Sharon Lauricella

University of Ontario Institute of Technology | UOIT · Communication and Digital Media Studies

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected deep reflection in higher education classrooms: how do we attract and retain students to (temporary but nevertheless increasing) online learning experiences, how do we keep them at our universities and colleges, and how do we give students a learning experience from which they will remember meaningful information?...

Thriving online: A guide for busy educators focuses on helping educators (secondary school and higher education level) succeed and thrive in blended and online learning settings. Grounded in evidence-based practices and principles, we share diverse and extensive insights on starting out, differentiated learning, learning activities, feedback and as...

Effective feedback provides more than information on whether a student is right or wrong; it gives them clear directions about how their performance or knowledge aligns with assignment expectations (Feldman, 2019). Good feedback will also provide students with information on adjusting or changing their work to achieve success (Talbert, 2015). For l...

Thriving online: A guide for busy educators focuses on helping educators (secondary school and higher education level) succeed and thrive in blended and online learning settings. Grounded in evidence-based practices and principles, we share diverse and extensive insights on starting out, differentiated learning, learning activities, feedback and as...

Thriving online: A guide for busy educators focuses on helping educators (secondary school and higher education level) succeed and thrive in blended and online learning settings. Grounded in evidence-based practices and principles, we share diverse and extensive insights on starting out, differentiated learning, learning activities, feedback and as...

Perusall is a social annotation tool that engages students in digital course materials. The system facilitates student interaction via posts of questions, responses, and comments on the video, written materials, and audio sources. The platform was created to increase student interaction with course readings and course-specific materials. This paper...

Building community and connection in online courses can be challenging. Discord, a mobile and desktop app popular with gamers, is explicitly designed to stimulate discussion, conversations, and community. This paper explored student perceptions of the benefits and challenges of using Discord in two upper-year, undergraduate, online social science c...

This paper explores how Ludic Pedagogy – the incorporation of fun, play, playfulness, and positivity into learning – can address challenges to student disengagement and academic integrity. We use the case of AI predictive text tool ChatGPT to illustrate how intrinsic motivation can come from students' enjoyment and satisfaction with learning. We ma...

Judging, marking, and ranking students is a common practice in higher education, though the pervasive dependence upon grades to dictate a student’s success or failure has come under increased scrutiny. While “ungrading” and alternative grading practices are endorsed by progressive educators, there are few systematic, empirical studies of student re...

In this introduction, guest editors Dr. Sharon Lauricella and Dr. Robin Kay summarize the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of Digital Life and Learning.

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated postsecondary students' mental health challenges, students were already struggling with issues that were pervasive in higher education, including anxiety, depression, overwhelm, burnout, and difficulty accessing mental health supports. This paper examines 1007 Twitter posts pertaining to higher educatio...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

Ludic Pedagogy: A Seriously Fun Way to Teach and Learn outlines why and how having fun and positive experiences in college and university classes (and not just at social events or parties) leads to increased student success in face-to-face, hybrid, hyflex, or online environments. It provides readers with the Ludic Pedagogy model, together with how...

The online arena is rife with mansplaining, harassment, and intimidation of women. Similarly, women in academia operate in a traditionally patriarchal, misogynistic environment. What happens when a female academic creates a vibrant online presence? This chapter is an autoethnographic account of the author's experiences managing the public, online p...

Thriving online: A guide for busy educators focuses on helping educators (secondary school and higher education level) succeed and thrive in blended and online learning settings. Grounded in evidence-based practices and principles, we share diverse and extensive insights on starting out, differentiated learning, learning activities, feedback and as...

As the acquisition of microcredentials becomes a more common practice, the authors foresee that there will emerge a variety of ways in which students can acquire microcredentials; such acquisition may manifest across multiple academic courses, programs, or experiences. In this chapter, they address how microcredentials are incorporated into and ass...

Social media scholarship has acknowledged a challenging environment for women in which online harassment is both present and prevalent. Similarly, women in academia operate in a traditionally patriarchal, misogynistic environment. What happens when a female academic creates a vibrant online presence? This paper is an autoethnographic account of my...

https://www.flowjournal.org/2021/03/using-media-to-teach-media/

An increase in the popularity of yoga in the West runs concurrent with an increase in self-declared vegans and vegetarians. Adherence to an animal-free diet follows the core principles of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. An ancient text which provides an instruction to yoga practitioners regarding their personal and moral conduct, the Yoga Sutras are...

The online arena is rife with mansplaining, harassment, and intimidation of women. Similarly, women in academia operate in a traditionally patriarchal, misogynistic environment. What happens when a female academic creates a vibrant online presence? This chapter is an autoethnographic account of the author's experiences managing the public, online p...

Media power couple Roma Downey and Mark Burnett’s 2015 reality program Answered Prayers appeared as a six-episode series on TLC. The program depicts prayer lives through spoken interview-style vignettes and reenactments portraying individuals and families in crisis. This article addresses the ways in which Answered Prayers depicts how people pray,...

