The Future Distribution of Media

The extensive developments in electronics over the past few years will have significant consequences for education in general and for all institutions serving education in some degree.     

The Florida teletraining project: Military training via two‐way compressed video

Abstract

The Florida Teletraining Project tested the feasibility of using community colleges as providers of various types of military training to personnel in the Reserve Components (RC). Training was delivered via the Army's TNET system, which employs two‐way interactive video. Five courses were produced, delivered, and evaluated during the project. Results showed that effective military course reconfiguration can be accomplished by civilian institutions, that the delivery system was technically reliable, that students performed well using specially reconfigured courseware, and that students rated the video teletraining approach as effective. The project demonstrated the potential of two‐way video teletraining for a variety of military training applications for several different levels of military personnel.     

Renovation of Teacher Training by the New Media

For the past fifteen years, new techniques and methods, most particularly audio-visual ones, have made it possible to foresee a profound renewal in the training and retraining of teachers. To name some, the use of tape recorders, and then closed-circuit television, the production of anthologies on films, radio and television programmes, which make up an integral part of a system of training at a distance. In industrialised countries, these methods are very unequally used; in some of them, they do not even have as yet a system of retraining at a distance. Also conditions vary greatly according to the training institutes. Some only use the most traditional methods more or less perfected; others, well equipped with projectors of all sorts, laboratories and closed-circuit television, try to introduce really new methods and mediafor teaching. And lastly, some new procedures have hardly gone outside the research centres.     

Assessment of attention in school children: teachers' ratings related to tests of attention

The paper provides (1) a teacher-administered rating instrument for inattention without confounding the rating with hyperactivity and conduct disorder, and (2) evidence that the ratings correlate with the scores obtained from cognitive tests of attention. In Study I, the first objective was to investigate the construct validity and the inter-rater reliability of the Attention Checklist (ACL) by factor analysing the teacher ratings of 110 Grade 4 children, obtained by using the ACL. The second objective was to investigate the predictive validity of the ACL by examining the relationship between the scores obtained for the participants from teachers' ratings using the ACL and the scores obtained by participants in the lab-type attention tests. The results of factor analysis showed that a single factor labelled ‘inattention’ underlies the 12 items in the ACL. Examining the differences in performance on attention tests, the ‘low attention’ children as rated by the teachers on the ACL scored lower than the ‘high attention’ children on the objective tests of attention. These findings were replicated in Study II, which was conducted to test further the construct validity and predictive validity of the ACL. This time, only those two tests (Auditory Attention and Visual Attention) that had shown relatively poor discrimination between the high and low attention groups in Study I were, again, administered to another cohort of 97 Grade 4 children, as it was our intention to further challenge the reliability of the ACL. Overall, the results of both studies suggest that comprehensive assessment of attention skills should include both ACL and objective measures of selective attention.     

Enhancing the Educational Communication Process

Abstract

The theme of the 1987 Conference of the International Council for Educational Media to be held at Cardiff on the 26‐27 October is ‘Communication ‐‐ the Essence of Education’.     

IV. THE COLLEGES AND WORLD PEACE

The Significance of Communication

     

The Physiology of Aging: Structural Changes and Functional Consequences. Implications for Research and Clinical Practice in the Exercise and Activity Sciences

The purpose of this article is to explore the relevance of Plato's Sophist in the context of coaching. The Sophist dialogue focuses upon the role of the philosopher as a therapist of the soul rather than simply a conveyer or wholesaler of knowledge. This article provides a rationale for the coach to be more than a technical conveyer of skill in which the athlete is perceived to be machine-like (i.e., homo mechanicus) in order to take on a more holistic role in the life of the athlete. Through the application of the noble sophist to the Ecological Task Analysis theory (ETA), we demonstrate how the fundamental perception of the role of the coach may be expanded and redefined to become more of a “midwife” for the birth of personal and moral development.