According to the Pew Research Center, newspaper readership fell 5 percent in just the past year, and advertising revenues are down 23 percent over the past two years. The third quarter of 2008 saw the worst decline in print ad revenue in nearly 40 years, reports the Newspaper Association of America. Several major chains are in bankruptcy, and a…

It is just about impossible to find an adult education department in Canada that does not have a critical social justice orientation, quite often oriented to community development. Many of the faculty identify themselves with the local and or global activist community, and they see their work as merging learning and justice concerns to build up…

This paper undertakes a comparative review of the development and implementation of media education in four Asian societies. The comparison focuses on the following issues: the general pedagogical transition from inoculation to empowerment; the roles of government policy and educational reform in facilitating the development of media education;…

This dissertation aims to investigate how advanced information technologies cope with the various demands of disaster response. It consists of three essays on the exploration of micro-blogging and FOSS environments. The first essay looks at the usage of micro-blogging in the aftermath of the massive 2008 China earthquake and explores the…

In this article, the authors consider the strengths and weaknesses of digital media in the organization of student activism, and how educators can better assist and advise student activists using digital media to create improved learning opportunities. To gain a perspective on the relative strengths and challenges of online media in regard to…

One of the most common obstacles the author finds when teaching media literacy courses is student insensitivity. Although this can exist for many different reasons, the media critiques that students submit in this type of class indicate that they've become indifferent to misogynistic, classist, and racist stereotypes. On the collegiate level, this…

The purpose of this study was to explore teacher dress in United States schools as presented in the newspaper. Twenty-nine articles were examined to answer three questions. Results revealed: (a) the newspaper provided four contexts for processing information about teacher dress--roles, control, impression management, and educational learning…

In 2007, against a tragically ironic backdrop of National Poetry Month, April indeed was "the cruellest month" (Eliot 1922, I.1). The media spotlight during that time repositioned from Iraq and Afghanistan to Blacksburg, Virginia, where a stateside guerilla incursion at Virginia Tech would mark the single worst episode of school shooting…

The mass media provides a frame for discourse around important health issues, and it has been widely demonstrated that the development and reinforcement of stereotypes of minority groups are strongly influenced by the news and entertainment media. An extensive search of academic databases failed to locate any studies which examined the…

The present research examined the influence of parents, peers, and the media in predicting college students' Appearance-based Rejection Sensitivity (Appearance-RS)--the degree to which individuals anxiously expect to be rejected based on their physical appearance. Given that women are socialized to be more appearance-focused than men, women were…

In the light of recent debates on the declining take-up of languages in English schools, and on pupils' motivation towards language learning, this article furthers discussion and asks broader questions. Is there a coincidence between trends in British attitudes to Europe and the growing or waning enthusiasm for language learning across all…

It is a challenge to attract undergraduate students into the gerontology field. Many do not believe the aging field is exciting and at the cutting edge. Students, however, can be convinced of the timeliness, relevance, and excitement of the field by, literally, bringing up today's headlines in class. The author collected over 250 articles during…

In this article we document observations of our own young children's usage of technology in their "out-of-school" worlds. How might these technologies and practices be changing the understandings and usage of texts and literacies of the children who enter into classroom spaces? What transformative possibilities might these home technology…

Under the influence of processes of globalisation, higher education in the countries of Europe, including Latvia, has been reshaped, restructured, re-evaluated and reoriented towards the establishment of a European higher education area. New issues have emerged at both the content and metacontent level, the most significant of which are…

The educational history of Upper Canada is commonly written as the succession of an elite group of educational reformers who advocated a centralized system of mass schooling. However, the recent shift in research on Upper Canada away from the narrative of prominent individuals who controlled the social, political, and economic development of the…