EAIT editorial 17-3

Abstract

As most readers will be aware, the journal of Education and Information Technologies is the official publication of the Technical Committee on Education (TC3) of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). If you want to find out more about IFIP or the activities of TC3 you should go to: http://www.ifip.org/ or http://www.ifip-tc3.net/. The third issue of EAIT this year has articles ranging from online seminars to reflection on the history of educational media reflecting again the wide range of topics related to this field. We begin this issue by looking at: ‘How and why do students of higher education participate in online seminars?’ in this article is by Stefan Hrastinski and Jimmy Jaldemark. Online education continues to gain in popularity in educational institutions and this paper investigates how higher education students participate in online seminars and why they participate in certain ways. The research involved an online class that attended asynchronous and synchronous online seminars and it was shown that the participation of students varied between aspects such as exchanging information, managing tasks and providing social support and that the emphasis of these aspects were related to the tool they communicated through. ‘Using a wiki to facilitate an online professional learning community for induction and mentoring teachers’ by Amy Hutchison and Jamie Colwell is the next article. The article reports a case study on the use of a wiki as a tool for conducting online professional learning communities (OLCs) with induction and mentor teachers. Results indicate that Web 2.0 tools may be most effective in OLCs when the social features are utilized in addition to the features that enable task completion and that using Web 2.0 tools restrictively, and without consideration of their affordances, may inhibit the success of OLCs. They also found that online learning communities for induction teachers may be most effective when supplemented with face-to-face discussion and that a task-driven environment in OLCs can encourage professional dialogue and reflection, but may make induction teachers feel isolated and unsupported. Educ Inf Technol (2012) 17:251–252 DOI 10.1007/s10639-011-9185-5