Safe touch: Reassurances for child care workers

Early childhood educators are aware of the important role touching plays in child development, nurturance, and guidance. But with attention increasingly focused on child sexual abuse in day care, we need to reexamine our behaviors and the role of touching in child care.Jan Allen is Assistant Professor of Child and Family Studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. This article has been adapted from a series of workshops presented to the Minneapolis Child Care Workers Alliance in 1983. The author expresses appreciation to Margaret Boyer, Minneapolis Child Care Resource Center-Southside, for suggesting the need for such workshops.     

Creating a Program to Deepen Family Inquiry at Interactive Science Exhibits

Abstract A common goal of science museums is to support the public in science inquiry by engaging groups of visitors with interactive exhibits. This article summarizes the efforts of a team of researchers and practitioners to extend and deepen such inquiry by explicitly coaching families in the skills of scientific inquiry at interactive exhibits. The first phase of the project, reported here, involved designing a “best case” program that worked for small groups of casual visitors under ideal circumstances, facilitated by an experienced educator in a quiet laboratory near the public floor. The final program, called Inquiry Games, taught visitors to sandwich their spontaneous physical experimentation between two additional phases: asking a question to drive their investigation at the beginning; and interpreting the results of their investigation at the end. Provisional evaluation data suggest that the Inquiry Games improved visitors' inquiry behavior in several ways and was rated as very enjoyable by them. Encouraged by these indicators, we suggest ways in which this program might be implemented on the open museum floor.     

资源集合/个体资源元数据关系描述及实现

只要是涉及资源集合搜索,现代检索系统一般都忽略了资源集合元数据的问题。而要揭示资源集合层次的信息,一种可选的方法是通过获得资源集合级和文献单元级的元数据,从而深刻理解它们之间的关系。介绍一个对资源集合与文献单元元数据关系提供分类逻辑框架的开发项目。这个逻辑构架支持：元数据规范的开发者定义元数据元素;元数据创建者描述对象;系统设计者实现应用系统的开发,该系统能够充分利用资源集合级元数据所带来的好处。介绍资源集合与文献单元元数据之间存在的三类关系实例：“属性/值传递”、“值传递”和“值约束”,表明即便是对于这些简单的例子,一个精确的公式除了要符合一阶谓词逻辑之外,还需要引入模态概念。这些公式也属于近期信息检索和本体评价方面的研究成果。