Windows into Children’s Thinking: A Guide to Storytelling and Dramatization

Telling and dramatizing stories is an increasingly popular addition to the preschool curriculum, largely due to the attention this activity has received through the writings of Vivian Paley (Bad guys don’t have birthdays: fantasy play at four. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988; The boy who would be a helicopter: the uses of storytelling in the kindergarten. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990; A child’s work: the importance of fantasy play. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004). While the writings of Paley and others (Cooper, When stories come to school: telling, writing, and performing stories in the early childhood classroom. Teachers & Writers Collaborative, New York, 1993; Engel 1999) focus on the social and cognitive outcomes children experience as a result of storytelling, less has been written about the process of writing and dramatizing stories with young children. This article discusses procedures and considerations that enhance storytelling with preschool children, including effective prompts for encouraging children’s creativity, potential trouble spots such as aggression in stories, and ways that storytelling can enhance home-school relationships.     

PolicyMap: Mapping Social Determinants of Health

PolicyMap is a mapping resource from The Reinvestment Fund that offers access to a range of demographic and health-related data, including chronic disease incidence, health care provider locations, food access, mass transit, and other social determinates of health. This column features a sample search and describes the types of outputs available with PolicyMap.     

A Critique of Internet Polls as Symbolic Representation and Pseudo-Events

The Internet continues to grow as an information and entertainment medium. Internet growth has implications for the news industry. Twenty-four hour news networks such as CNN and MSNBC regularly encourage viewers of their television programs to visit their Web sites. While visiting news Web sites, visitors are invited to participate in opinion polls. Unfortunately, these online opinion polls are not scientific and have little real news value. In spite of these limitations, news Web sites' Internet polls are often treated as serious topics in broadcast news discussions. This article examines media organizations' Internet online polls and critiques them as instances of symbolic representation and pseudo-events that have arisen largely out of the integration of print, broadcast, and Internet media.     

Our Designs and the Social Agendas They Carry

Although the work of learning scientists and instructional designers has brought about countless curricula, designs, and theoretical claims, the community has been less active in communicating the explicit and implicit critical social agendas that result (or could result) from their work. It is our belief that the community of learning scientists is well positioned to build transformative models of what could be, to develop learning and teaching interventions that have impact, and to advance theory that will prove valuable to others. This potential, we argue, would be significantly heightened if we as a community embrace the critical agendas that are central to so many discussions in anthropology, philosophy, or even curriculum development more generally. Instead of simply building an artifact to help individuals accomplish a particular task, or to meet a specific standard, the focus of critical design work is to develop sociotechnical structures that facilitate individuals in critiquing and improving themselves and the societies in which they function, and then we use our understanding of participation with these structures to advance theory. As an example of critical design work, we describe the Quest Atlantis project and the methodology used in its creation.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. (Karl Marx, 1845/1998)     

7. German and Scandinavian Media Studies

CRITICAL IDEAS IN TELEVISION STUDIES by John Corner (New York: Oxford University Press “Oxford Television Studies,”; 1999—$52.00/19.95, ISBN 0–19–874221–5 hard, ISBN 0–19–874220–7 paper, 139 pp., references, index)

USES OF TELEVISION by John Hartley (London: Routledge, 1999—$75.00/22.99, ISBN 0–415–08508‐X hard, 0–415–08509–8 paper, 246 pp., figures and pictures, appendixes, references, index)

WAVES OF RANCOR: TUNING IN THE RADICAL RIGHT by Robert L Hilliard and Michael C. Keith (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe “Media, Communication, and Culture in America,”; 1999—$32.95, ISBN 0–7656–0131–1, 288 pp., appendices, notes, index)

THE HIDDEN SCREEN: LOW‐POWER TELEVISION IN AMERICA by Robert C. Hilliard and Michael C. Keith (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999—prices not given, ISBN 0–7656–0419–1 hard, 0–7656–0420–5, 212 pp., photos, notes, further reading, index)

ACTIVE RADIO: PACIFICA'S BRASH EXPERIMENT by Jeff Land (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press “Commerce and Mass Culture,”; 1999—$42.95/16.95, ISBN 0–8166–3156–5 hard, 0–8166–3157–3 paper, 179 pp., photos, notes, bibliography, program index, text index)

MAKING SENSE OF TELEVISION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AUDIENCE INTERPRETATION by Sonia Livingstone (London: Routledge “International Series in Social Psychology,”; 1998 [2nd ed.]—$85.00/25.99, ISBN 0–415–18623–4 hard, 0–415–18536‐X paper, 212 pp., tables, bibliography, author and subject indexes)

TELEVISION: A MEDIA STUDENT'S GUIDE by David McQueen (London: Arnold, 1998—$55.00/18.95, ISBN 0–340–719764 hard, 0–340–70604‐X paper, 275 pp., illustrations, suggested readings, index)

