The Researcher: An Interdisciplinary Journal

CALL FOR PAPERS for a SPECIAL ISSUE on Cyberlearning: Transforming Academic Communities with Emerging Technology

Deadline for Paper Submission: June 30, 2013

The Researcher: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal published semi-annually at Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi. This special issue of The Researcher welcomes scholarly research from all disciplines in the area of Cyberlearning. Planned publication date is September 30, 2013.

Universities are being transformed with the current generation of students who generally have extensive access to a wealth of technological resources. This access issues a direct call for immediate action by educators. Such technological exposure, thus, has affected students’ learning styles and created new and exciting opportunities and challenges for educators. Traditional pedagogies, alone, no longer fully engage university students in this technologically advanced age. Hence, to effectively educate today’s student and prepare them for society’s increasing reliance on technological advancements, educators must leverage emerging technological trends to create flexible cyberlearning pedagogies that adapt to and complement the learning styles of today’s students. For academic communities, these challenges entail both incorporating new technologies into traditional classroom settings and providing remote access to instruction and information.

For this special issue, we seek papers that explore the opportunities and challenges colleges and universities face as new technologies modify existing approaches to education. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Facilitating changes in curriculum for schools using curriculum and teaching models developed for a past industrial age while learners need tools and pedagogy for today’s information-based workforce;
• Enabling cyberlearning through mobile technologies;
• Changing the classroom paradigm from teacher-centered to student-centered, where the teacher becomes a facilitator and actively participates in this new learning community as a contributor of content guidelines;
• Creating strategies for actively engaging faculty in the adoption of cyber-technologies;
• Nurturing the creativity of teachers;
• Exploring the role of social media as an educational tool;
• Utilizing virtual communities in bringing many worlds and/or communities together, including home, school, and work; and
• Customizing learning techniques enabled through technology and/or apps that promote learning of higher-order skills both within and across disciplines.

With the widespread adoption of mobile technologies (such as Jackson State University’s iPad Initiative), we also seek papers which address effective approaches for assessment of the impact of these technologies on learning across students of different subgroups, such as, discipline, age, gender, race, ethnicity, classification, and varying socio-economic groups.

Submission requirements: Submissions should be less than forty pages and sent in electronic form as an attachment via email, in Microsoft Word Format in 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, with two-inch margins. All maps, charts, and graphs must be camera ready. Each article should be accompanied by an abstract and have an introduction. Documentation format should follow a style appropriate to the discipline, such as, MLA for humanities and APA for social and behavioral sciences. To facilitate blind review, please include a removable cover page providing the name, institutional affiliations, positions, and highest degrees earned of all authors, as well as a return address, email address and the article title; the article itself must carry only the title of the paper.

Papers will be read by a minimum of two reviewers before a publication decision is made. Reviewers’ comments and suggestions for revisions will be relayed to the author in a timely manner.

For further information, please contact: Patsy J. Daniels, Editor, The Researcher, Box 17929, Jackson State University, 1400 John R. Lynch Street, Jackson, MS 39217; (editor.researcher@jsums.edu).
Please email submissions as an attachment to Patsy J. Daniels, Editor, at (editor.researcher@jsums.edu).