This chapter discusses the use of blogging in a beginning level academic writing course. Blogging was used in this writing course both as a means of interacting with the other students and as a means of discussing the issues the students were to write about in their classroom assignments, all of which dealt with issues related to the nature of plagiarism and what policies towards plagiarism should the university adopt. The chapter analyzes the blogs of an African immigrant student. It is argued that the use of blogs allows the students to develop a variety of rhetorical strategies outside the confines of the course that could then be transferred into the student’s academic writing assignments.

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The increase in online courses offered in higher education, the reliance on highly developed academic literacy skills to learn course content, the complex nature of media literacy, the negotiation of multiple technologies, and the corresponding media literacy together can be quite challenging for online learners. Most research conducted on academic literacies has focused primarily on academic reading and writing practices rather than on media literacy. This chapter discusses an investigation of media literacy in an online course, the experience learners had with this literacy and online tasks. The chapter discusses results of data from the online learners and instructor, which showed the instructor required different media literacy proficiency than what the online learners possessed prior to beginning the online course. Finally, the chapter presents implications the study findings have for online instructors' effective development, design, and delivery of online courses and development of online learners' media literacy.

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Increasingly, teachers are being asked to work with growing numbers of multilingual and multicultural students in their classrooms. This condition requires that teachers have the ability to operate in a globalized space where exchanges are plurilingual and pluricultural (Kramsch, 2008). Community engagement provides teachers an opportunity to gain the knowledge and skills they need to operate in a globalize space, and, at the same time, engage, in their local communities, and in the global communities represented in their classrooms. To better help teachers successfully work in globalized spaces, a community engagement project was implemented in an online Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) course for graduate students in the TESOL Program at a large public research university in Ohio. The two-fold purpose of the study was: 1) To prepare teachers to be successful in a global society by gaining experience working with multilingual and multicultural learners; 2) To provide teachers the opportunity to apply TESOL theory and methods when working with these learners.