HANDBOOK ON RADIO AND TELEVISION AUDIENCE RESEARCH by Graham Mytton (New York: UNICEF House, 1999 [Rev. and expanded ed.]—$20.95, paper, ISBN 92–806–3393–7, 191 pp., appendices, bibliography, glossary, references)

A BROADCAST ENGINEERING TUTORIAL FOR NON ENGINEERS (Washington, DC: NAB, 1999 [2nd ed.]—$49.95/29.97, paper, ISBN 0–89324–275–6, 209 pp., diagrams, index)

DIGITAL TELEVISION IN A DIGITAL ECONOMY: OPPORTUNITIES FOR BROADCASTERS by A. T. Kearney (Washington, DC: NAB, 1998— $164.99/98.99, paper, ISBN 0–89324–316–7, about 100 pp., charts, tables, notes, glossary)

NAB ENGINEERING HANDBOOK edited by Jerry Whitaker, et al (Washington, DC: NAB, 1999 [9th ed.]—$379.95/228.00, ISBN 0–089324–258–6, 1,572 pp., charts, diagrams, tables, chapter references and bibliography, CD‐ROM disc, index)

STATION CONSOLIDATION: A TECHNICAL PLANNING GUIDE FOR RADIO STATIONS by the NAB Science &; Technology Department (Washington, DC: NAB, 1997—$89.95/53.97, paper, ISBN 0–89324–311–6, 80 pp., diagrams, maps, appendices)

TOWER SITE REGULATION HANDBOOK by the NAB Science &;. Technology Department (Washington, DC: NAB, 1998—$99.95/59.95, paper, ISBN 0–89324–312–4, 533 pp., tables, diagrams, appendices)

UNITED STATES RBDS STANDARD: SPECIFICATION OF THE RADIO BROADCAST DATA SYSTEM (RBDS) by the National Radio Systems Committee of the Electronic Industries Association and the National Association of Broadcasters (Washington, DC: NAB, 1998—$49.95/29.97, paper, no ISBN provided, 202 pp., diagrams, tables, glossary, annexes)

RACE IN SPACE: THE REPRESENTATION OF ETHNICITY IN STAR TREK AND STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION by Micheal C. Pounds (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999—$32.50, ISBN 0–8108–3322–0, 252 pp., figures, tables, notes, references, index)

PLAYERS ALL: PERFORMANCE IN CONTEMPORARY SPORT by Robert E. Rinehart (Bloomington: Indiana University Press “Drama and Performance Studies,”; 1998—$35.00 /15.95, ISBN 0–253–33426–8 hard, 0–253–21223–5 paper, 188 pp., notes, index)

DIRECTING FOR TELEVISION: CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICAN TV DIRECTORS by Brian G. Rose (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999—$32.50, ISBN 0–8108–3591–6, 227 pp., index)

BROADCASTING FREEDOM: RADIO, WAR, AND THE POLITICS OF RACE, 1938–1948 by Barbara Dianne Savage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press “John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture,”; 1999—$45.00/18.95, ISBN 0–8078–2477–1 hard, 0–8078–4804–2 paper, 391 pp., illustrations, photos, notes, bibliography, and index)

TELEVISION AND NEW MEDIA AUDIENCES by Ellen Seiter (New York: Oxford University Press “Oxford Television Studies,”; 1999—$65.00/19.95, ISBN 0–19–871152–5 hard, 0–19–871141–7 paper, 154 pp., photos, bibliography, index)

UNTOUCHABLES by Tise Vahimagi (London: British Film Institute, 1998 [available from Indiana University Press]—$19.95, paper, ISBN 0–85170–563–4, 112 pp., photographs, index)     

7. ELECTRONIC MEDIA

INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS by Ronald A. Cass and John Haring (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press “AEI Studies in Telecommunications Deregulation,”; 1998—price not given, ISBN 0–8447–4071–3, 291 pp., notes, references, index)

THE ECONOMICS OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE by Soon‐Yong Choi, Dale O. Stahl, and Andrew B. Whinston (Indianapolis, IN: Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1997—$49.99, ISBN 1–57870–014–0, 626 pp., tables, charts, graphs, notes, suggested readings and Internet resources, index)

THE FUTURE OF THE ELECTRONIC MARKETPLACE edited by Derek Leebaert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998—$35.00, ISBN 0–262‐ 12209‐X, 383 pp., notes, index)

ELECTRONIC MARKETING AND THE CONSUMER edited by Robert A. Peterson (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997—$58.00/27.95, ISBN 0–7619–1069–7 hard, 0–7619–1070–0 paper, 193 pp., tables and figures, references, index)