Contending that public broadcasting has great potential to invigorate national discourses and to function as an agent of social change; at the beginning of the 21st century, many public television licensees are united solely by a core programming schedule and the need to raise funds at least four times a year. The paper traces the history of…

A study examined the effectiveness of the Children's Television Act of 1990 in altering the marketplace for informational and educational children's programming on commercial broadcast television. Producers and distributors of nationally available series that commercial broadcasters were using in 1993 to meet the requirements of the Act were…

This paper describes the proposed School Without Walls program in the United Kingdom, a television-centered project which is designed to deliver high quality nursery (preschool) education direct to children at a fraction of the cost of traditional educational television programming. The daily programs will present a selection of practical learning…

This study assessed the educational and informational television programming provided by four major networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Assessed were 29 children's television programs during the 1995-1996 season. Programs were videotaped from 7:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., a time frame when children are most likely to be in the viewing audience. A content…

The Intertribal Wordpath Society is a nonprofit educational corporation formed to promote the teaching, status, awareness, and use of Oklahoma Indian languages. The Society produces "Wordpath," a weekly 30-minute public access television show about Oklahoma Indian languages and the people who are teaching and preserving them. The show…

This paper is concerned with the recent developments in federal and state legislation regarding cable franchises and their effect on the establishment of a statewide distance learning network. It begins with an overview of recent legislation regarding cable regulations and presents issues regarding distance education. These include linking cable…

The study examines the instructional use of Channel One in a middle school over 18 months' time. Channel One is a 12-minute educational television news program broadcast daily to over 12,000 U.S. secondary schools. It is argued that while many students watch the programming, there is only a small minority of the classrooms where teachers actively…

The meaning of "diversity" was at the core of the U.S. Senate debate of 1991-92 concerning continued Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) funding, a debate that was both reported on and fueled by a parallel discourse on the topic in the popular press. Ideas about the diversity of programming fell into three sub-dimensions: (1) political…

The purpose of this study was to investigate viewers' knowledge of program content under various television translation modes and viewing experiences. Subjects were 176 students from the Center for Matriculation Program, Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia. The Spanish version of an instructional television program was used; the program…

This paper describes the state of interactive distance learning in Connecticut, particularly the current and future provision of these services by the telecommunications and cable television industries. The overview examines questions of where obligation and responsibility lie (with schools, local exchange companies, cable franchises, etc.) in…

This paper summarizes an integrated research study which was conducted of the literature on learning from mass media and instructional television. The body of literature reviewed encompasses 17,500 citations from the Educational Resources Information Clearinghouse (ERIC) and 1,882 citations from Psychological Abstracts. Major research areas…