Television History

SATURDAY MIGHT: A BACKSTAGE HISTORY OF SATURDAY MIGHT LIVE by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad (New York: Beech Tree Books/Morrow, 1986—$17.95)

THE SOAP OPERA ENCYCLOPEDIA by Christopher Schemering (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985—$8.95, paper)

WARNER BROS. TELEVISION: EVERY SHOW OF THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES EPISODE-BYEPISODE by Lynn Woolley, et al. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1985—$25.95)

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN BANDSTAND by Michael Shore with Dick Clark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985—$12.95, paper)

A COLLECTOR'S GUIDE TO TV MEMORABILIA by Anthony Slide (Wallace-Homestead Book Co., 580 Waters Edge, Lombard, IL 60148—$13.95, paper)     

Disability and accessibility in the library and information science literature: A content analysis

The library profession is a strong and vocal proponent of increased information access for people with disabilities. With the discipline's longstanding interest in the subject of services to people with disabilities, questions arise about how the profession perceives the phenomenon. How is library and information science (LIS), as a discipline, conceptualizing disability and accessibility? A content analysis of the LIS literature was conducted to examine this question. The literature provides a fertile ground for study as it reflects the profession's approaches to, and perceptions of, a topic. This research identifies the major issues and trends in the research about accessibility and disability in the LIS literature throughout a 10-year period, 2000–2010. The strongest theme in the literature is accessibility as it relates to web, database, and software, while the prevailing disability of focus is visual disabilities. The overall environment emphasizes technology more than attitudinal aspects associated with disabilities. The research could benefit from increased direct participation of people with disabilities.     

Design and Teaching: A Bibliographic Essay

Abstract

Distance education, particularly online education, is becoming a standard experience in formal learning environments, particularly at the postsecondary level. As more faculty and students have expectations that distance education is a part of the learning experience, we need to build a deeper understanding of how to design effective environments to enhance and extend the learning process. Further, we need to explore how to best facilitate learning in these contexts. This bibliographic essay explores the literature related to design and teaching in distance education as presented in the third section of Moore's (2007a) Moore, M. G. 2007a. Handbook of distance education, 2nd, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.  [Google Scholar] Handbook of Distance Education (Table 1 provides an overview of all the chapters in the Design and Teaching section of the Handbook).     

An end of innocence: African-American high school protest in the 1960s and 1970s

This paper considers African-American student protests in secondary schools during the 1960s and early 1970s. Taking a national perspective, it charts a growing sense of independence and militancy among black students as they made the schools a focal point of activism. Activist students challenged established civil rights organisations on a variety of questions. They also engaged in an escalating series of protest activities to make schools change. Much of this focused on curricular change, particularly adding black history courses and hiring African-American teachers and principals. Generally, these protests proved quite successful. Black students also protested against conditions encountered in integrated schools, where they often met hostility from whites. Distinct regional patterns characterised such activities, with more protest over school issues in the North and greater conflict regarding desegregation in the South. By the mid-1970s the era of black secondary student protest concluded, although its legacy continues to live.     

Being a ‘professional’ primary school teacher at the beginning of the 21st century: a comparative analysis of primary teacher professionalism in New Zealand and England

This article analyses findings from two studies conducted collaboratively across two educational settings, New Zealand and England, in 2001–2002. These studies examined the impact of national educational policy reforms on the nature of primary teachers’ work and sense of their own professionalism and compared these impacts across the two countries. Adopting a policy ethnography approach, using in‐depth interview data from samples of teachers in each country, it is argued that there have been discursive shifts in the meaning of the three key terms, autonomy, altruism and knowledge, embodied in the classical professionalism triangle. These shifts reflect policy‐makers’ moves from a ‘professional‐contextualist’ conception of teacher professionalism towards the ‘technocratic‐reductionist’ conception that accompanies neo‐liberal educational reforms in many countries. Teachers in both countries experienced increasing constraints on their autonomy as they became far more subject to ‘extrinsic’ accountability demands. Whether these demands were perceived as enhancing or diminishing teacher professionalism depended on the manner in which they were filtered through the profession’s defining quality, namely teachers’ altruistic concerns for the welfare of the children in their care.     

Developing primary science through IT-INSET

The purpose of the research study was to find out if the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) could improve the planning, performing and evaluating process within a sequence of six gymnastics lessons, and whether this would then improve the children's technique. The research consisted of a questionnaire given to the 30 children in the class at the end of the six consecutive lessons, an interview with the class teacher prior to the implementation of ICT and again afterwards, and observations. The findings showed that ICT improved the plan, perform and evaluate stages, within gymnastics, and consequently, the children's technique improved.     

Exploring ancestral phenotypes and evolutionary development of the mammalian middle ear based on Early Cretaceous Jehol mammals

We report a new Cretaceous multituberculate mammal with 3D auditory bones preserved. Along with other fossil and extant mammals, the unequivocal auditory bones display features potentially representing ancestral phenotypes of the mammalian middle ear. These phenotypes show that the ectotympanic and the malleus-incus complex changed notably during their retreating from the dentary at various evolutionary stages and suggest convergent evolution of some features to extant mammals. In contrast, the incudomalleolar joint was conservative in having a braced hinge configuration, which narrows the morphological gap between the quadroarticular jaw joint of non-mammalian cynodonts and the incudomalleolar articulations of extant mammals. The saddle-shaped and abutting malleus-incus complexes in therians and monotremes, respectively, could have evolved from the braced hinge joint independently. The evolutionary changes recorded in the Mesozoic mammals are largely consistent with the middle ear morphogenesis during the ontogeny of extant mammals, supporting the relation between evolution and development.