Bricoleurs in preschool: girls poaching horror media and gendered discourses

Children's experiences and understandings are often marginalised in discussions of their own television viewing. Moreover, rarely is attention paid to the meaning children make from and with the ideas and images in media, much less in horror movies. This inquiry examines the horror media talk of a preschool girl in a poor and working-class preschool programme in a conservative Christian area in the Southern United States. One extended story by Jakaysha, a five-year-old African-American girl, is the focus of this paper. Using multiple post-structural theories including Davies' fluidity and Bakhtinian text mapping, we examine the contrasting gendered discourses in her narrative. Combining characters ‘poached’ from various media with discourses from her local community, she creates new horror media. In one reading of her tale, she uses horror to justify a departure from feminised subjectivities, while in another feminised expectations prevail, speaking to the multiple gendered subjectivities for girls.     

1. CBQ Review Essay: Global Telecommunication Company History

James Playsted Wood's The Curtis Magazines (New York: Ronald Press, 1971—price not known)

Magazines in the United States which has just been re-released in a revised (3rd) edition (New York: Ronald Press, 1971—price not known)

Otto Friedrich's Decline and Fall (New York, Harper &; Row/Ballentine, 1970—$10.00/1.25)     

Experiments with Industry's “Pair-Programming” Model in the Computer Science Classroom

Anecdotal evidence from several sources, primarily in industry, indicates that two programmers working collaboratively on the same design, algorithm, code, or test perform substantially better than the two working alone. Two courses taught at the University of Utah studied the use of this technique, often called pair-programming or collaborative programming, in the undergraduate computer science classroom. The students applied a positive form of “pair-pressure” on each other, which proved beneficial to the quality of their work products. The students also benefit from “pair-learning,” which allowed them to learn new languages faster and better than with solitary learning. The workload of the teaching staff is reduced because the students more often look to each other for technical support and advice.     

Joining Forces for Families: an embedded response to neighborhood poverty

The authors reflect on how they, as social work practitioners, support the school systems in supporting homeless youth and families. They emphasize the importance of relationships and trust in working with this vulnerable population. The reflexive vignettes highlight the challenges and success of developing community-based programming for homeless and highly mobile students.     

Partner Knowledge Awareness in Knowledge Communication: Learning by Adapting to the Partner

Awareness of the knowledge of learning partners is not always sufficiently available in collaborative learning scenarios. To compensate, the authors propose to provide collaborators with partner knowledge awareness by means of a visualization tool. Partner knowledge awareness can be used to adapt messages toward the partner. This study investigated the cognitive consequences of message adaptation on producers. The authors chose a simulated collaboration scenario in order to dissociate the producer effect from recipient and collaboration effects. Results on 42 participants that had been randomly assigned to either the partner knowledge awareness condition (partner and own knowledge visualized) or the control condition (only own knowledge visualized) are reported here. Participants in the partner knowledge awareness condition adapted their contributions according to the visualized partner's knowledge and benefited with regard to the acquisition of elaborated knowledge.     

Interrogative strategies and information exchange in computer‐mediated communication

The explosive growth of Internet and E‐mail use has provided exceptional opportunities for humans to mediate their communication and thus their relationships in new ways. This study reports on a content analysis of interrogative strategies used in E‐mail messages exchanged over six months between intergenerational sets of senior citizens and youngsters. A great deal of relationship development is facilitated by the use of questions which are a core aspect of uncertainty reduction processes. While Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT) has been a predominant theoretical position for examining face‐to‐face initial interaction, its utility for examining communication in an asynchronous, computer‐mediated environment was only partially effective. Data analyses focused on politeness of questions, types of questions, and, temporal effects. Results suggest that the interrogative strategies we engage in to achieve interpersonal connectedness are sometimes different in computer‐mediated communication (CMC) and a new standard for transacting relational message exhange may be emerging.