Texas has opened the door to electronic instructional media, allowing science students new ways to explore the world. Hands-on activities make science concepts real. Videodiscs provide teachers with rich instructional material, displaying still shots, graphics, and film clips on monitors. Students can now explore extreme weather conditions,…

Discusses digital technology convergence and its effects on the information and entertainment industries and on public television. Highlights include media-based educational organizations and their place in the knowledge marketplace; relationships between content providers and their suppliers and customers; competition; distance and continuing…

Provides a profile of Wesley Joseph McJulien, an instructional technologist who provided leadership to the field throughout his professional career. Highlights include his educational background, teaching career in higher education, presidency of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), and his role as spokesperson for…

Offers suggestions for making effective videos for academic or commercial presentations. Highlights include focusing on the objective of the video; communicating the intended message; limited use of special effects; showing versus telling; careful use of narration; use of humor; and endings. (LRW)

Discussion of the education of students with autism focuses on the use of multimedia systems and reviews the current state of the field. Suggests that systems should be developed that directly address autism-specific impairments and considers autistic student education in the context of equality of access to education. (Author/LRW)

This section of "Educational Media and Technology Yearbook" profiles individuals who have made significant contributions to the field of instructional technology. Leaders profiled in the "Yearbook" have either held prominent offices, written important works, or made significant contributions that have in some way influenced the contemporary vision…

Studies how visitors use mechanical interactive exhibits: how they respond to interactive controls, problems encountered, and how museums can best solve those problems through redesign of controls and exhibits. Problems are described under the following headings: (1) Visitors' Understanding of Exhibits; (2) Design of Interface Controls; (3)…

The importance and work of Library Media Specialists is discussed where they help teach students to be information literate. The Library Media Specialist also helps to find answers to questions and help find resources to support instruction in the classroom, working with students to use technology in the library media center, the computer lab, and…

This study investigates whether "socialness" increases the memorability of newly acquired knowledge of a second language (L2). Three groups of beginning learners of Japanese learned 10 novel Japanese words through a Q & A session. Group 1 did the session with a human interactant and learned the novel words from him. Group 2 did the session alone…

Although prior research clearly shows that toddlers have difficulty learning from video, the basis for their difficulty is unknown. In the 2 current experiments, the effect of social feedback on 2-year-olds' use of information from video was assessed. Children who were told "face to face" where to find a hidden toy typically found it, but children…

A "wiki" is a class of Web site that lets authorized users create and modify pages (sometimes called articles) as well as search for information. The term also sometimes describes the software that makes the site possible. The most famous example of a wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with articles that are written and edited by site…

The article argues that we make best use of learning technologies if we begin with an understanding of educational problems, and use this analysis to target the solutions we should be demanding from technology. The focus is to address the issue from the perspective of teachers and lecturers (the "teaching community"), and to consider how…

While researchers have studied the impact of technologies on primary, secondary, and higher education, this study asks, "What are the relationships between types of graduate education and the role of communication technology?" The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the current communication issues for distance education at the…

This guide aims to help parents choose stimulating, educational, and fun videos for their children from the more than 7,000 currently available. The guide includes: 10 tips for evaluating and choosing videos; interviews with and advice from experts; annotated descriptions of more than 400 recommended videos; essential information such as suggested…

The topic of this hearing was the Children's Television Act of 1990. This act was designed to increase the choices for children and to give parents and families the possibility of finding educational programming to supplement other children's programs. The Act has two major provisions. First, it established time limits on the amount of advertising…