It is now widely understood that societies must rapidly decarbonize to avoid the worst impacts of future climate change. To contribute to this urgent effort, academic libraries should develop an understanding of the carbon footprint resulting from their activities. This article shares the results of an effort at the Penn State University Libraries…

Personal technology use can significantly impact wellness. The transition to widespread remote learning, working, and socializing during the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated society's reliance on technology. This article presents a case study of how the authors applied their privacy scholarship to offer a responsive learning experience for students…

Introduction: Health professionals are working in an era of social technologies that empower users to generate content in real time. This article describes a 3-part continuing education minicourse called "Friending Facebook?" undertaken at Penn State Hershey Medical Center that aimed to model the functionality of current technologies in…

Social capital (or the ways in which people in an organization collaborate and to a greater extent the quality of professional community in that context) has a variety of implications for organizations, specifically schools. This study examined the relationship between attitudes of administrators and faculty at the secondary level toward…

Surely "massive open online course" (MOOC) has one of the ugliest acronyms of recent years, lacking the deliberate playfulness of Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) or the droll shoulder shrug suggested by the word "snafu" (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up). The author is not a complete neophyte to online…

Data-driven decision making, popularized in the 1980s and 1990s, is evolving into a vastly more sophisticated concept known as big data that relies on software approaches generally referred to as analytics. Big data and analytics for instructional applications are in their infancy and will take a few years to mature, although their presence is…

New studies on how language learning occurs are beginning to chip away at some long-held notions about second-language acquisition and point to potential learning benefits for students who speak more than one language. New National Science Foundation-funded collaborations among educators, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and…

In recent years, composition teachers and scholars have noted that multimodal technologies have changed the landscape of the first-year college writing classroom, causing many to consider the relevance of integrating these tools into the writing curriculum. While some suggest that it is important to teach students to write with a variety of…

At the end of 2010, for the first time ever, smartphones outsold PCs. Mobile device adoption rates continue to rise rapidly around the world. A recent forecast by Cisco found that global mobile data traffic more than doubled last year, and by the end of 2012, the number of mobile devices in use will outnumber the world's population. In the United…

There is no doubt that eProcurement technology has turned cumbersome paper-based processes into highly connected online systems. The most basic parameters of eProcurement range from shopping for or sourcing goods, to creating purchase requisitions and getting them approved, to placing orders with suppliers, to receiving invoices--all…

Over the past decade, a small revolution has taken place at some of the world's leading universities, as they have started to provide free access to undergraduate course materials--including syllabi, assignments, and lectures--to anyone with an Internet connection. Yale offers high-quality audio and video recordings of a careful selection of…

Along with their students, faculty have become co-learners and pioneers in the classroom. With no models to work from, they have had to explore, practice, and discover the iPad's potential for expanding learning. Given the recent and rapidly growing access to a dazzling array of intellectual technologies, faculty and staff at Seton Hill, a liberal…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of electronic mail and other portable and wireless devices on the traditional out of classroom communications which take place between students and professors in colleges and universities. The environment in which higher education instruction occurs has changed dramatically in the last two…

Academic institutions mediate online literacy practices in meaningful and significant ways. This essay explores the nature of that mediational process, using a visual-spatial method to map out and conceptualize dynamics and structures that have a bearing on the work of composition. A key argument is that composition teachers are intellectually…

This article discusses the author's experiences in teaching a new course at Dickinson College, a four-year liberal arts college in Pennsylvania serving around 2,300 undergraduates. The course emphasized newer and emerging media and technologies such as satellite television, the Internet, and mobile telephony. To better understand the read-write…