Although the importance of teaching creativity in higher education has been widely recognized, empirical research addressing the success of such attempts, has been scant. The purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate the effects of an online Creative Thinking Program. The program included a series of modules whose design, content and…

In 2006, the author worked on a pre-service education course in instructional media and revised it to include ICTs and technology integration, as part of a national program to infuse ICTs throughout Namibia's educational system. The course was to be implemented in 2008 at all four Colleges of Education in Namibia responsible for the Basic…

This dissertation describes the development of a state-of-the-art immersive media environment and its potential to motivate high school youth with autism to vocally express themselves. Due to the limited availability of media environments in public education settings, studies on the use of such systems in special education contexts are rare. A…

This paper reflects on the evolving experience of modern distance education (DE) as a field of practice for professionals and as a medium for student access to education and training. The writer's 30 years in the field, as both teacher and student, has coincided with the five-stage evolution of DE delivery defined by Taylor (1995-2010). The author…

Large research networks naturally form complex communities with overlapping but not identical expertise. To map the distribution of professional competence in field of "technology-enhanced learning", the lexical semantics expressed in research articles published in a representative, large-scale conference (ED-MEDIA) can be investigated and changes…

Digital storytelling involves the creation of short, personal narratives combining images, sounds, and text in a multimedia computer-based platform. In education, digital storytelling has been used to foster learning in formal and informal spaces worldwide. The authors offer a critical discussion of claims about digital storytelling's usefulness…

"Kilimani Sesame," a media intervention that employs print, radio, and television, was developed to entertain and educate preschool children in Tanzania. This study examined the effects of a six-week intervention delivering "Kilimani Sesame" material to 223 children in the rural district of Kisarawe and the city of Dar es…

Within the field of social studies education, disciplinary models of teaching, such as approximating a historian in asking students to "think historically," have been the emphasis of countless professional development and teacher education programs. This movement, however, has focused largely on the use of traditional primary documents and…

Media--text, images, audio, and video--underwent a transformation from analog to digital formats during the transition from the 20th to the 21st century. Digital media can easily be replicated, downloaded, revised, edited, and reposted, and the implications of this are affecting education, government, entertainment, culture, and society. The…

In order to be able to cope with many authentic challenges in increasingly networked and technologically mediated life we need to construct opportunities for participants in higher educational settings to practice the advancement of self-directing intentional learning projects. In addition to teaching general strategies for carrying out these…

Interactive instructional methods are characterized by engaging students with the course material and involve delivering feedback for their efforts. Using a mixed 2 x 2 factorial experiment, we compared the effects of multiple choice answer formats (word versus letter) and methods (automated versus manual) on 70 undergraduate students' acquisition…

During the past three years, a team from the Centre for Science Education at Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Salford, the University of York, Glasshead and Teachers TV, has been working in collaboration to develop a series of blended media resources to support the teaching and learning of How Science Works (HSW) at Key Stages 3 and…

This paper conceptualizes the theoretical framework of modeling learning spaces for self-directed learning at university courses. It binds together two ideas: (a) self-directed learners' common learning spaces may be characterized as abstract niches, (b) niche characteristics are collectively determined through individually perceived affordances.…

As media digitizes, fragments and moves closer to the audience, the information and experiences become more a reflection of the community than a product delivered to the audience. The very nature of how people get and share information and experience things has changed, so naturally the individuals and organizations who create, consume and share…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has conducted a national survey of more than 1500 parents of children ages 2-10 to find out how much of children's media time is devoted to educational content, platform by platform, age by age. "Learning at Home: Families' Educational Media Use in America" is the first comprehensive analysis of parents'…