This report is a summary of discussions that took place at the Young Leaders' Forum held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (PEI), on March 9-10, 2007. The event was part of the Rural Dialogue, an on-going, two-way discussion between the Government of Canada and Canadians from rural, remote and northern regions. Launched in 1998, the Rural…

Peer coaching, or peer assisting, was established in 1970s by Joyce and Showers. Initially used in teachers' professional development, it refers to a process that two or more teacher peers evaluate current practice mutually; expand skills, extract and build new skills; share ideas, and review & solve problems of classroom teaching in a way of…

Australian historiography has often portrayed Australian education as dependent and isolated. Starting from Foucault's notion of power as capillary, this paper traces two ways in which Australian teacher training in the first half of the twentieth century was tied into international networks. It documents some conspicuous links between key…

Social interactions profoundly impact the learning processes of learners in traditional societies. The rapid rise of the Internet using population has been the establishment of numerous different styles of network communities. Network societies form when more Internet communities are established, but the basic form of a network society, especially…

According to John Thompson, Web 2.0 is here. Having moved away from its roots in a read-only medium, the Internet is now a place where any and all users can create, upload, and transform information. A crucial consideration for Thompson is how this technological transformation will affect the pedagogical practices of institutions of higher…

Although a seemingly good idea, electronic portfolios have to date failed to gain significant traction in higher education. Institutions with ePortfolio implementations routinely report high numbers of accounts on their campuses, but few believe that those numbers are a meaningful reflection of actual usage. Change is in the air for the…

This article reports that education leaders in Los Angeles, faced with unrelenting pressure to raise anemic high school graduation rates, are turning to YouTube, MySpace, text messaging, and the radio waves to reach students at risk of dropping out of school and lure back thousands who have already left. The Los Angeles Unified School…

The following article examines the sociocultural needs of higher education students on an international degree programme delivered jointly by a post-1992 university in England and a polytechnic institution in the Netherlands. A brief discussion of relevant literature is followed by a methodological overview, detailing the qualitative research…

It is not always easy to find the balance between protecting students from Internet dangers and distractions and reaping its benefits--but it is certainly on every district's tech priority list. Sharnell Jackson, chief e-learning officer for the 415,000-student Chicago Public Schools, and Miguel Guhlin, director of instructional technology…

Guided by the social network perspective, this study examined the structural properties of the state reading policy domain using network visualization tools: sociograms and multidimensional scaling scattergrams. The authors' graphic exploration of eight state reading policy networks produced rich insights about the density and the overall…

Bettina Cass, with Deborah Brennan, Ilan Katz, Catherine Thomson and Deborah Mitchell, and 10 Partner Organisations in NSW and South Australia, are undertaking a three-year ARC Linkage Grant project on "Young Carers: Social Policy impacts of the caring responsibilities of children and young people". Located at the Social Policy Research…

Little research has explored the relationship between social influences (e.g., social networks, social support, social norms) and health as related to modifying factors that may contribute to health disparities. This is a cross-sectional analysis of fruit and vegetable intake and physical activity, using baseline data from two cancer prevention…

Sociologists of knowledge find that academic stratification is present among individual scholars, genders, networks, fields, and all kinds of scientific organizations, while communications scholars have been studying global cultural asymmetry for a long time. Yet few researchers have explored the global dimension of academic stratification. In…

This article presents the findings of a study that explored the role and impact of continuing education on rural revitalization. A community development approach, academic expertise, and a university's resources were used to assist the citizens of Montmartre, Saskatchewan, to establish Centre 48, an arts and continuing education centre. Courses…

In the 1900s, student affairs professionals were faced with decisions about how to incorporate new forms of technology into the college community. New technologies during the twentieth century that institutions had to plan and prepare for included the telephone (invented in 1870), television (invented in early 1900s), cable television (available…