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How do we define a high-quality school librarian? Decades of educational researchers have attempted to link teacher characteristics--such as how teachers are prepared, which credentials they carry, and years of experience--to student outcomes. These researchers have contended that individual educator attributes may have a direct effect on what and how much their students learn. School librarians are also teachers who have direct student contact, and although numerous studies have indicated that school librarian preparation, licensure, and other background characteristics are promising areas for further direct exploration, researchers have yet to examine if, how, and why school librarians' certification or preparation positively impacts students' learning outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to compare findings from causal educational research to findings from descriptive school librarianship research to discern possible areas of causal alignment that warrant further investigation. In this study, we present a subset of a larger mixed research synthesis of causal educational research related to student achievement, contextualized with existing school librarianship research, to draw relationships between classroom teacher and school librarian preparation and characteristics and to shape researchable conjectures about school librarians' effects on learner outcomes.

The #acadv Twitter chat is an organic, online community of higher education academic advising professionals. Using a longitudinal study, we explored the way a self-directed learning network sustains ongoing professional development and knowledge sharing by examining the archives of 203 structured online discussions. In mapping the chat topics to published core competencies, we discovered that this advising community scaffolds on-demand learning for discussion of advising approaches and strategies, distribution of resources for supporting student success, collective sharing of personal advising philosophies, and encouragement to engage in reflective assessment about advising practice. Community members are motivated to contribute to networked practice to enhance professional development activities, share open educational practices, and support advising competency development in an occupational community of practice.

The Colorado Study (Lance, Wellborn, and Hamilton-Pennell 1993) and its many replications in other states have demonstrated that when educators and learners had access to a qualified school librarian in the context of a thoughtfully built, adequately resourced, technology rich, and widely accessible school library, learners tended to flourish on traditional measures of reading and science achievement, regardless of the district or community's relative wealth and other external factors (Scholastic 2016). This correlational research has been vital for communicating the value of school librarians and school libraries to decision makers and other stakeholders. The Causality: School Libraries and Student Success II (CLASS II) project is aimed at establishing the foundation for comparison and groundwork for causal research. In this article, the authors share the CLASS research agenda and progress to date and demonstrate how this effort to chart the future of school librarianship research has the potential to guide and strengthen professional growth and implementation. The resulting knowledge is to help school librarians create meaningful, authentic learning experiences that impact and influence the next generation of learners.

This study focused on understanding how college student educators use The Student Affairs Professional Facebook group. Through descriptive and qualitative analysis of posts, shares, comments, and interactions, this study identifies central topics and issues discussed over a 14-month period. This research shows how college student educators use this Facebook group to share professional development, offer learning/training resources, disseminate graduate education information, to offer/solicit advice, engage in dialogue regarding equity/social justice/inclusion, support colleagues, and share humor/stories.

Big data from massive open online courses (MOOCs) have enabled researchers to examine learning processes at almost infinite levels of granularity. Yet, such data sets do not track every important element in the learning process. Many strategies that MOOC learners use to overcome learning challenges are not captured in clickstream and log data. In this study, we interviewed 92 MOOC learners to better understand their worlds, investigate possible mechanisms of student attrition, and extend conversations about the use of big data in education. Findings reveal three important domains of the experience of MOOC students that are absent from MOOC tracking logs: the practices at learners' workstations, learners' activities online but off-platform, and the wider social context of their lives beyond the MOOC. These findings enrich our understanding of learner agency in MOOCs, clarify the spaces in-between recorded tracking log events, and challenge the view that MOOC learners are disembodied autodidacts.

"Fashioning Circuits" is a humanities course designed to explore how fashion, electronics, social issues, and makerspaces interact with design and critical theory. Digital humanities scholars and practitioners have seen an emergence of public art and representation beyond the academy, specifically applying interdisciplinary university curricula to youth learners in the community. As this university course expands into the public domain, the social discourse around gender, technology, and fashion are threaded with the "making" opportunities to tinker and design in order to solve real-world problems in the community. This article is an ethnographic case study, which details the "Fashioning Circuits" learning experiences, specifically to understand how open education projects and shared curriculum knowledge can exist within the postsecondary and community learning environments. Through the intersection of media ecologies and contemporary fashion design offers this emerging pedagogical practice asks learners to build artifacts that engage with real-world problems. To encourage critical making, that is, an emphasis on the process rather than the product, it is important to center learning experiences around issues and ideas to find solutions and not focus on end technological outcomes alone.