This Best Practices article outlines 10 tips relative to teaching a course in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). It outlines suggestions for readings, activities, and projects throughout a semester-long undergraduate course. The article addresses how students can learn both the theory and practice of nonviolence by means of readings and activities tha...

London-based boy band One Direction was created after each of the young band members auditioned separately for Britain’s X Factor; they were subsequently signed as a group by well-known reality television judge and producer Simon Cowell. The group’s notable success includes 7 American Awards, 27 Teen Choice awards, and they were the first band in U...

In June 2018, discourse around immigration to the U.S. came to a peak when award-winning Getty Images photographer John Moore captured an image of a distraught, crying, two-year-old Honduran child beside her mother and a U.S. border agent. The image of the toddler, with her shoelaces removed and mouth agape in a wail, came to represent Trump’s “zer...

Global initiatives have directed education to emphasize science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The purpose of this study was to assess elementary school teacher attitudes and behaviours with respect to using STEM-based apps in the classroom. This mixed-methods study involved 34 teacher-participants (14 males, 20 females) integrati...

Previous research on the use of apps in elementary school classrooms has employed general measures of attitude and learning performance to assess overall tablet use. This study uses a reliable, validated metric for attitude and content-based learning performance measures based on Bloom's revised taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) to examine th...

Medical drama Grey's Anatomy (Peter Horton, US 2005-) features weddings as piv-otal life events and has portrayed 14 unions over the program's 13 seasons on ABC. This article is a synthetic approach combining communication, gender studies, and grounded theory methodology to examine weddings in Grey's Anatomy through a feminist lens. We employ Judit...

This study considers five high-profile female chemists on Twitter, and identifies ways in which women, as established chemistry professionals on social media, construct their online identities via an important social media channel. Emergent themes in the data include (a) participation in popular culture, (b) engaging with politics and issues of soc...

This chapter considers how the spiritual practice of prayer is represented in the reality program Answered Prayers. I suggest that the program, in keeping with neoliberal values expressed by mainstream media, asserts that the individual is responsible for his or her own salvation and agency in being part of a miracle. The “invisible hand” of God is...

Modern media representations of Blacks as violent and criminal (Crichlow 2009, 2014) have contributed to the construction of Blacks, and particularly Black males, as ensconced in a life of crime, poverty, and violence. The issue of media depiction of Black males is particularly important in the present age—coined “post-racial”—after Barack Obama’s...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how fire services use social media to educate the public about safety and fire prevention. Design/methodology/approach Grounded theoretical methods were employed in a rigorous qualitative analysis of five significant fire services’ Twitter accounts in Ontario, Canada. Findings Seven main themes e...

A spiritual—yet not religious—practice, meditation has been touted as beneficial to boosting the immune system, lowering blood pressure, alleviating migraines, and increasing gray matter in parts of the brain. While scientific research on meditation is beginning to quantify its benefits, there is increasing concern among the scientific community th...

Acknowledgement is a communicative act through which we confirm, affirm, or validate another (Hyde 2006). This paper is an autoethnographic account of my experiences in conducting a personal experiment in which I wrote letters to students, friends, colleagues, family, and even strangers in order to acknowledge them for the difference that they make...

Spirituality has been associated with a journey metaphor by both scholars of spirituality and spiritual practitioners. In this paper, we address the notion of spiritual hitchhiking and hospitality. The combination of trust and vulnerability in hitchhiking is in keeping with the same elements in spiritual seeking. To date, no academic work has consi...

Contemporary work on spirituality in the field of communication and media studies consists of three principal areas: theoretical development, field praxis and pedagogy. Fundamental is the conceptualization of spirituality as the creation of meaning, the sharing of which defines the parameters of communication. In an age in which communication is in...

The laptop computer is considered one of the most used and important technological devices in higher education, yet limited systematic research has been conducted to develop a measure of laptop use in college and university. The purpose of the following study was to develop a research-based, theoretically grounded scale to assess student use of lap...

Chocolate-flavoured cow's milk has changed its image from a playful beverage for young children to a powerful post-workout beverage suitable for and helpful to elite athletes such as Ironman competitors. Elite athletes, as a respected hegemonic cultural class, have fuelled this shift in perception by endorsing chocolate milk consumption amongst bot...

A spiritual – but not necessarily religious – practice, meditation has been touted as beneficial to boosting the immune system, lowering blood pressure, alleviating migraines, and increasing grey matter in parts of the brain. While scientific research on meditation is beginning to quantify its benefits, there is increasing concern amongst the scien...

A variety of communication technologies are used in higher education classrooms, however, limited research has been conducted comparing the relative educational impact of these media. This paper explores four types of communication media: email, instant messaging, text messaging, and video chat. Comfort level, frequency of use, usefulness, reasons...

This study examines both if and why university students believe that increased exposure to holistic principles would have been beneficial to their success after finishing secondary education. The overwhelming majority—on average about 70%— of participants agreed that had they had more exposure to holistic principles (personal identity, meaning/purp...

