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Social media provides a modern approach to working and learning with people across vast distances as easily as if they were side by side. The new tools foster a new type of social learning, offering leaders an opportunity to transform their organizations into rich learning labs where new knowledge and innovative practices emerge in real-time.

Based on my book published in 2010, and the work I have done with more than 100 companies on social media’s use for fostering social learning.

Social technologies should be used to replace outmoded education programs with more effective and mobile means. With these tools, learners can reframe learning from a passive activity done to learners to an active and very human activity that enables people to build upon their individual and collective potential.

Written for this publication, yet based on the learnings since and research done originally for The New Social Learning.

Identity exploration is a central mechanism for identity formation that has been found to be associated with intense engagement, positive coping, openness to change, flexible cognition, and meaningful learning. Moreover, identity exploration in school has been associated with adaptive motivation for learning the academic material. Particularly in the fast-changing environment of contemporary society, confidence and skills in identity exploration and self-construction seems to be increasingly important. Therefore, promoting students’ identity exploration in school within the curriculum and in relation to the academic content should be adopted as an important educational goal. The purpose of this paper is to describe a conceptual framework for interventions to promote students’ identity exploration within the curriculum. The framework involves the application of four interrelated principles: (1) promoting self-relevance; (2) triggering exploration; (3) facilitating a sense of safety; and (4) scaffolding exploratory actions.

We begin the paper with a conceptual review of identity exploration. We follow by specifying the conceptual framework for interventions. We then present a methodological-intervention approach for applying this framework and describe three such interventions in middle-school contexts, in the domains of environmental education, literature, and mathematics.

In each intervention, applying the principles contributed to students’ adaptive motivation and engagement in the academic material and also contributed to students’ identity exploration, though not among all students. The findings highlight the contextual, dynamic, and indeterminate nature of identity exploration among early adolescents in educational settings, and the utility of the conceptual framework and approach for conceptualizing and intervening to promote identity exploration among students.

This paper contributes to the conceptual understanding of identity exploration in educational settings, highlights the benefits and the challenges in intervening to promote identity exploration among students, and discusses the future directions in theory, research, and practice concerned with the promotion of identity exploration in educational settings.

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.

Storytelling began quite possibly as early as 15,000 bc, with cave drawings of animals and a man. Enduring because of its appeal to the human spirit and imagination, stories illuminate and inspire as well as bridge a gap between fact and fiction. From the time we are little children, stories have taken us on a journey. Whether simple or complex, we use them to remember; we use them to create; we use them to disrupt. But there is a Part Two to the power of a story that can be found in telling it – in the act of becoming the storyteller. In either presenting a narrative or sharing the narrative as the character, one transforms from a learner to a teacher. And in that transformation is found deep understanding and learning. There is a story at every turn in education – in history, in languages, in maths, in science – everywhere. This chapter will discuss the tremendous value of the story, not just in the telling but as the teller.

Twitter is a simple tool allowing users to send 140 character messages to their followers. Although the tool itself is relatively simple, the benefits of using Twitter can be immense. Using Twitter educators and their students can tap into a global network of others interested in educational topics. Twitter is powerful in both range and immediacy. Students, faculty, and other university personnel including librarians are using Twitter to communicate both inside the classroom and beyond. This chapter includes how-to information for those who are new to Twitter, ways to use Twitter, tips on getting the most out of this tool, and a list of additional resources and tools which will magnify the positive effects of using Twitter.

Corporate CEOs are finally telling the truth when they say “People are our most important assets”. Intellectual capital has become the primary factor of production. To raise their “corporate IQ”, managers treat workers as if they were customers of learning. This article explores why people learn much more about their jobs in the coffee room than in the classroom. It hypothesizes that equipping people intellectually to prosper will become a corporate discipline every bit as important as marketing or finance. Web services will mark the advent of workflow learning in real‐time organizations.