Motion Pictures and Photography

William Kuhns' Movies in America (Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum/Standard, 1973 - $6.50, paper)

William Kuhns and John Carr Teaching in the Dark (same publisher, $4.50, paper)

Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972 - $5.95 2.95)

David Shipman's The Great Movie Stars: The International Years (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972 - $15.00)

The Silent Picture (quarterly, $4.00 per year)

Films Illustrated (monthly, $10.00 per year)

Slide Albums ($35.00 each)

Herbert Volkmann's Film Preservation (1965, 60 pp., $1.50)

Theodore Huff's The Early Work of Charles Chaplin (1961, 24 pp., 500)

Fifty Years of Soviet Cinema: 1917-1967 (1967, 30 pp., 950)

Rules for Use in the Cataloguing Department of the National Film Archive (1960, $1.20)

Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury State College, Salisbury, Md. 21801 - $5.00 per year/four issues, or $2.00 each)     

Face-to-Face Tutorials in a Distance Learning System: Meeting student needs

Many distance learning programmes include an element of face-to-face tuition. This paper reports on a research project concerned with various issues related to face-to-face tutorials in the Open University of Hong Kong's distance education system, including students' expectations of the benefits they will gain; their reasons for attending; the approaches they prefer; and their overall satisfaction with what tutors actually provide. Some comparisons are drawn between students in the university's different schools-and the overall findings are compared with those reported for distance learners in the West, in an effort to assess the impact of cultural context on student attitudes to tutorials. The research found that the Hong Kong students' attendance at tutorials was very high compared to that found in other similar studies, possibly reflecting Hong Kong's geographical compactness, but also possibly reflecting a preference for face-to-face meetings; that the students looked for specific guidance and support from tutors within a largely directive framework; that even where the format of the tutorial departed from the students' expectations, the students did not necessarily give the tutorial a low evaluation, provided that it was a fruitful experience; and that the cultural context within which a distance education system operates affects students' expectations and learning styles.     

Core skills assessment to improve mathematical competency

Many engineering undergraduates begin third-level education with significant deficiencies in their core mathematical skills. Every year, in the Dublin Institute of Technology, a diagnostic test is given to incoming first-year students, consistently revealing problems in basic mathematics. It is difficult to motivate students to address these problems; instead, they struggle through their degree, carrying a serious handicap of poor core mathematical skills, as confirmed by exploratory testing of final year students. In order to improve these skills, a pilot project was set up in which a ‘module’ in core mathematics was developed. The course material was basic, but 90% or higher was required to pass. Students were allowed to repeat this module throughout the year by completing an automated examination on WebCT populated by a question bank. Subsequent to the success of this pilot with third-year mechanical engineering students, the project was extended to five different engineering programmes, across three different year-groups. Full results and analysis of this project are presented, including responses to interviews carried out with a selection of the students involved.     

Professional and personal values and virtues in education and teaching

This article seeks to shed light on the dilemma facing history education in regions beset by a protracted, and as yet unresolved ethno-political conflict. The article will examine this issue by means of a unique test case that observes a dramatic war event in Israeli textbooks. The event in question is the Six-Day War of 1967 and the study of its outcomes. This war stands in the twilight between memory and history and there is an extreme gap between the public history and the formal representation of that war in school textbooks. The question that begs an answer is why such a seminal event in Israeli history is not presented in history textbooks like the country’s other wars. The research methodology, which was conducted on two generations of textbooks, is based upon a comparative discourse analysis. A discussion of the findings contends that a critical pedagogy approach to history education might equip adolescent students with more powerful lenses through which to view several plausible scenarios for healing the wounds of the present by means of a rational and grounded perception of the past.     

Face[book] Management: Self-Presentation of Political Views on Social Media

This study explores Facebook users’ management behaviors related to their—and their friends'—political communication via social media, utilizing the concepts of context collapse and self-presentation. A new two-factor measure of Facebook management was developed, pilot tested (N = 139) and implemented in a survey utilizing a national sample (N = 352) of individuals aged 18–29. Results indicated Facebook users are not generally engaging in the strategic management of political disclosures or the political content to which they are exposed. However, as network sizes increase, participants engage in more disclosure behaviors and make greater efforts to manage content exposure. Additionally, participants with strong political beliefs engage in more Facebook management behaviors, possibly indicating an effort to limit cognitive dissonance.     

An examination of the Clegg impact hammer test with regard to the playing performance of synthetic sports surfaces

One of the tests used to evaluate the performance of sports surfaces measures the peak deceleration of a rigid mass during contact with the surface, after being dropped from a set height. It is widely used and is included in a number of international standards. The test was carried out using two drop heights on four different designs of artificial cricket pitch, with a full set of acceleration data being collected over the duration of impact. These data were then integrated twice with respect to time to produce velocity and displacement information. Oblique impacts of cricket balls were also carried out and analysed using a high-speed video system to evaluate the playing performance of each pitch design. It was found that, although the pitches gave quite different readings of peak deceleration, they produced similar values for coefficient of restitution and were therefore considered to ‘play’ in a very similar way. This was due to a high peak deceleration reading being accompanied by a short contact time and low peak deceleration being accompanied by a long contact time, meaning that the change in momentum was similar in both cases. It was concluded that for accelerometer tests to be useful, all the acceleration-time data should be analysed, rather than the peak value alone.