Students need to know how to find and use information, yet only 31 percent of information searches succeed. Google and Wikipedia are not the only providers of answers, although they are often students' first stops for information. Everyone knows how to open a browser, but can teachers assume they know how to search effectively for information? In…

During the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century France, the encyclopedists created a systematic compilation of all human knowledge in order to dispel current disinformation imposed by kings and clergy. The resultant Encyclopedie has been considered the turning point of the Enlightenment, where knowledge became power and the power was made…

This paper explores various epistemological paradigms available to understand, interpret, and semiotically depict young people. These paradigms all draw upon a metadiscourse of developmental age and stage (e.g. Hall 1914) and then work from particular epistemological views of the world to cast young people in different lights. Using strategic…

Recent research on academic writing has established the intersection of writing and identity. However, it is not clear whether writers themselves are aware of this link. In this study, we investigated five ESL graduate students' awareness of the identities that they constructed through the appropriation of others' words and ideas in their texts.…

Writing is a recursive and complex set of cognitive processes that can be taught effectively to students with disabilities. Employing an adapted cognitive theory of writing, a broad view of what constitutes evidence, and the support of a variety of assistive and internet-based technologies, we developed a writing instructional program to meet the…

This paper presents a study that used narrative inquiry to explore staff experiences of learning and teaching in immersive worlds. The findings introduced issues relating to identity play, the relationship between pedagogy and play and the ways in which learning, play and fun were managed (or not). At the same time there was a sense of imposed or…

Whatever their relative importance or determining priority, globalisation and virtualisation may be seen as just two constructed dimensions of a raft of interrelated changes taking place in contemporary culture. Those changes are both impacting on and expressed in higher education systems and universities throughout the world. The ways in which,…

The advent of powerful Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) continues to dramatically affect curricula, pedagogy, and epistemology in secondary and college algebra classrooms. However, epistemological and pedagogical research regarding the role and effectiveness of CAS in the learning of algebra lags behind. This paper investigates concerns regarding…

Scholars have studied epistemological development--or how one understands knowledge and knowing--of college students for many years. Research in this domain has included benchmarking studies of epistemological development, examinations of how curricular innovations impact epistemology, and some studies of differences in epistemological development…

Until recent times, it seemed evident that to study another culture successfully, one was obliged to understand it clearly and accurately, exactly as it understood itself, with all its inherent contradictions. Lately that paradigm has changed to an almost exclusive and unquestioning focus on the grievances of the other culture and the oppression…

Fast knowledge can be considered part of fast capitalism, especially an emergent new generic form of capitalism based increasingly on forms of symbolic capital associated with the rise of global finance and associated with new information and communication technologies. In this essay, the authors first theorise fast knowledge in relation to fast…

Drawing on ancient and contemporary connections between rhetoric--an art of public deliberation and communication--and democracy, this chapter argues for creating "a common space of public scholarship across and beyond disciplines" to help ensure the future of sustainable publics and participatory democracy.

This chapter argues that public scholarship can transcend the epistemological limitations of research universities by drawing on postmodern social theory and pragmatism in order to help solve social problems that too often expert knowledge itself has helped create.

At the start of their first semester, 35 college freshmen were given an interview probing (a) their differentiation of scientists' ideas from evidence, and hypotheses from theories; (b) their understanding of the inherent uncertainty of scientific knowledge; and (c) their reasoning about scientific controversies. The most common responses were in…

In this article, the authors investigated the impact of evolving technology on gender disparity and the contradictions found in previous research relating to the computing gender gap to determine if certain computer software tasks are gender specific and if those skills represent a gender gap in technology. Based on the social cognitive theory and…