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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.

The disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic necessitated a move from face-to-face teaching to fully online teaching, creating new challenges and opportunities for educators. In this chapter we explore how instructors' practices were affected by this emergency situation and the nature of changes in their conception of teaching/learning and their roles as teacher educators. Data from interviews and narratives contributed by a large number of educators spanning a variety of educational and geographical contexts have been analyzed using Lewin's three-stage model of change. This is cross-referenced against a theoretical framework informed by a sociocultural view of teaching and learning to examine the transformative nature of teaching and learning promoted by pandemic pedagogical practices. The findings show that educators' practices have necessarily had to evolve or even change significantly in order to fit the new online instructional mode. However, it is not possible to establish that these were largely transformative in nature beyond serving the existing institutional outcome needs more or less efficiently. This implies that further investment is needed in teacher education to facilitate remote teaching, redesign teaching, and reconsider technology in new ways which go beyond it being a simple tool for the transmission of knowledge. Equally important would be to support educators to put ‘Maslow before Bloom,’ meaning that safety and well-being must be given priority over teaching and learning as the mental, emotional, and physical challenges experienced during the pandemic will continue to linger post pandemic.

Distributed performance arrangements are increasingly used by organizations to structure dyadic and team interactions. Unfortunately, distributed teams are no panacea. This chapter reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages associated with the geographical and temporal distribution of team members. An extended discussion of the implications of distributed team performance for individual, team, and organizational decision making is provided, with particular attention paid to selected cultural factors. Best practices and key points are advanced for those stakeholders charged with offsetting the performance decrements in decision making that can result from distribution and culture.

This chapter traces the journey of the Faculty of Education through the pandemic, charting some of the challenges and opportunities in leading teaching and learning, research, international and engagement activities while maintaining its staff's health and emotional well-being. The chapter concludes with six significant educational challenges amplified during COVID-19 that must be addressed. These insights provide a road map for how higher education and academia can emerge from the pandemic fit for purpose and ready to contribute to our nation's and the world's future.

In recent years, the concept of “reification” has virtually disappeared from debates in social theory, including critical social theory. The concept was at the center of the revitalization of Marxist theory in the early twentieth century generally known as Western Marxism. Georg Lukács in particular introduced the concept to express how the process described in Marx's critique of alienation and commodification could be grasped more effectively by combining it with Max Weber's theory of rationalization (see Agger, 1979; Stedman Jones et al., 1977).¹ In Lukács's use, the concept of reification captured the process by which advanced capitalist production, as opposed to earlier stages of capitalist development, assimilated processes of social, cultural, and political production and reproduction to the dynamic imperatives and logic of capitalist accumulation. It is not just interpersonal relations and forms of organization constituting the capitalist production process that are being refashioned along the lines of one specific definition of economic necessity. In addition, and more consequentially, the capitalist mode of production also assimilates to its specific requirements the ways in which human beings think the world. As a result, the continuous expansion and perfection of capitalist production and its control over the work environment impoverishes concrete social, political, and cultural forms of coexistence and cooperation, and it brings about an impoverishment of our ability to conceive of reality from a variety of social, political, and philosophical viewpoints.