Concern about children and the Internet is the latest in a ritual cycle of moral panics surrounding new technologies. Such panics often focus on children and are related to adult anxieties surrounding the transgression of boundaries including those between adult/child, private/public, and work/leisure. They are also founded on technological…

Decision makers are faced daily with making important and pervasive decisions. This is especially significant in higher education, where decisions about academics will have considerable impact on the next generation of leaders. In place of rational decisions about the substance of learning and instruction, academic administrators make incremental…

What do we know about technology and rights? This article provides a fairly comprehensive overview of current issues regarding this topic. We explore and analyse a wide spectrum of rights that are challenged in this current era of technological convergence. We use the United States Bill of Rights as an example of the vulnerability of legal…

This article looks at the ethical implications of the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in bringing about development in developing societies. Any proposed means to enhance development has costs as well as benefits. Hence, the evaluation of a given means to development should always be a matter of "applied ethics".…

The effect of educational technologies on learning is an area of active interest. We conducted an experiment to compare the impact of instructional software on student performance. We hypothesize that some of the impact on student performance may reflect the influence of the technology on student subject-related beliefs and that those beliefs may…

This article focuses on the social practices of propagating and circulating memes within Internet environments as a significant dimension of cultural production and transmission. Memes (pronounced "meems") are contagious patterns of cultural information that are passed from mind to mind and which directly shape and transmit key actions and…

The experience of engaging with the knowledge and views of others is arguably as important as the actual knowledge with which one engages. Engagement is shaped by social and organizational norms, past experiences, personal preferences, and other factors. These authors each select a particular mixture of knowledge-engaging experiences (such as…

As technology revolutionizes instruction, conceptual models of influence are necessary to guide implementation and evaluation of specific applications such as online peer discussion. Students in an educational psychology course analyzed five case studies that applied and integrated course content. Some students (n= 42) used "WebCT…

The nation's social agenda for improving education and training has converged with national economic forces (Hornbeck & Salamon, 1991). The emphasis on lifelong learning of the workforce through education, training and development, demands for ever-improving productivity and significant technological advancements have required new tools to…

Although there is great interest, and considerable investment, in adopting technology within Higher Education, it is less clear what this change means to the people who implement or experience it. Presently, there is no consistent framework used to study and explain this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a framework that can structure and…

Introduction: A number of theoretical works focus on the potential revolutionary impact of the Internet and other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) upon Competitive Intelligence, but only a few empirical research papers can be found on it. Is the real impact still unknown, or is it too insignificant to talk about? The present paper…

Today's librarians must create an engaging setting for teaching and learning by offering a welcoming library space, a wealth of online resources, combined with librarians' expertise and collaborative instruction programs. Rapid advances in information technologies, new methods of teaching and learning, and the changing makeup of university student…

This paper traces some of the ways that IT has changed and continues to change our lives, and how information and communication technologies or ICT are changing learning in schools. The real potential of ICT is the way it changes learners and the major focus of the paper is on e-learning, a term that combines pedagogy and technology. For this…

The call for quality research into the effectiveness of learning technologies is a common feature in much of the related literature and the broad question of how schools use technology to transform and improve the quality of student learning is one main area of concern. Projects like DECStech have flagged the need for research into student…

Permanent employment, typical of industrial societies and bolstered by numerous social guaranties, has been declining in the past 2 decades. There has been a steady expansion of various forms of contingent work. The decomposition of traditional work is a logical consequence of the characteristic patterns of the knowledge-based economy. According…