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The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which academic researchers consider the relationship between broadband access and children’s information seeking in the United States. Because broadband has been cited as an essential element of contemporary learning, this study sought to identify gaps in the attention given to the role of broadband in the information seeking environment of youth.

The researchers conducted a mixed method synthesis of academic research published in peer-reviewed journals between 1991 and 2011 that reported the information seeking of children aged 5–18 years. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from leading databases, analyzed separately, and conclusions drawn from integrated results.

The results of this study indicated that broadband is rarely considered in the design of children’s information seeking published in peer-reviewed research journals. Only 15 studies showed any presence of broadband in study design or conclusions. Due to the small number of qualifying studies, the researchers could not conduct the synthesis; instead, the researchers conducted a quantitative relationship analysis and qualitative content analysis.

Given the focus of policymaking and public discussion on broadband, its absence as a study consideration suggests a crucial gap for scholarly researchers to address.

The data set included only studies of children in the United States, therefore, findings may not be universally applicable.

Despite national imperatives for ubiquitous broadband and a tradition of information seeking research in library and information science (LIS) and other disciplines, a lack of academic research about how broadband affects children’s information seeking persists.

Although “acceptable use” policy (AUP) constitutes a fairly straightforward perspective in many school districts – students’ ethical, legal, and personally responsible educational usage of electronic technologies – there is a more ambiguous area of which administrators need to be aware. For example, what constitutes an AUP and who is responsible for creating them and upholding their guidelines? Other issues that need to be thought about are what makes up “appropriate” (instructionally acceptable) standards of educational quality in terms of the content of web sites?

This chapter presents findings from a qualitative study focused on the strategies that two marginalized seventh graders used as they completed an Internet inquiry project about survival.

The participants spent time over a four-week period in three phases – selecting a topic, locating information, and presenting information. Participants completed journals and participated in interviews. The participants’ online searches and how they organized their presentations were recorded. The researcher took field notes. These four data sources were used to determine subcategories in each phase to document the strategies they employed as they completed the project.

Participants used phrases and questions as they decided on key words to locate information. The majority of the sites they visited ended in the .com domain. They used different web browsers and spent varied amounts of time reading websites once they decided on key words and selected sites. Each participant approached the project uniquely and met the requirements to complete it.

This study suggests that students in self-contained resource classes engage with online content in sophisticated ways but that they still need support from teachers to optimize their learning.

Studies like this add to a body of research offering thick descriptions of teachers and students work together. In addition, this chapter derives value from the fact that it was conducted by a classroom teacher and therefore offers a unique perspective on the classroom as a learning environment as well as a site of inquiry.

As more people become Internet users, the likelihood of free public Internet access at libraries or other institutions increases. However, demand alone does not drive governments to offer this public service. Governments in Eurasia face economic, reform, and freedom of information challenges. People in Eurasia face computer illiteracy, lack of affordable computers and Internet providers, missing relevant online content in their mother tongue in their local context, and disinterest in creating content or learning new technologies.

Today, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia have made the most progress in promoting the Internet as an information resource in the public sphere. Moldova, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan have made progress in some key areas, but government, political, market, economic, and geological impediments need to be addressed. Tajikistan and Turkmenistan have two of the lowest percentages of Internet users in the world, and they have barely begun to make the Internet a relevant public information resource.

The next generation of leaders (those currently below 25 years of age) and increased government support of access, training, and content will raise rates of Internet adoption. As this unfolds, a mixture of government reform in its support of libraries and donor support could improve libraries’ current abilities to meet the information needs of the citizens in Eurasia.

Fifty years ago the political scientist Robert Dahl concluded that courts are usually in sync with “the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities” and thus offer little help to aggrieved minorities (Dahl, 1957, p. 285). In recent years, Dahl's classic formulation has received renewed attention. This chapter uses the example of the Rehnquist Court's First Amendment decisions to analyze “regime politics” theory. On religion cases the Rehnquist Court was generally in sync with the socially conservative strain in the Republican Party, but in other First Amendment areas the pattern is far more complex, raising questions about the relationship between conservative judges and the political movements that brought them to office.

Spurred on by the global economy and greater public interests, technology is no longer a luxury reserved for or exclusively used in wealthy schools. Indeed, educational leaders now experience strong pressure to increase and improve the use of the technology in their schools. Utilizing current research, program models, and best practices, this chapter provides educational administrators with issues associated with the costs of school technology plans, instructional, management, and other topics to address in planning to add or change the use of technology in schools, and a list of basic tenets to assist in creating and operating school technology programs.

While numerous approaches have been suggested for the improvement of elementary and secondary education in American urban public schools, one common component of such plans is the more effective utilization of computers, networking, and other educational technologies. When making these considerations, leaders must look at information regarding demographic analysis, assessments, demand factors, and access. The Digital Divide shines a light on the role computers play in widening social gaps throughout our society, particularly between White students and students of color. By providing equitable and meaningful access to technology we can create a stronger assurance that all children step into the 21st century prepared. Home access to computer technology is a continuous area of inequality in American society. If society assumes that academic achievement is facilitated by access to computers both at school and in the home, the gap in access to computer technology is a cause for concern.

Education scholars have recognized the current cohort of university students as the “always-connected generation” (Bull, 2010). As a result, selecting appropriate and yet targeted teaching tools for this generation is both “challenging our notion of a teaching environment” (p. 634) and raising questions about how to best “mitigate the negative impact of new technologies on learning” (Billsberry & Rollag, 2010, p. 635). One of the negative impacts that arise from the intersection of technology and education is cyberbullying. It is this extremely important and often difficult to predict element of online-based communications – cyberbullying – that serves as the focus of this chapter. The chapter is divided into three main sections. First, we present research regarding the prevalence, forms, and associated consequences of the mobile and online technologies being used by young people today. Second, we provide a definition of cyberbullying as well as a discussion of its pervasiveness and ways to address it. Finally, as a tool for moving forward with respect to the issue of addressing cyberbullying in university environments, we describe a university-based service-learning project aimed at increasing students' understanding of the variety of forms and the severe consequences of cyberbullying.

This chapter presents a theoretical and evidence-based investigation of the contribution that national educational systems make to the development of and transition to a knowledge economy in the Arabian Gulf, generally, and Saudi Arabia, specifically. The challenges to creating an Arabian Gulf knowledge economy are twofold. One is a functional and structural challenge of developing a knowledge economy-oriented mass education system. The other is a cultural and contextual challenge of aligning Arabian Gulf expectations, traditions, and norms with institutionalized expectations for knowledge economies. The knowledge economy development challenge that is specific to national versus non-national Gulf populations, information and communication technology (ICT), and formal mass education systems is highlighted. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role that national innovation systems play in knowledge economy development in the Arabian Gulf countries.

Asynchronous communication technologies (ACT), such as email, listservs, and online discussions, have been slow to catch on in K-12 classrooms. Not coincidentally, these are potentially the most transformative of all technologies and the ones most difficult to integrate into a traditional classroom. Teacher training, technical support, and access do not really explain this glaring exclusion. The theoretical standpoint of social informatics– or the ecology of technology and social systems– gives us a productive way of understanding technology's impact– or lack thereof – in school settings. More specifically, the individual/organizational, institutional, national, and societal contexts impede or propel technological integration in any given setting. In light of these contexts, one teacher's successful integration practices are examined. While teachers can effect change in their own classrooms, only administrators can truly effect systemic change, ironically working from the grass-roots up, as one district success story illustrates.