OBJECTIVE To present research findings on access to, and use of, digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) by Australians from lower income and disadvantaged backgrounds to determine implications for equitable consumer access to digitally-mediated health services and information. METHODS Focus groups were held in 2008-09 with 80 residents from lower income and disadvantaged ba...

In all educational contexts, technological developments and changes in pedagogical theory mean that any picture of current practice and attitudes must be dynamic. In many countries, the learning outcomes of foreign language courses now include intercultural communicative competence (ICC), although the precise model for teaching ICC varies even across the English-speaking world. Internet-mediate...

Background: The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (Council of Europe 2001) has, over the past decade, come to be widely used as a reference tool for teaching, learning and assessment (Alderson 2002; North 2014). The focus of the current study is on scaling the China Standards of English (CSE) vocabulary descriptors for College English education in Mainland China, where College Engli...

BACKGROUND Latinos are a fast growing segment of the U.S. health care population. Acculturation factors, including English fluency, result in an ethnic group heterogeneous with regard to SES, health practices, and health education needs. This study examined how demographic and health-related characteristics of Spanish-dominant (SD), Bilingual (BIL), and English-dominant (ED) Latino men and wome...

Background/rationale: Sharing educational resources, specifically virtual patients (VP’s), among medical schools, is a way to improve education. However, several cultural aspects may have an impact on the development and the use of VP’s. What was done: As a part of the eViP-project, 30 Romanian medical students, with previous training exclusively in Romanian and good understanding of English, p...

* We thank the NET Institute (www.N Administration at California State financial support. We are also indeb Jake Kendall for significant contributi This paper replaces earlier work with t and the Digital Divide in Rural South A * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 83 5077. E-mail address: [email protected] 0970-3896 a 2011 Indian Institute of rights reserved. Peer-review under res of Management Bang...

In this paper, we empirically explore the relationship between native language and use of the Internet. The ultimate economic and social questions we explore are: (1) how native language affects use of the Internet, both in total and by type of Web site; (2) whether English is likely to retain its “first-mover advantage” on the Web in terms of the language employed by Web sites; and (3) whether...

Considering educational equity in English education as an important issue at schools in this modern time, this study aimed at comparing English education at schools of Iran and Finland from an educational equity point of view. The researcher used a qualitative research method comprising library method of research to do this study. To this end, a lot of up-to-date and useful articles, theses and...