Tierney, S. Craig Watkins

Many Schools and programs in low-income neighborhoods lack access to the technological resources that those in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods have at their fingertips. This inequity creates a persistent divide in both formal and informal digital literacy that further marginalizes youths from minority and first-generation communities. Diversifying Digital Learning outlines the pervasive problems that exist with ensuring digital equity and identifies successful strategies to tackle the issue. Bringing together top scholars to discuss how digital equity in education might become a key goal in American education, this book is structured to provide a framework for understanding how historically underrepresented students most effectively engage with technology-and how institutions may help or hinder students' ability to develop and capitalize on digital literacies. Addressing the intersection of digital media, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic class in a frank manner, the lessons within this compelling work will help educators enable students in grades K-12, as well as in postsecondary institutions, to participate in a rapidly changing world framed by shifting new media technologies.

Learning Technologies and User Interaction explores the complex interplay between educational technologies and those who rely on them to construct knowledge and develop skills. As learning and training continue to move onto digital platforms, tools such as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, video games, virtual reality, and more hold considerable potential to foster advanced forms of synergy across contexts. Showcasing a variety of contributors who are attuned to today’s networked technologies, environments, and learning dynamics, this book is ideal for students and scholars of educational technology, instructional design, professional development, and research methods.

What is Digital Journalism Studies? delves into the technologies, platforms, and audience relations that constitute digital journalism studies’ central objects of study, outlining its principal theories, the research methods being developed, its normative underpinnings, and possible futures for the academic field. The book argues that digital journalism studies is much more than the study of journalism produced, distributed, and consumed with the aid of digital technologies. Rather, the scholarly field of digital journalism studies is built on questions that disrupt much of what previously was taken for granted concerning media, journalism, and public spheres, asking questions like: What is a news organisation? To what degree has news become separated from journalism? What roles do platform companies and emerging technologies play in the production, distribution, and consumption of news and journalism? The book reviews the research into these questions and argues that digital journalism studies constitutes a cross-disciplinary field that does not focus on journalism solely from the traditions of journalism studies, but is open to research from and conversations with related fields. This is a timely overview of an increasingly prominent field of media studies that will be of particular interest to academics, researchers, and students of journalism and communication.

What's it really like to learn online?Learning Online: The Student Experience Online learning is ubiquitous for millions of students worldwide, yet our understanding of student experiences in online learning settings is limited. The geographic distance that separates faculty from students in an online environment is its signature feature, but it is also one that risks widening the gulf between teachers and learners. In Learning Online, George Veletsianos argues that in order to critique, understand, and improve online learning, we must examine it through the lens of student experience. Approaching the topic with stories that elicit empathy, compassion, and care, Veletsianos relays the diverse day-to-day experiences of online learners. Each in-depth chapter follows a single learner's experience while focusing on an important or noteworthy aspect of online learning, tackling everything from demographics, attrition, motivation, and loneliness to cheating, openness, flexibility, social media, and digital divides. Veletsianos also draws on these case studies to offer recommendations for the future and lessons learned. The elusive nature of online learners' experiences, the book reveals, is a problem because it prevents us from doing better: from designing more effective online courses, from making evidence-informed decisions about online education, and from coming to our work with the full sense of empathy that our students deserve. Writing in an evocative, accessible, and concise manner, Veletsianos concretely demonstrates why it is so important to pay closer attention to the stories of students—who may have instructive and insightful ideas about the future of education.

We live at a time when the need for resistance has come front and center to international consciousness. Rise Up! Activism as Education works to advance theory and practice-oriented understandings of multiple forms of and relationships between racial justice activism and diverse and transnational educational contexts. Here contributors provide detailed accounts and examinations—historical and contemporary, local and international—of active resistance efforts aimed at transforming individuals, institutions, and communities to dismantle systems of racial domination. They explore the ways in which racial justice activism serves as public education and consciousness-raising and a form of education and resistance from those engaged in the activism. The text makes a case for activism as an educational concept that enables organizers and observers to gain important learning outcomes from on-the-ground perspectives as it explores racial justice activism, specifically in the context of community and campus activism, intersectional activism, and Black diasporic liberation. This volume is an essential handbook for preparing both students and activists to effectively resist.

How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand. Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world—in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both. Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members of the white male majority. Perhaps most important, Stewart and Valian provide practical advice for overcoming obstacles to inclusion. This advice is based on their experiences at their own universities, their consultations with faculty and administrators at many other institutions, and data on institutional change. Stewart and Valian offer recommendations for changing structures and practices so that people become successful in ways that benefit everyone. They describe better ways of searching for job candidates; evaluating candidates for hiring, tenure, and promotion; helping faculty succeed; and broadening rewards and recognition.