) participants' gender, (2) friendship status (best vs. secondary), (3) friendship gender composition (same sex vs. opposite sex), and (4) friendship contexts (school only vs. nonschool only vs. multiple). Adolescents (N = 102) took part in five…

Handwritten notes, meeting for coffee, eye contact, a handshake, a smile--are these social practices of yesteryear, soon to be replaced by the "wall posts" and "pokes" of today's social networking technologies? Although advances in social networking technologies allow for new and perhaps more efficient means of learning and…