Online social media have transformed the face of human interaction in the 21st century. Wikis, blogs, online groups and forums, podcasts, virtual worlds, and social tagging are but a few of the applications enabling innovative behaviors that support acquisition, access, manipulation, retrieval, and visualization of information. It is, therefore, no surprise that educational practitioners and theorists have begun to explore how social media can be harnessed to describe and implement new paradigms for communication, learning, and education.

The editors' goal in publishing this book was to identify original research on the application of online social media and related technologies in education as well as emerging applications in Web technologies that could provide and shape future educational platforms. The selected contributions deal with questions such as how social media can truly enrich and enhance learning and teaching experiences in ways not otherwise possible; how learning can be integrated in a distributed and ubiquitous social computing environment; or what theories, paradigms, and models are applicable for the support of social computing in education. Researchers in education or educational software will find interesting and sometimes provocative chapters on paradigms and methodologies, virtual and mobile learning spaces, and assessment and social factors. Practitioners in these fields will benefit from an additional section devoted to case studies and first experience reports.

HTML and the Art of Authoring For the World Wide Web is devoted to teaching the Web user how to generate good hypertext. `As a result of (this) rapid uncontrolled growth, the Web community may be facing a `hypertext crisis'. Thousands of hastily written or ill conceived documents may soon be presented to readers poorly formatted or unusable... .' (From the Preface.) `The clear and practical ways in which HTML and the Art of Authoring For the World Wide Web sets forth the principles of the Web, the operation of its servers and browsers, and its publishing concept is commendable. It will be an indispensable guide to the Web author as well as the sophisticated user.' (From the Foreword by Robert Cailliau.) `Despite its user friendliness, the Web has, by its own virtue, a default that makes it difficult for people to know where to begin: there is no starting point to the Web. Bebo White's HTML and the Art of Authoring For the World Wide Web will fill this gap immediately, as it provides a clear, introductory and sequential description of the fundamental concepts that lie underneath the Web. It describes HTML as an SGML application, explains the relationship between HTML and SGML, and gives a complete description of all the structure that HTML provides.' (From the Foreword by Eric van Herwijnen.)

Online social media have transformed the face of human interaction in the 21st century. Wikis, blogs, online groups and forums, podcasts, virtual worlds, and social tagging are but a few of the applications enabling innovative behaviors that support acquisition, access, manipulation, retrieval, and visualization of information. It is, therefore, no surprise that educational practitioners and theorists have begun to explore how social media can be harnessed to describe and implement new paradigms for communication, learning, and education. The editors' goal in publishing this book was to identify original research on the application of online social media and related technologies in education as well as emerging applications in Web technologies that could provide and shape future educational platforms. The selected contributions deal with questions such as how social media can truly enrich and enhance learning and teaching experiences in ways not otherwise possible; how learning can be integrated in a distributed and ubiquitous social computing environment; or what theories, paradigms, and models are applicable for the support of social computing in education. Researchers in education or educational software will find interesting and sometimes provocative chapters on paradigms and methodologies, virtual and mobile learning spaces, and assessment and social factors. Practitioners in these fields will benefit from an additional section devoted to case studies and first experience reports.

HTML and the Art of Authoring For the World Wide Web is devoted to teaching the Web user how to generate good hypertext. `As a result of (this) rapid uncontrolled growth, the Web community may be facing a `hypertext crisis'. Thousands of hastily written or ill conceived documents may soon be presented to readers poorly formatted or unusable... .' (From the Preface.) `The clear and practical ways in which HTML and the Art of Authoring For the World Wide Web sets forth the principles of the Web, the operation of its servers and browsers, and its publishing concept is commendable. It will be an indispensable guide to the Web author as well as the sophisticated user.' (From the Foreword by Robert Cailliau.) `Despite its user friendliness, the Web has, by its own virtue, a default that makes it difficult for people to know where to begin: there is no starting point to the Web. Bebo White's HTML and the Art of Authoring For the World Wide Web will fill this gap immediately, as it provides a clear, introductory and sequential description of the fundamental concepts that lie underneath the Web. It describes HTML as an SGML application, explains the relationship between HTML and SGML, and gives a complete description of all the structure that HTML provides.' (From the Foreword by Eric van Herwijnen.)