Describes the objective behind this special issue: to identify a science content area (physics for eighth to eleventh graders), work with science teachers to produce a set of content materials, and present a common content outline to a group of instructional designers. The first article describes the derivation of the content outline. The next…

Discusses the importance of positive video game experiences and designs that can create them, including immediacy of feedback, allowing graceful recovery from mistakes, high-quality feedback, and input device mappings. Examines interface complexity. Concludes game designers must treat the interaction between human and video game as a formal…

Managing a company's knowledge requires a different set of skills than are typically found in a corporate Web team. Chief among these is a "customer-obsessed" philosophy. The job of taking content, tools, and data and providing a platform that makes it meaningful is an inevitable next step for Web teams in the age of the new intranet.…

Discusses experiences of Schlumberger IT Sourcing (Austin, Texas) in designing and deploying knowledge management (KM) systems and outlines the empathic design approach. The new "market" approach in Schlumberger which leads to the simplification of intranet systems and interfaces, creation of a new classification system, and better…

The current research investigates infants' perception of a novel object from a category that is familiar to young infants: key rings. We ask whether experiences obtained outside the lab would allow young infants to parse the visible portions of a partly occluded key ring display into one single unit, presumably as a result of having categorized it…

The present paper describes the impact and evaluation of two intervention components--a video with group discussion and an interactive computer-tailored program--in order to encourage adolescents to register their organ donation preference. Studies were conducted in school during regular school hours. The video with group discussion in class had a…

This study investigated graduate students gender-specific preferences for certain website interface design features, intending to generate useful information for instructors in choosing and for website designers in creating educational websites. The features investigated in this study included colour value, major navigation buttons placement, and…

We have used a genetically tractable model system, the fruit fly "Drosophila melanogaster" to study the interdependence between sensory processing and associative processing on learning performance. We investigated the influence of variations in the physical and predictive properties of color stimuli in several different operant-conditioning…

This study considered the utility of gender schema theory in examining girls' website design preferences. It built on a previous study which identified eight website evaluation criteria related to biological sex: collaboration, social connectivity, flexibility, motility, contextuality, personal identification, inclusion, and graphic/multimedia…

This article provides an overview of Telementoring Orchestrator[TM] (TMO), a new web-based software tool designed to aid small or large organizations in supporting telementoring programs (also called online mentoring or e-mentoring programs). In this report, we review the research that inspired the design of the software, and survey the major…

Much has been written about the barriers to collaborative work, but little research has been conducted on how to foster collaboration within higher education. This article presents the results of a case study of four campuses that have organized to enable collaboration. The study builds on earlier literature from the corporate sector using a model…

For the thirty-fifth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the national AECT Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

Higher learning organizations frequently offer courses isolated from other disciplines or areas of concentration. The intent of this study was to explore collaboration practices on authentic based projects involving two distinct courses from differing programs: Instructional Technology and Educational Leadership. This paper describes the…

Perhaps no school reform has generated as much interest and controversy in recent years as the proposal to have parents select their children's schools. Opponents of school choice fear that rolling back the government's role will lead to profit-driven financial scandals, sectarianism, and increased class and racial isolation. School choice…

Robert Gagne has been a central figure in the infusion of instructional psychology into the field of instructional technology, and in the creation of the domain of instructional design. Gagne's design principles provide not only a theoretical orientation to an instructional design project, but also have prompted a number of design conventions and…