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The great influx of international students into UK universities has led to internationalisation becoming an important issue. Previous studies have focused on the integration of home and international students, illustrating a lack of intercultural interaction. Yet there has been a lack of research investigating international students' networks and how these networks evolve over time. The study reported in the current paper sought to fill this gap. The research findings were interpreted through the lens of Community of Practice (CoP) and Social Networks (SN) theories. Findings confirmed that international students have four distinct types of network. The class did not evolve towards a single cohesive network, rather there were changing clusters of relationship. The findings showed that although co-national factors are important at the beginning of students' learning, they are not always the main influences shaping student networks. The findings are significant for both institutions and teachers.

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Purpose This study aims to explore undergraduate students’ perceptions of teaching information and communication technology (ICT) courses in the library and information science (LIS) program in Jordanian universities. It also aims at investigating the correlation between the impact of some variables, namely, gender, the type of university, academic year and student GPA on and their students’ views. Design/methodology/approach Quantitative methods were adopted. A questionnaire with 40 items was distributed on a stratified random sample of 220 students from four LIS departments in Jordan and, of whom, 203 responded with a response rate of 92.3 per cent. Findings Research findings indicated that teaching ICT courses was considered highly important. Students stressed on the importance of incorporating ICT courses in LIS programs. They also pointed out the competence of the teaching staff and the efficacy of their teaching methods. On the other hand, student assessments of the curriculum content, the teaching pedagogy and methods of assessment were on an average level. In addition, the findings indicated that resources and facilities necessary to teach ICT courses were available and adequate. It was noted that the “university” was the only factor that affected results; the University of Jordan students showed a higher satisfaction. The other factors (gender, academic year and GPA) did not appear to affect student perceptions. Originality/value Previous studies investigated the importance of teaching ICT courses in general but did not consider students’ perceptions. Only a few studies discussed students’ perceptions of studying ICT courses but in a different context, i.e. Kuwait. This research focused on students’ perceptions of studying ICT in Jordan as a new geographic region. This would be beneficial for other developing countries to learn from this experience and refine their ICT curricula and LIS programs accordingly.

This paper compares two projects that adopted social bookmarking (SB) technology in different educational contexts at the same institution, a large, research-intensive university in the north of England. The first study used social bookmarking in a multicultural postgraduate class to increase interactivity within the whole class and to produce an archive of course-related online resources to engage potentially isolated students. The second study used social bookmarking to support first year undergraduate students' independent research activities, to facilitate collaboration and to aid the tutor's preparation for seminar classes. The paper provides an outline of the two studies, including a description of the pedagogic approaches adopted in them, developments in the pedagogy over time and evaluative and usage data that were collected. The discussion focuses on five main issues: SB literacy; SB benefits; SB costs and risks; SB pedagogy; and SB alternatives.