Podcasts covering essential first-semester general chemistry laboratory techniques and central concepts that aid in experimental design or data processing were prepared and made available for students to access on an as-needed basis on iPhones- or iPod touches-. Research focused in three areas: the extent of podcast usage, the numbers and types of interactions between instructors and research teams, and student performance on graded assignments. Data analysis indicates that the podcast treatment research teams accessed a podcast 2.86 times on average during each week that podcasts were available. Comparison of interaction data for the lecture treatment research teams and podcast treatment research teams reveals that interactions with instructors were statistically significantly fewer for teams that had podcast access rather than a pre‐laboratory lecture. The implication of the results is that student research teams were able to gather laboratory information more effectively when it was presented in an on-demand podcast format. Finally, statistical analysis of data on student performance on graded assignments indicates no significant differences between outcome measures for the treatment groups when compared as cohorts. The only statistically significant difference is between students judged to be highly motivated; for this sub‐group the students in the podcast treatment group earned a course average that was statistically significantly higher than those in the lecture treatment group. This research study provides some of the first data collected on the effectiveness of podcasts delivered as needed in a first-semester general chemistry laboratory setting.

This project describes the outline for an effective procedure for a backwards design approach as it relates to a technology integrated unit of study.

The purpose of the project was to develop an online course in the hopes of cutting some of the costs of the typical "brick and mortar" class while at the same time offering senior students the opportunity to take a class outside of the physical campus.

The primary purpose of this project is to develop an online forum to facilitate communication among educators, parents, and students resulting in an open environment for more informed decisions by all those involved in the educational process. The second purpose is the personal development of an electronic learning application using online tools needed for an effective online learning environment that will cost the school district little or nothing.

The purpose of this project was to develop a Web site that would facilitate students' use of the Internet to research topics relating to the study of biology. This Web site serves as a bridge to link classroom topics to real world scientific information and research available on the Internet. Methods of preventing plagiarism and focusing Internet research were incorporated into the overall Web site design.

This project will address the issues concerning the benefits of distance learning, a growing area in our education system today. Distance learning takes place when the teacher and students are separated, and technology is used to bridge the instructional gap.

M. Tech. (Department of Information and Communication Technology, Faculty of Applied and Computer Sciences), Vaal University of Technology. / The delivery of education and/or curriculum is shifting from the traditional method of delivery to a digital format, most notably the e-learning, using available technology. However, without e-learning readiness, e-learning benefits will not be reaped and the probability of failure in adopting e-learning will be high. Therefore, it is imperative to know the levels of readiness for e-learning of educators and learners in South African schools. In this study, e-learning readiness of the South African educators and learners in previously disadvantaged schools in Gauteng were investigated. A twenty-nine (29) item questionnaire was used to obtain the data. This new learning method is being introduced and will be implemented by Gauteng Department of Education. The data obtained from the questionnaires was then analyzed by using a STOPE (Strategy, Technology, Organization, People and Environment) model. The results obtained by using STOPE analysis indicated the overall readiness for e-learning at a level of 77%. This is above the mid-point of 50% showing that the schools in Gauteng are ready for adoption of e-learning. The five-point Likert scale method was also used to check the e-learning readiness and established a level of 3.86. The schools in Gauteng that participated in our study are ready for e-learning adoption but need to improve on their people and content readiness. These schools show that they will benefit in adopting e-learning in their schools.

For 10 weeks, an online writing club was a place where seven children, ages 5 to 8, came together to co-construct a space for sharing favorite texts and composing practices. This study documents the ways that the writing club offered a space for children to construct shared literacy practices that allowed for new meaning-making, social relationships, and literate identities. As the researcher and facilitator of the writing club, I took up an inquiry as stance position, which provided a generative space for exploring the tensions between practice and theory. Additionally, literacy dig analysis provided an opportunity to understand the discursive elements of the popular culture texts that young children bring into their literacy practices. Taking up sociocultural and critical childhood frameworks as well as multiliteracies and multimodal models of literacy, I explored the following questions: How do young children narrate their identities and social worlds through text? What stories (narratives) and resources do young children value and take up when writing? How do young children take up the space of an informal, online writing group to pursue intellectual, social, cultural, and composing lives? Over the 10 weeks, the writing club developed into a space where telling jokes, grabbing a notebook to learn how to draw like Dav Pilkey, and creating a plan for surviving “infinity holes” signaled belonging. Children shared interests often deemed inappropriate for school spaces (e.g., consumer culture, violence, and video games) and took up ideas from popular culture (e.g., Minecraft, LOL and Calico dolls, and Captain Cage) in their composing practices. The literacies of the children in this study were mobilized by family participation, the shared and private spaces in homes, and opportunities to experiment outside of the constraints of school curricular goals and expectations. As the children engaged in transmedia and multimodal composing practices, new literate identities were revealed and established expertise in knowledge of popular culture and digital composing practices helped reposition how children were seen by their peers in the writing club. The social and composing practices of the young children in this online writing club have important implications for the ways we design writing spaces and curriculum for young children that center children’s culture, composing practices, and ways of knowing and being as important resources for teaching and learning.

This dissertation unites two contrasting phenomena, musical theorizing as practiced on YouTube and dreamlike experiences involving music, under a single rubric: virtual space. While the two phenomena are disconnected in time, geography, and culture, they are nonetheless similar in that they are spatialized in ways that contravene how we typically experience physical space, So, I develop the concept of virtual space as a means of approaching the commonalities underlying these phenomena. Building on a definition of space as a medium in which entities are positionally related, I propose a framework for analyzing virtual spaces that emphasizes a phenomenon’s subjective immersivity and objective relationality. In order to bring out the human dimension of these virtual spaces, I concentrate on the discursive, instrumental, experiential, and generative aspects of embodied virtual spaces that are entangled in social, cultural, and political networks. To that end, in the first half of the dissertation, I discuss how a community of YouTube content creators has carved out a place for practicing, teaching, and learning music theory. I detail YouTube’s affordances as a space for theorizing music and a medium of communication, showing how content creators have leveraged these to great effect in their theorizing of game music. Flitting between the general and the particular, I balance case studies of content creators and close readings of audiovisual content with sociological approaches. In spite of the platform’s self-image and the community’s political positioning, I contend that YouTube’s egalitarian promise has been left unfulfilled in the English-language, Western-centric field of YouTube music theory, which replicates or even exacerbates some of the epistemological issues and unjust social structures that pervade academia and Western society more broadly. The other half of the dissertation concerns the analytical interpretation and precise differentiation of dreamlike experiences centered on music. I demonstrate that much of the discourse on this topic comes from close readings of music as dream. As this perspective locates dreaming in an object, I argue for counterbalancing this discourse towards a dreaming subject, and thus I propose a framework with three interrelated components. First, I carefully distinguish dreaming, as a virtual and spatialized experience, from standard waking consciousness through recourse to neuroscience and phenomenology. After that, I set forth a tripartite scheme that articulates the many permutations of how we might position ourselves, other subjects, and music in this non-dreamer–dreamer dynamic. Last, I classify the various interactions between music, dreamlike experience, and analytical interpretation. Using the music of Fryderyk Chopin as my example, I show that, though this music has accrued much historical and cultural meaning through being read as dreamlike, we have much to gain from the analytical insights unique to our subjective, dreamlike experiences with this music.

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