This Digest details how one professor of public relations has developed and put into practice a class in "cyberspace." The Digest first provides background on online communication techniques and the explosion of online teaching at the university level, and then tells how a professor, with the help of a summer grant from her university,…

This study focused primarily on two types of computer interfaces and the differences in academic performance that resulted from their use; it was secondarily designed to examine gender differences that may have existed before and after any change in interface. Much of the basic research in computer use was conducted with command line interface…

A metaphor and ongoing debate of the information age is that the mind is a computer or that, conversely, the computer has a mind. Since the debate is conducted using anthropomorphic metaphors such as "intelligent,""memory," and "friendly" (terms from humanity), the language itself pressures the discussion towards the conclusion that computers will…

This paper presents framework specifications for an instructional systems development (ISD) expert system. The goal of the proposed ISD expert system is to improve the means by which educators design, produce, and evaluate the instructional development process. In the past several decades, research and theory development in the fields of…

This paper presents some research which makes use of the computer with a video disk player to do aesthetic analyses of the work of Vincent Van Gogh which can be used in art history slide lectures. It begins with discussions of a video disk system with IBM (International Business Machines) Infowindows and of several software systems. The paper…

This paper describes the development of a software program which incorporates interactive graphics techniques into a teaching and research environment at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Technion, Israel, and the experience of transferring the software from mainframe to personal computer (PC) operating systems at the California Institute of…

This report describes a specific approach to two current trends in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) research: (1) an emphasis on metacognitive skills which are not domain specific; and (2) a move away from viewing ITS research as being exclusively concerned with "knowledge communication." A human-computer dialogue model designed to…

The nature of the learner-machine interaction is of central importance in the design of guided discovery learning environments. The interface to a learning environment is the only way in which a learner has access to the functionality of the system, and conversely, the interface in the only way in which the tutoring component of the system has…

One means by which subordinate leaders in armor units can practice command, control, and communication (C3 skills) before participating in field exercises is with the use of a computer supported battle simulation. This report describes the functional requirements and hardware configuration for Simulation in Combined Arms Training (SIMCAT), a…

Research on intelligent tutoring seeks to develop systems for automating education and to explore epistemological issues concerning the nature of the knowledge presented by tutors and how that knowledge can be learned. The ACT theory of skill acquisition and its successor (PUPS--PenUltimate Production System) provides production-system models of…

A complete bibliographic reference and an abstract are provided for each of 66 publications of the Human Factors Laboratory from 1979 through 1983, including in-house and contractor-developed documents. Documents are indexed by source, author, and subject matter. Publications address such topics as adaptive training, air combat maneuvering,…

Four papers from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Project on Human-Computer Interfaces are presented in this report. "Evaluation and Analysis of User's Activity Organization," by Liam Bannon, Allen Cypher, Steven Greenspan, and Melissa Monty, analyzes the activities performed by users of computer systems, develops a…

This publication provides guidance for the introduction of computer software tools within agencies of the United States government or within other installations where there has been little or no prior use of software tools. From a survey of current tool usage, it is concluded that the greatest obstacles to effective use of software tools are…

The Subject Access Research Project was initiated by OCLC in August 1979 to study the process of subject searching in the library catalog, with the objective of identifying features for an automated subject retrieval system which would support the present search tactics employed by library users performing manual subject searches at the library…

This paper explores languages for communicating precise ideas within limited domains, which include mathematical notation and general purpose and high level computer programming languages. Low-level properties of such natural artificial languages are discussed, with emphasis on those in which names are chosen for concepts and symbols are chosen…