Colleges and universities in the United States often have rather homogenous environments in which cultural gaps exist between minority students and the institution. Campuses may unwittingly create a conflict between students' ethnic and cultural values and the dominant values of academe. After all, the American university models precepts from…

With an increasing prevalence of virtual high school programs in the United States, a better understanding of evaluative tools available for distance educators and administrators is needed. These evaluative tools would provide opportunities for assessment and a determination of success within virtual schools. This article seeks to provide an…

Geographic information systems (GIS) are computer-based tools for geographic data analysis and spatial visualization. They have become one of the information and communications technologies for education at all levels. This article reviews the current status of GIS in schools, analyzes the requirements of a GIS-based learning environment from…

This article reports on a case study of Instant Messaging (IM) in a context of high-school virtual schooling. Data collection relied on interviews conducted with 20 participants in a context of high-school web-based instruction in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The participants included e-teachers as well as other distance education personnel.…

Background: Many of the potential benefits of using virtual worlds for teaching and learning are difficult to define and often become overly focused on the functionality of the technology or on its ability to support informal or "social" forms of learning. Purpose: The aim of the paper is to highlight the experiential nature of virtual…

Although school websites have existed on the Internet for over fifteen years, in practice the website is not integrated into the organizational-pedagogical system of the school. Against the challenging background of the modern education system and the theoretical facets of realizing a learning environment, this paper will present an online…

Many schools are initiating projects that place laptop computers into the hands of each student and teacher in the school. These projects entail a great deal of planning and investment by all involved. The teachers in these schools are faced with significant challenges as they prepare for teaching in classrooms where every student has a computer.…

This article reports the results of an investigation into the issues encountered by undergraduate language students while engaging in "the Grammar Project"--a collaborative assessment task for the module Academic and Professional Skills for Language Learning--and shows how encouraging students to take ownership of their learning process…

"Impact" is possibly the most frequently evaluated construct associated with any kind of technological diffusion or adoption within educational settings. Seemingly endless research projects are funded to measure it and to validate the educational value we have become adept at inscribing into practically all novel technologies brought to…

Environmental education is just beginning to tap the potential of the virtual classroom, with courses offered by University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Project Learning Tree, and others. The courses fill gaps in the learning opportunities available to formal and nonformal educators, and have drawn students, educators, resource management…

This paper proposes a new way to integrate history of science in science education to promote conceptual change by introducing the notion of historical microworld, which is a computer-based interactive learning environment respecting historic conceptions. In this definition, "interactive" means that the user can act upon the virtual environment by…

Research suggests that students learn better when studying a picture coupled with narration rather than on-screen text in a computer-based multimedia learning environment. Moreover, combining narration with the visual presence of an animated pedagogical agent may also encourage students to process information deeper than narration or on-screen…

Most asynchronous computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments can be characterized as "functional" environments because they focus on functional, task-specific support, often disregarding explicit support for the social (emotional) aspects of learning in groups which are acknowledged by many educational researchers to…

The purpose of this descriptive research study was to evaluate the effectiveness of Web-enhanced agricultural education pedagogy as perceived by students in a collegiate agricultural education program. Overall, respondents agreed there were many benefits to Web-enhanced courses and perceived all Web site components under study to be very useful.…

The engine of change for the next revolution is cyberinfrastructure, a comprehensive phenomenon that involves the creation, dissemination, preservation, and application of knowledge. It adds new dimensions that greatly increase transformational potential. Cyberinfrastructure combines complex elements to create a dynamic system. It eclipses its…