Productive Usability: Fostering Civic Engagement and Creating More Useful Online Spaces for Public Deliberation

This article offers productive usability as a usability approach that focuses on the usefulness of civic Web sites. Although some sites meet traditional usability standards, civic sites might fail to support technical literacy, productive inquiry, collaboration, and a multidimensional perspective—all essential ingredients for citizen-initiated change online. In this article, we map productive usability onto broader philosophies of usability and offer a framework for rethinking usability in civic settings and for teaching productive usability.     

Social and cognitive effects of professional communication on software usability

We designed and piloted a technical communication course for software engineering majors to take concurrently with their capstone project course in software design. In the pilot, one third of the capstone design course students jointly enrolled in the writing class. One goal of the collaborative courses was to use writing to improve the usability of students’ software. We studied the effects of writing on students’ user‐centered beliefs and design practices and on the usability of their product, using surveys, document analyses, expert reviews, and user test results. When possible, we compared the usability processes and products of teams who did and did not take the writing class. Our findings suggest that the synergy of this interdisciplinary approach effectively sensitized students to user‐centered design, instilled in them a commitment to it, and helped them develop usable products.     

NAECTE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE FEBRUARY 1999

Children whose native language is one other than English face formidable challenges when they enter English-dominant schools. The task of learning English, progressing in one's native language, and acculturating to the school environment is a complicated one that requires the child to develop many new skills. In the past, children who were English Language Learners (ELLs) encountered a school system that offered little support. New teachers who enter the workforce must now know how to help these children move successfully into the school setting and learn English at the same time. The purpose of this article is to describe the process of change that occurred during the first year of a professional development grant aimed at infusing English Language Learner (ELL) competencies within an early childhood higher education teacher preparation program. A process is described that helped the faculty move from an awareness level to one that embraced a system to integrate ELL skill development within their coursework.     

Mediation of Consultee's Conceptual Development in New Teacher Groups: Using Questions to Improve Coherency

This qualitative study applied methods used in discourse analysis to investigate how a consultant's questioning supported the goal of group consultation to empower beginning teachers to become effective problem solvers in their work environment. The focus of the study was on the process of questioning and communicative coherency as the group evolved over the course of the school year. The participants in this study were 7 White elementary school teachers in their first year of teaching. There were 12 sessions held over an 8-month period. The investigators found evidence of a parallel process between the coordinate consultation process and coherency in consultative discourse, such that as the coordinate process developed and improved, so did the coherency of group discourse. Implications for practice, training, and future research are discussed.     

The Process of Fostering Consultee Development During Instructional Consultation

This investigation examines how the process of instructional consultation (IC) supports consultees' problem-solving and fosters change in how the consultees understand pertinent work problems. The setting was a mid-Atlantic elementary school's Instructional Consultation Team, and the participants were 13 case manager consultants and 5 teacher consultees. A micro-ethnographic research approach was used and 4 primary sources of data collected: interviews, direct observations, consultation documents, and IC training documents. Analysis of the data uncovered 4 general themes related to the participants' problem-solving and evolving understanding of the work issues. In the discussion, the question of how IC is a constructive process that promotes consultees' development is considered.     

Meeting in the Middle: The Role of Mutual Biracial Friends in Cross-Race Friendships

Social network analysis was used to examine the role of having a mutual biracial friend on cross-race friendship nominations among monoracial sixth-grade students (M_age = 10.56 years) in two racially diverse middle schools (n = 385; n = 351). Monoracial youth were most likely to choose same-race peers as friends but more likely to choose biracial than different-race peers as friends, suggesting that racial homophily may operate in an incremental way to influence friendships. Monoracial different-race youth were also more likely to be friends if they had a mutual biracial friend. The findings shed light on the unique role that biracial youth play in diverse friendship networks. Implications for including biracial youth in studies of cross-race friendship are discussed.     

Creating a flexible fund structure to meet the needs and goals of the library and its users

This paper describes the Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries' new and innovative approach to monograph collection development using a re-engineered internal funding structure and a process that reflects the needs and goals of the library and its users. The paper discusses the goals of the new fund structure, the experience of implementing it, and the results after one year in use.     

Nineteenth century chrome yellow and chrome deep from Winsor & NewtonTM

The Winsor & Newton^TM (W&N) nineteenth century archive database includes digitised images of hand-written instructions and workshop notes for the manufacture of their artists’ materials. For the first time, all 183 production records for yellow lead chromate pigments were studied and evaluated. They revealed that W&N produced essentially three pigment types: lemon/pale based on mixed crystals of lead chromate and lead sulphate [Pb(Cr,S)O₄]; middle on pure monoclinic lead chromate [PbCrO₄]; and deep that contains the latter admixed with basic lead chromate [Pb₂CrO₅]; accounting for 53, 22, and 21% of the production, respectively. Production records for primrose (4%) were also included since the formulation results in mixed crystals with a high percentage of lead sulphate, which, according to the literature, leaves it more prone to degradation. Each pigment type is characterised by only one or two main synthetic pathways; process variations reveal a systematic and thorough search for a high-quality durable product. A comparison of the chemical composition of pigment reconstructions with early W&N oil paint tubes showed that their records entitled ‘pale’ and ‘lemon’ correlated with the pigment in their tube labelled chrome yellow and, ‘middle’ and ‘deep’ with the label chrome deep. Lemon and middle pigment formulations were made into oil paints to assess their relative photo-stability. The degradation process was followed by colorimetry and was studied by synchrotron radiation-based techniques. Based on the X-ray absorption spectroscopy data, the possibility for creating a stability index for chrome yellows is discussed.