The seminal work of Prensky on "digital natives" and "digital wisdom" is used to launch a broader discussion on the relations between electronic communication, higher education, and popular and elite culture. Prensky's critics commonly contrast his polarisations and generational divisions with a more complex picture of types of engagement with…

This article presents a new approach to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course design. Situated in the context of an English-medium university in Hong Kong, the article describes an undergraduate course in English for science, which focused not only on traditional academic genres but also engaged students in the creation of a multimodal…

This article compares actual help-seeking frequencies across online and face-to-face learning environments. It also examines strategies enacted by nursing students when they faced academic difficulties, reasons for help-seeking avoidance, and the relationship between the frequency of asking questions and achievement. Participants were nursing…

The phenomenal growth and subsequent increasing use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) innovations has led to an increase in their use in higher education over the past decade. Past research has criticised e-learning (compared to traditional face-to-face lecturing) for its failure to engage students in their learning. However, King…

Multimodal texts involve the presence, absence, and co-occurrence of alphabetic text with visual, audio, tactile, gestural, and spatial representations. This article explores how teachers' evaluation of students' multimodal work can be understood in terms of cognition and culture. When teachers apply a paradigm of assessment rooted in print-based…

The main purpose of this study is to define the perception of e-learning and traditional learning among undergraduate students in Jordanian universities. The results of the study indicated that e-learning had significantly higher scores for perceived value among students than traditional learning. The perception of e-learning among male students…

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a…

This article considers the problem of peer-producing rich online learning environments, a task that appears techno-socially feasible, but is not without challenge. The author draws on the self-professedly "utopian" approach developed by Baudrillard in "The Mirror of Production", to establish and understand the two key dimensions of leverage…

During the 2010-11 academic year, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, worked with professors at universities across the United States who were interested in using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in their classrooms through a pilot version of the Wikipedia Education Program. This article presents a case study…

In conjunction with Iowa City's 2008 designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, an interdisciplinary team of University of Iowa faculty, graduate and undergraduate student researchers formed UCOL--the University of Iowa UNESCO City of Literature Mobile Application Development Team. The project brings together community partners, faculty, students…

It is widely accepted in many societies that we are all individuals, with our own thoughts and minds, our own abilities, emotions and personalities, our own free will. In the western world our education systems are based on these ideas, as are our theories of education, our psychologies of behaviour, and our day-to-day communications. How else…

This article on peer learning was originally prepared for the Committee of the Institute for the Development of Human Potential (IDHP) in 1985. It outlines the history, structure and ideology of seventeen IDHP courses with their two primary dimensions--confluent and political. A holistic conceptual model is presented for each of these dimensions,…

Consideration of a possible use of virtual reality technologies in school contexts requires gathering together the suggestions of many scientific domains aimed at "understanding" the features of these same tools that let them offer valid support to the teaching-learning processes in educational settings. Specifically, the present study is aimed at…

Misled by a quick triumphalism of the social media, the international news agencies have confused the two: revolt and revolution. The past episodes of unrest started as a social, not a political, public revolt. Through the pain of sobriety, the protesters are learning that neither globalisation nor the McFB way of life is a shortcut to…

One of the major issues facing humanity in the twenty-first century is how the increasing effects of globalisation will play out in relation to existing societal and global inequalities. At the very crux of this issue are the terms "knowledge society" and "knowledge economy", two terms employed in a variety of different contexts, including…