This study presents a qualitative look at a blended learning approach by investigating the pre-service IT teachers’ perceptions of asynchronous discussion board (ADB) as a tool for learning and evaluates the advantages and challenges of such a practice. ADB was integrated into the methods of teaching IT course for 13 female preservice teachers over 14 weeks. In addition to the weekly face-to-fa...

This paper explores communicative trends in an online, facilitated course for intercultural learners. We examine participation rates and communicative interactivity between culturally diverse learners, and find that participation rates differ by cultural grouping, by gender and by role, and that online interactions are dominated by facilitatorlearner exchanges (rather than by peer-to-peer commu...

English teachers need continuous professional development programs but the problem is that, at least in Iranian EFL context, either teacher trainers have almost no time for such programs or running such programs is not cost effective; therefore, a more practical way out of this problem is for the teachers themselves to discuss pedagogical issues in online peer-to-peer settings. The main purpose...

This methodology-focused paper reports how I compiled and analysed a 12-million-word corpus of threaded online discussions by employing Corpus Workbench tool (CWB, Evert & Hardie, 2011) combining analysis with micro-analysis drawing on the principles digital Conversation Analysis. The not only affords an efficient retrieval large dataset, but also, more importantly, facilitates exploration base...

The overall goal of this project is to develop techniques to mine medical and health-related social media content for information and opinions about diseases and treatments. This would allow users to benefit from the numerous postings of people’s experience scattered all over the Web. This paper reports the results of a textual analysis of user-generated content on drugrelated online sites. The...

Introduction. The Everyday Life Information Seeking approach suggests that much information behaviour takes place in non-work settings, for example in the pursuit of leisure activities such as hobbies. This study focuses on a community of collectors to examine how they gather information to decide whether to purchase an item for their collection when the target item has an ambiguous or deficien...

Screen reader programs (such as JAWS for Windows) provide output in a linear, either audio or Braille, format. Due to this linearity, it is much easier for blind users to get disoriented in a complex hypertext environment. iCare-Assistant attempts to address content accessibility challenges for students without sight in accessing educational materials (as lecture notes, syllabi, assignments, pr...