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This chapter provides a comprehensive review of research and developments relating to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in education. As opposed to early educational uses of the Internet involving publication of static information on web pages, Web 2.0 tools offer a host of opportunities for educators to provide more interactive, collaborative, and creative online learning experiences for students. The chapter starts by defining Web 2.0 tools in terms of their ability to facilitate online creation, editing, and sharing of web content. A typology of Web 2.0 technologies is presented to illustrate the wide variety of tools at teachers’ disposal. Educational uses of Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, and microblogging are explored, in order to showcase the variety of designs that can be utilized. Based on a review of the research literature the educational benefits of using Web 2.0 technologies are outlined, including their ability to facilitate communication, collaborative knowledge building, student-centered activity, and vicarious learning. Similarly, issues surrounding the use of Web 2.0 tools are distilled from the literature and discussed, such as the possibility of technical problems, collaboration difficulties, and plagiarism. Two case studies involving the use Web 2.0 tools to support personalized learning and small group collaboration are detailed to exemplify design possibilities in greater detail. Finally, design recommendations for learning and teaching using Web 2.0 are presented, again based on findings from the research literature.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

Today, businesses, organizations and governments attach great importance to digital transformation to meet the needs of their customers, business partners, and employees to adapt to the developing technology in recent years. Digital transformation, which is a challenging and mandatory process, has been and continues to be passed by institutions today. However, the successful management of this transformation without conflict can be realized by accurately detecting new communication technologies and examining, understanding, and implementing the transformation process in detail. This process will be painful, where radical changes will take place in the structure, processes, functions, and business models of the organization. Different challenges may be encountered in each of the startup, execution, and governance subprocesses examined in the digital transformation process. Many conflicts such as time and budget shortages, inadequate digital skills and lack of vision for digital customer processes, cybersecurity threats, human resource shortages, difficulty in managing technology, failure to achieve cloud structure integration, vision, and culture differences are the reasons why this process cannot be managed fluently and accurately. For businesses that focus on this goal, regardless of scale, digital transformation has become a necessity, not an alternative to choose. In this study, the digital transformation process and maturity model were discussed, and technological and digital conflicts were emphasized. It seeks to shed light on the work they will do by making recommendations for institutions to manage this process in the best way.

Since its conception, the community of practice (CoP) theory has become a popular framework in a plethora of disciplines and settings. In the field of higher education, this versatile social theory of learning and identity that is compatible with theories of language and discourse has been used for the exploration of a variety of topics such as quality assurance, language socialisation in study abroad, medical student workplace learning and the learning of science. This theoretical model offers a framework based on collectives attached by their practice and mutual relations, which suits a priori some institutionally recognised clusters within higher education, such as research groups (RGs). These groupings, composed of pre- and post-doctoral researchers, form a domain of sustained relations and interactions through which learning may occur, but the extent to which the RG constitutes a CoP remains uncertain. This chapter discusses the suitability of the CoP model for the study of RGs in the light of ethnographic data gathered from two RGs.