Television and the Developing Imagination of the Child

The paper examines whether television enriches a child's imagination, leads to distortions of reality, and whether adult mediation while a child views a program or immediately after can evoke constructive changes or stimulate make‐believe play.     

Implementing a personalized resource management program for a small medical library by using LinkOut

End users want easy access to electronic full-text articles from their desktops. This small medical library has implemented an easy and cost-effective resource management program to meet this user need. This column will describe the implementation, use, and maintenance of the National Library of Medicine's LinkOut, a personalized resource management program that provides immediate access to the library's online journal full-text holdings via hyperlinks.     

Learning how to respond to current events: Partner journals between U. S. preservice teachers and children

The representation of a variety of stakeholders' voices during the deliberation of public issues is vital for the proper functioning of a liberal democracy. This qualitative study examined an activity involving deliberation among children and preservice teachers in the United States. In the activity that we call partner journals, children were partnered with preservice teachers as pen pals to deliberate shared current events texts. Data included partner journals, written reflections from preservice teachers, and interviews with the children's teachers. All students gained perspective consciousness of someone with a different social positioning, a higher-order thinking skill vital to social justice and democratic education. The issues of teacher disclosure and power were particularly important to preservice teachers. Findings suggest implications for future research on partner journals with other partnerings of different social positionings.     

Speaking, listening and learning: a rationale for the Speaking and Listening Profile

Schools have often not recognised the basis for literacy that oracy provides, but with the issuing of the recent package for speaking and listening to schools, Speaking, Listening, Learning, the tide is now beginning to turn. However, many schools still have not set up any developmentally sequenced structure for assessment in this strand of English. Realising this need, Dorothy Latham has designed such a profile, based on the criteria given in the official package, but with useful additions, showing clear definitive levelling in an easy‐to‐use format. Schools have been consulted and continue to trial its use.