Describes how Nashville (Tennessee) mayor Phil Bredesen has enlisted sports fans to help champion a $100 million overhaul of the city's library system. Discusses Internet filtering and balancing printed materials and technology. Highlights politicians from Illinois, Washington, Georgia, Texas, Rhode Island, and California who have increased…

Discusses the benefits of storytelling by teachers or librarians to elementary and middle school students. Topics include listening; sharing versus performing; finding stories, other than folk tales; guidelines for telling stories; and resources, including print sources and Web sites. (LRW)

Describes the development of low-cost multimedia courses and materials for use on the Internet, as well as virtual laboratories, at the Universidad Estatal a Distancia (Costa Rica). Explains how simultaneous production of traditional printed materials and online courses, outsourcing, and the use of HTML and Java can reduce costs for developing…

Investigated differences in the level of young readers' reading comprehension when one group of students read an interactive CD-ROM storybook and another group of students read the same story from a printed book. Discusses results of a univariate analysis of variance that was used to compare scores on oral retellings and comprehension questions.…

Our social worlds are visually saturated. A feature of post-modern society is its relentless traffic in images, often borrowed from diverse times and places, and patched together in ever changing ways. This traffic serves commercial purposes, shapes identities, and increasingly stands in for reality itself. As a newspaper columnist noted, "most of…

Finnish students' multiliteracy profiles are examined from the perspectives of both traditional printed reading and Internet activities in the light of the data collected as a national option integrated into the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000 study. After reciting some previous findings on reader profiles as revealed by…

This paper reports on the re-design of the Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) programme, which is offered by the University of Pretoria through distance education (DE) to teachers in rural South Africa. In 2007, a team re-designed the programme with the goal of promoting access, quality, and student support. The team included an independent…

This study investigates the application of voice recognition technology to online lectures focusing on the efficacy of the text component of a multimedia presentation. Specifically, participants were provided with online access to multimedia instructional packages comprising an image of the lecturer with accompanying computer slides, plus…

This is a book about teaching maths to pupils with learning differences, not learning difficulties. Teaching and learning in schools is, and always has been, print based. Other ways of thinking--visual, kinaesthetic, practical--are discounted in the classroom. To become teachers, students must jump over a long series of hurdles, formal and…

Despite the heavy emphasis on online learning in recent years, print is still an important medium for course delivery in distance education. Distance educators have argued that, with the incorporation of appropriate access structures, distance learning materials can be self-instructional and interactive. This study aims to explore the extent to…

Literacy is one of the binding threads of modern society. Print text and literacy are irretrievably intertwined with many of the core themes of industrial society: family, gender, nation state. In the shift to new digital technologies, changing sociocultural landscapes and new theoretical frames, the growing difficulty in defining and delineating…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of the Internet as a research tool on elementary students' quality of writing, their perceptions of effort expended, and their resource media preference in writing an expository paper. We gathered data from 56 upper-elementary students as they wrote expository papers using print resources,…

Six models are developed to analyze the cost options the University of California faces in providing access to academic journals. The driving force in this analysis is a movement by publishers to deliver the content of their journals via the Internet. The models assume electronic access will always be provided. Researchers like this capability…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of a 2-day in-service education program for (a) promoting the use of two emergent literacy strategies by early childhood educators and (b) increasing children's responses to these strategies. Method: Sixteen early childhood educators were randomly assigned to an experimental and a…

This report provides an update of the possibilities and limitations of currently available mass deacidification methods, focusing on the major developments in research and application of the main operational systems. This study is intended primarily to support the development of a well-considered preservation policy by librarians and archivists,…