The main purpose of this paper is to create digital media design, production, and programming standards for Enhanced TV (ETV) in distance education milieus. ETV, commonly known as Interactive Television, provides increased learner control over viewing and interacting in virtual educational settings. This essential aspect of ETV emphasizes two-way…

Finds that nature as a theme is completely absent in 80% and the outstanding theme in only 1.7% of television programming; not only less frequent, but separate from the dominant themes in prime-time; and treated as a sociopolitical "issue" (like "politics,""science,""religion," and "education").…

Presents a framework that combines Genetic Programming and Inductive Logic Programming, two approaches in data mining, to induce knowledge from noisy databases. The framework is based on a formalism of logic grammars and is implemented as a data mining system called LOGENPRO (Logic Grammar-based Genetic Programming System). (Contains 34…

Discussion of XML (extensible markup language) and the traditional DTD (document type definition) format focuses on efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium's XML schema working group to develop a schema language to replace DTD that will be capable of defining the set of constraints of any possible data resource. (Contains 14 references.) (LRW)

This article discusses and illustrates the three ways by which information from a multiple response questionnaire can be analyzed, its impact on the resulting summary tables, and the implications for the interpretation of survey results. It also underscores the importance of communicating with a data analyst during the questionnaire design phase.…

Explains how to create Web-enabled databases. Highlights include Inmagic's DB/Text WebPublisher product called DB/TextWorks; ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) drivers; Perl programming language; HTML coding; Structured Query Language (SQL); Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programming; and examples of HTML pages and Perl scripts. (LRW)

A multielement design was used to compare the effects of three treatments on the happiness of 3 individuals with profound multiple disabilities. The conditions were typical programming using materials selected by staff, presentation of preferred materials plus social interaction, and social interaction alone with no materials present. Both the…

College students exhibited impulsivity if, in the first of 2 sessions, they consistently chose an immediate, small reinforcer (15-s cartoon video followed by 75 s of waiting) over a delayed, large reinforcer (55-s prereinforcer delay, 25-s video, 10 additional s of waiting), or self-control if they showed the opposite preference. Previously,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of an activity implemented by means of Resident-Assisted Montessori Programming (RAMP). Design and Methods: Four persons with early-stage dementia were trained to serve as leaders for a small-group activity played by nine persons with more advanced dementia. Assessments of leaders'…

In this column, the author compares and contrasts the most popular scripting languages that are used to create truly dynamic service-oriented Web sites, building a conceptual framework that be can used as a starting point for specific server-side library projects.

This article describes how driven Web sites help schools and districts maximize their IT resources by making online content more "self-service" for users. It shows how to set up the capacity to create data-driven sites. By definition, a data-driven Web site is one in which the content comes from some back-end data source, such as a…

The Boxer Project conducted the research that led to the synthetic review "Issues in Component Computing." This brief essay provides a platform from which to develop our general perspective on educational computing and how it relates to components. The two most important lines of our thinking are (1) the goal to open technology's creative…

The paper uses Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories about the relationship between thought, language, and objects of the world to explore the assumption that OO-thinking resembles natural thinking. The paper imports from research in linguistic philosophy to computer science education research. I show how UML class diagrams (i.e., an artificial…

It is important for students to develop critical thinking and other higher-order thinking skills during their tertiary studies. Along with the ability to think critically comes the need to develop students' meta-cognitive skills. These abilities work together to enable students to control, monitor, and regulate their own cognitive processes and…

Expert programmers possess schemas, abstractions of concrete experiences, which help them solve programming problems and lessen the load on their working memory during problem solving. Possession of schemas is a key difference between novices and experts, which is why instructors need to help students construct them. One recent tool for…