Young Children's Spatial Representations Developed through Exploration of a Desktop Virtual Reality Scene

Virtual Reality (VR) technology seems to offer the opportunity of designing 3D worlds and navigation activities which provide settings that are close to children's everyday experiences, capitalising on their enthusiasm for videogame-like technologies.This paper describes how different types of exploration of a VR scene by 6[emsp4 ]y-old children affected their performance in a series of spatial tasks. Individual children explored a desktop virtual world where we varied both the visual perspective on the VR scene (route vs. survey view) and the level of exploration control (active vs. passive movement). We measured children's knowledge of the spatial layout of the environment through their memory of objects' location in the virtual scene and through the analysis of their wayfinding abilities within the scene.The results indicate that children were able to develop and display different levels of allocentric knowledge about the virtual world depending on the way they had familiarized with it and on the characteristics of the task demands. This finding contributes to inform the design of VR technologies aimed at supporting or evaluating spatial abilities in children of this age.     

Who is using the .co.uk domain? Professional and media adoption of the web

This paper reports on a survey of 221 web sites chosen at random from a subset of the .co.uk area of the Internet. A breakdown of the types of business represented shows that whilst computing companies continue to have a sizeable presence on the web, certain other types of business now also have a relatively large number of sites. The survey found many media-related businesses and professional-based companies and practices, reflecting the increasing use of Information Technology in these areas but also the increasing knowledge about the Internet that is needed or helpful in many types of job. The results are consistent with general business use of the web in the UK still being in an experimental phase of web site creation by those who can rather than by those who should.     

Effects of success and failure on emotionally handicapped boys

The study was designed to investigate the extent to which expectancies and performance of emotionally handicapped children could be altered by success- or failure-induced experiences. Students were randomly assigned to either of two experimental conditions during five trials of a guessing task. Immediately following the initial experience, all children were asked to estimate their expectancy of success on a novel learning task; students were then given a progressive matrix worksheet with ten problems which required adding and/or subtracting. It was hypothesized that those students in the success condition would have higher expectancies and actual performance scores than the children in the failure condition. It was further hypothesized that expectancy levels and performance scores would be related. An analysis of the results indicated that success and failure on a task were influential on subsequent expectancy estimates and performance; a discussion of these results is presented.     

The positive purpose of remediation: Getting to the core of higher education

Mike Rose argues that remediation, despite its negative reputation, is both a historically appropriate function of higher education and intimately interconnected with its foundational concerns.     

Making Sense in Art Lessons

Meaning in the arts has been explained in terms of the ‘linguistic/cognitive’ metaphor, that is as a product of a framework of conventions, rules and symbols, of shared conceptualisations with a clearly defined ‘conceptual space’. Sense in a work of art is dependent upon this framework and only by conventionalising pupils into it will they be able to communicate meaning. The problem is that the arts take their audience beyond the framework, beyond the boundaries of sense. The question then becomes how the arts continue to have meaning, paradoxically, to continue to make sense even though they have exceeded its boundaries. The solution to this problem, it is argued, lies in the way that the arts appeal directly to our uniquely human ability to reflect on commonly experienced feelings and to consequently transcend particular frameworks of meaning. Rather than meaning being subject to frameworks within which experience and artistic intention are seen to be made possible, I argue that experience has an autonomous presence in art, a presence that enables meaning to be communicated with spontaneity and immediacy.     

The StartwithXML Project: Understand the Point and Path to a Digital Workflow

To pursue emerging revenue opportunities in the most cost-efficient way (or sometimes to be able to pursue them at all), book publishers are going to have to adopt a StartwithXML workflow. That means their content needs to live in an XML-structured document from the earliest possible moment, which could be “inception”, and carry within it metadata about the document structure, the content itself, and the rights to all components. The tools exist to do this, but the organizational challenges of changing workflows and inventing new procedures are daunting. This project explores the business case and the implementation challenges, including case studies of companies who have already begun to work this way.