Interactivity and multimedia interfaces

Multimedia technology offers instructional designers an unprecedented opportunity to create richly interactive learning environments. With greater design freedom comes complexity. The standard answer to the problems of too much choice, disorientation, and complex navigation is thought to lie in the way we design the interactivity in a system. Unfortunately, the theory of interactivity is at an early stage of development. After critiquing the decision cycle model of interaction – the received theory in human computer interaction – I present arguments and observational data to show that humans have several ways of interacting with their environments which resist accommodation in the decision cycle model. These additional ways of interacting include: preparing the environment, maintaining the environment, and reshaping the cognitive congeniality of the environment. Understanding how these actions simplify the computational complexity of our mental processes is the first step in designing the right sort of resources and scaffolding necessary for tractable learner controlled learning environments.     

Higher Education and the Elaboration of Successful Democracies and Economies

The author, the Executive Director of the Washington, D. C.-based Association of International Educators, makes a plea for the continuation and expansion of educational and academic international exchange programmes. The direct and indirect beneficiaries of such programmes develop all sorts of cross-cultural insights and skills that make them both valuable world citizens and enlightened citizens of their respective countries. Despite the dampening effect of the 11 September 2001 events, the United States is urged to continue encouraging international students to come to the United States and to facilitate their periods of residence. The United States can also learn from ongoing European efforts to internationalize its higher education.     

Moral Values and the Teacher: beyond the paternal and the permissive

ABSTRACT Teachers are regularly blamed–especially in times of moral panic–for failing to set a good example and teach proper moral standards to their pupils. As well as familiar issues about moral values and the legitimacy of different modes of moral pedagogy this also raises the question of the degree of connection between a teacher's private and personal values, attitudes and behaviour and his or her professional conduct and responsibilities. Two common responses to these problems–paternalism and liberalism–are here criticised and an alternative perspective on the moral role of the teacher is sought, drawing on communitarian insights into the nature of moral and other values and their function in human affairs.     

Quality assurance in health sciences literature searching: applying the ISO 9000 quality standard

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ITEM-EXAMINEE SAMPLING PROCEDURES AND ASSOCIATED STANDARD ERRORS IN ESTIMATING TEST PARAMETERS

Selected parameters for a negatively skewed and a normally distributed normative distribution were estimated in a post mortem item-examinee sampling investigation. Manipulated systematically were number of subtests, number of items per subtest, and number of examinees responding to each sub-test. Each item-examinee sampling procedure was replicated five times. Defining one observation as the score received by one examinee on one item, the results of this investigation support the conclusion that, in estimating parameters by item-examinee sampling, the variable of importance is not the item-examinee sampling procedure but is instead the number of observations obtained by that procedure. Degree of skewness in the normative distribution and failure to distribute all items among subtests were found to be relatively unimportant variables.     

Experience is Not The Whole Story: The Integral Role of the Situation in Dewey's Democracy and Education

The central objective of Dewey's Democracy and Education is to explain ‘what is needed to live a meaningful life and how can education contribute?’ While most acquainted with Dewey's educational philosophy know that ‘experience’ plays a central role, the role of ‘situations’ may be less familiar or understood. This essay explains why ‘situation’ is inseparable from ‘experience’ and deeply important to Democracy and Education’s educational methods and rationales. First, a prefatory section explores how experience is invoked and involved in pedagogical practice, especially experience insofar as it is (a) experimental, (b) direct, and (c) social‐moral in character. The second and main section on situations follows. After a brief introduction to Dewey's special philosophical use of ‘situation’, I examine how situations are implicated in (a) student interest and motivation; (b) ‘aims’ and ‘criteria’ in problem‐solving; and (c) moral education (habits, values, and judgements). What should become abundantly clear from these examinations is that there could be no such thing as meaningful education, as Dewey understood it, without educators’ conscious, intentional, and imaginative deployment of experience and situations.