In today's Information society it is an everyday scenario to be a part of an online community such as social media. Participation has become almost mandatory to the point of acting as a virtual extremity to one's physical environment. This virtual extremity is the individual's window to the outside world and vice versa. The process of being a part…

Unequal access to information has significant social and political consequences, and is itself a consequence of sociotechnical systems born of social, cultural, economic, and institutional context. Information is unequally distributed both within and between communities. While many factors that shape information inequality shift subtly over time,…

In light of recent scholarship about teachers leveraging social media to support their continuing professional development, this article documents an investigation of school board policies governing teachers' use of social media. Focusing on 30 traditional public school systems within a 10-county region in the Midwestern United States, the author…

The aim of this study is to show how Google's business model is concealed within Google Apps for Education (GAFE) as well as how such a bundle is perceived within one educational organisation, consisting of approximately 30 schools. The study consists of two parts: 1) a rhetorical analysis of Google policy documents and 2) an interview study in a…

Under contract with the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB), Pearson VUE reportedly performs much of the work of developing and administering the social work licensing exams required by most states. ASWB charges substantial fees for such exams and, after paying Pearson, has been able to bank considerable sums. One of the key contributions to…

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) represents over 65,000 university and college teachers, academic librarians, researchers and professional and general staff at more than 120 universities and colleges from every province. The association's members both create and use copyright material; they require copyright law that protects…

Adhering to laws whilst working or studying in an educational establishment is often fraught with challenges. The Irish Data Protection Act 1988 (Amendment 2003) strives to protect the individual where their personal data is potentially being abused. The advancements in technologies have facilitated educational establishments by improving…

The introduction of widespread school Internet access in industrialised countries has been accompanied by the materialisation of what can be labelled as a national school e-safety agenda. Drawing upon Foucault's notions of discourse and governmentality, this paper explores how e-safety policy documents serve to constrain the conceptual…

Social web services catalog users' activities across the Internet, aggregating, analyzing, and selling a vast array of user data to be used largely for consumer profiling and target marketing. This article interrogates the tacit agreements and terms-of-use policies that govern who owns user data, how it circulates, and how it can be used. Relying…

This article reports on findings from a scan of 465 policies relevant to the handling of cyberbullying in 74 Canadian universities. It first assesses the commonalities and differences in the policies. Second, it considers how their various lenses--a human rights perspective versus a student conduct perspective, for instance--can affect the…

This article reviews the history of open access (OA) policies and examines the current status of mandate policy implementations. It finds that hundreds of policies have been proposed and adopted at various organizational levels and many of them have shown a positive effect on the rate of repository content accumulation. However, it also detects…

This article investigates the utility and availability of college data to evaluate the impact of high school interventions. It reports results of a pilot study that collected information about the college experiences of graduates from four high schools in the northeast United States. Using these results as a lens, the article examines what…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of information communication technology (ICT) reform in a government school in Singapore. The focus is on the distributed leadership actions performed by various individuals, and how the multiple leaders and their leadership practices interacted with one another.…

The use of CCTV in schools is now commonplace in the UK. It is estimated that 85% of all UK secondary schools currently have CCTV systems in operation. The introduction of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) (enacted in March 2000) meant that for the first time CCTV had direct legislation governing its use in the UK. This paper attempts to apply…

Few studies have researched career guidance and information policies, particularly at the regional and local level. This article analyses Sweden's national governance of career guidance in schools from 1950 to 2007, and governance at the local level in today's highly decentralised Swedish educational system. The analysis is based on national…