Social media use has risen in higher education, as campus stakeholders frequently access these technologies for teaching, learning, research, communication, and information sharing. With these connected, digital technologies, our colleges and universities understand there are both opportunities and threats that social media affords. Higher education has increasingly witnessed a number of challenging incidents and abuses online. As a result, a number of institutions are evaluating policies and practices to regulate online behavior and establish community standards for students, staff, and faculty. Using latent semantic analysis, 36 universal topics are extracted from the 250 policy documents. This study not only establishes reference database of social media policy documents representing ten countries, it also forms the ontology to develop the framework foundation of sociotechnical stewardship to support strategic, long-term technology planning for organizations and their stakeholders.

Higher education institutions have embraced social media platforms. Yet, little research has examined the characteristics of institutional social media accounts and the narratives their posts construct for faculty and student life. By investigating these topics, researchers can better understand the actual and potential roles of these tools in contemporary universities. This study focused on understanding how Canada's public universities use Twitter, reporting descriptive, inferential, and qualitative analyses of large-scale Twitter data. Findings show extensive variability in participation patterns among institutions. Although rhetoric surrounding Twitter suggests an interactive platform, institutions mostly use it to broadcast information and construct overwhelmingly positive representations of institutional life. While the identified representations are partly authentic, they are also incomplete and misleading. Such representations suggest difficulty for students and faculty seeking to use social media to accurately anticipate campus life or to interact online in these spaces.

This chapter describes how to establish social media guidelines and policies for colleges and universities effectively, based upon a field study of postsecondary education institutions representing 10 different countries. To further community interactions and social media involvement, this chapter will outline effective practical approaches for the creation and implementation of policy and guidance in higher education.

Guided by the question, "What are the implications of national educational evidence standards for school librarianship research?," prevailing U.S. evidence-driven educational policies are examined to identify implications for school librarianship research; promising methods to contribute to building this evidence base are explored; and finally, progress on a long-term research agenda designed to enable school librarianship researchers to contribute evidence to educational policy is reviewed. As promising methods are explored, an actionable agenda is proposed that school library researchers can undertake to participate in a causal research environment., Introduction Waves of educational reform and policy impact school libraries regardless of whether libraries are explicitly included in those initiatives. Indeed, silence from policy makers regarding the library is often [...]

Social media platforms and digital networks have enabled professionals to communicate with colleagues, disseminate information, and co-create knowledge. As the Internet has grown up and social networks have scaled, there is an increased awareness of the occupational impact of being online. Prior research in postsecondary education has examined the structure of social networks, imagined audiences online, openness of practice, and informational/communication patterns of academics. We conducted 92 semi-structured interviews with higher educational professionals beyond the faculty/academic role to understand motivations and challenges online. Participants shared how they navigate digital identity and contribute to networked practices in professional online communities. Multiple factors influence and impact the use of social media over time, specifically as professionals reflect on their digital presence, network affiliations, and informal learning opportunities. We identify seven networked practices: kinship in community, self-directed learning, digital norms, navigating context collapse, career advancement, reputation management, and risk versus reward assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is becoming increasingly vital to publish and share research as well as get citations for the purpose of researcher visibility. The publishing options available for research distribution seem endless. It really is an academic jungle out there! This article reviews why early career researchers and graduate scholars should consider their research impact in the digital age.

This study focused on understanding how college student educators use The Student Affairs Professional Facebook group. Through descriptive and qualitative analysis of posts, shares, comments, and interactions, this study identifies central topics and issues discussed over a 14-month period. This research shows how college student educators use this Facebook group to share professional development, offer learning/training resources, disseminate graduate education information, to offer/solicit advice, engage in dialogue regarding equity/social justice/inclusion, support colleagues, and share humor/stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]