This paper describes the experience of a group of undergraduate students’ (n = 40) experience learning mindfulness meditation. The practice of mindfulness meditation can help individuals to self-calm, focus on the present moment, and experience physical and mental health benefits. This skill is of particular importance to undergraduate students, wh...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the benefits and challenges using laptop computers (hereafter referred to as laptops) inside and outside higher education classrooms. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 156 university students (54 males, 102 females) enrolled in either education or communication studies. Benefits of us...

Sunni–Shia relations have become a topic of significant media attention; this attention is largely due to the tendency of these groups to engage in sectarian strife as well as the Islamic Shia sect’s influential rise in world politics. The inter-Islamic sectarian relations are part of extensive reporting on upheaval events currently taking place in...

This paper assesses the efficacy of teaching a new course in the communication curriculum entitled Nonviolent Communication and Peace. Three studies are included: two pilot studies at a large Eastern US university and a final study which also included data from a concurrent study at a large Canadian university. Results from a pre-post instructional...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the benefits and challenges of using laptop computers (hereafter referred to as laptops) inside and outside higher education classrooms. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 156 university students (54 males, 102 females) enrolled in either education or communication studies. Benefits...

Mohandas Gandhi, one of the world’s best known vegetarians, demonstrated his conviction and dedication to the appropriate treatment of animals in accordance with the core principles of living as outlined in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The Yoga Sutras, including the yamas and niyamas, are instructions to individuals regarding personal conduct; the...

This article examined how higher education students used text and instant messaging for academic purposes with their peers and faculty. Specifically, comfort level, frequency of use, usefulness, reasons for messaging and differences between peer-to-peer and peer-to-instructor interactions were examined. Students noted that they were very comfortabl...

While incarcerated on Rikers Island, Grammy award-winning rapper Lil’ Wayne posted letters to a blog to maintain contact with fans. The blog entries and comments from fans express gratitude, positivity, encouragement, and a pervasive sense of spirituality and religiousness. This paper considers the content of Lil’ Wayne’s letters from Rikers,...

While incarcerated on Rikers Island, Grammy award-winning rapper Lil’ Wayne posted letters to a blog to maintain contact with fans. The blog entries and comments from fans express gratitude, positivity, encouragement, and a pervasive sense of spirituality and religiousness. This paper considers the content of Lil’ Wayne’s letters from Rikers, toget...

This critical literature review considers how prayer is practiced throughout the life course, why it is practiced, and the influences upon prayer behaviours throughout different life stages. Specific age groups considered include children, adolescents, undergraduates, adults, and elders. Comparisons and contrasts in prayer behaviours are made among...

The coexistence of the religious (or “holy”) and the secular (the “profane”) has been identified and celebrated in the context of hip hop and rap music; references to prayer and spirituality are present, while the “hustler” and “gangster” stereotype is simultaneously referenced and played out in this popular genre. This paper considers T.I. and Jay...

This article employs uses and gratifications theory to conduct an audience analysis on crime drama viewership. To the best of our knowledge, this theory has not yet specifically been applied to this genre, thus providing a basis for the research study. Three independent variables (age, sex, frequency of crime drama viewing) were tested against four...

Theoretical linkages between communication sources (mediated and interpersonal), prayer (public and private), and spiritual health are derived from Relational Prayer theory. These relationships are empirically investigated using quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Participants (N = 151) completed a written survey for extra credit. Mediated...

Because of decreased prices, increased convenience, and wireless access, an increasing number of college and university students are using laptop computers in their classrooms. This recent trend has forced instructors to address the educational consequences of using these mobile devices. The purpose of the current study was to analyze and assess be...

Because of decreased prices, increased convenience, and wireless access, an increasing number of college and university students are using laptop computers in their classrooms. This recent trend has forced instructors to address the educational consequences of using these mobile devices. The purpose of the current study was to analyze and assess be...

Over the past 18 years, a number of large scale reviews of the literature have documented that gender differences in computer attitudes, ability, and use tend to favor males. Since the use of laptops in higher education classrooms is increasing, it is important to examine whether this use is disproportionally advantageous to males and disadvantageo...

A majority of today's higher education students have been nurtured on a steady diet of technol-ogy and Internet access, leading to the increased presence of laptops in higher education class-rooms. However, many instructors are unsure whether or how to assimilate this technology into their lessons. The purpose of the following study was to examine...

This paper considers The Secret DVD, together with the accompanying book and website, by means of analyzing an active audience seeking spiritual meaning and results. This study hypothesizes that many of those who have adopted The Secret’s spiritual framework have done so by adhering to beliefs and practices just as one would when they commit to an...

Considerable research has been conducted examining the use of laptops in higher education, however, a reliable and valid scale to assess in-class use of laptops has yet to be developed. The purpose of the following study was to develop and evaluate the Laptop Effectiveness Scale (LES). The scale consisted of four constructs: academic use and three...

Objective: Students will enhance their information literacy skills (ability to determine the validity, currency, and appropriateness) relative to web resources. Courses: Professional Writing, Academic Writing, Introduction to Communication