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The Grammar Gang blog has now passed its fourth anniversary as a borderless, non-proprietary language and learning online classroom. It gives wing to the aspirations of academic staff from four universities to explore language and learning across hemispheres. The Blog's recent birthday provides a timely opportunity to explore how this collaboration takes place and some possible ways to extend language, learning and academic support services. The Grammar Gang is an online classroom where people around the world can learn and explore their interest in language in a fun, conversational way. It is also a borderless classroom which queries the notion of institutional "ownership" in its traditional sense. Further, it opens wide the debate around the rights and wrongs of English language expression and learning. Four members of the Grammar Gang examine the implications of this digital collaboration in this context by addressing the ways in which the blog is used and some of the thinking within the literature around global English and institutional ownership of knowledge. The Grammar Gang continues to be an "adventure across the hemispheres" providing a model for others to follow.

The University of South Australia and Purdue University (Indiana) launched the "Grammar Gang Blog" in June 2008, as a collaborative forum for talking about language. The blog reaches a far-flung community of learners from Australia to the United States, Brisbane to Bangalore and Ghana to Germany. The Grammar Gang--where Owls meet Possums--started as a practical way to share knowledge about the function of grammar in academic writing at university. Two years later, the collaboration has grown to include the University of Adelaide. The Grammar Gang demonstrates how social software has given us an easy pathway to interact globally with those who have a common love of language. This paper discusses the way in which social software can be used for learning and global community building between students, university staff and their institutions. (Contains 4 figures.)

Despite the exponential growth in online learning, student retention rates in the online environment remain a concern to educators. Online learning @ UniSA is a learning object aimed at laying foundations for online learning for prospective students. It uses the voices of student peers to explore the qualities needed to succeed. Through the insights of four students and their facilitator, prospective online learners can make an informed choice about whether online study is likely to suit their own situation. Preliminary data supports the authors' hypothesis that the web site has allowed prospective students to select online study with their eyes wide open to what this choice really means.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various research papers within the issue on topics including classrooms without walls/borderless classrooms, international students and teaching and education.